About

Melted Duck on a Dashboard refers to a before-and-after image featuring a photograph of a green, plastic duck sitting on a dashboard next to a picture of the duck melted in the summer heat.

Origin

On July 18th, 2017, Twitter user @shiohitoshi tweeted a photograph of a rubber duck resting above his car stereo juxtaposed with a photo of the duck melted on to his dashboard (shown below), along with the message "最悪マジで。" ("This is the worst, I can’t believe it" in English). Within 48 hours, the tweet gained over 1.08 million likes and 635,000 retweets.

Spread

The following day, other Japanese Twitter users began questioning the authenticity of the photo, pointing out several apparent discrepancies between the two dashboards, some of which used illustrated diagrams and 3D models (shown below).

Meanwhile, the images uploaded to Imgur,^[2] where they received upwards of 346,000 views, 9,000 points and 450 comments. Also on January 19th, Twitter created a Moments^[3] page titled "The mystery of the melted rubber duck on a dashboard," collecting various reactions to the viral images. The same day, Instgram user @shitheadsteve posted the image with the caption "Me excited for summer vs me after 2 months of summer" (shown below, left). Over the next 24 hours, the post gained over 47,800 likes. On July 20th, Redditor DiggurDig submitted the image captioned with the joke "Dont think marajuana is bad drug? Think again" to /r/dankmemes, where it garnered more than 1,600 points (94% upvoted) in 15 hours (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References