Member Berries

About

Member Berries are a fictional superfruit that utter nostalgic, homophobic and racist phrases to people while they are being eaten in Season 20 Episode 1 of the animated television series South Park.

Origin

On September 14th, 2016, Comedy Central aired the South Park episode titled "Member Berries," in which the character Randy Marsh is shown eating talking purple berries mention various nostalgic pop culture icons, before asking if he could remember times when there were fewer Mexicans around, gay marriage was illegal and Ronald Reagan's presidency (shown below).

Spread

That day, the @MemberBerries^[3] Twitter feed was launched, featuring tweets written from the perspective of the fictional purple berries. Also on September 14th, a Facebook^[4] page titled "Member Berries" was launched, garnering upwards of 2,700 likes over the next two months. The following day, a page titled "Member Berries" was created on the South Park Wiki.^[10] On September 16th, Urban Dictionary^[2] user isblueacolor submitted an entry for "member berries," defining them as "tasty morsels of organic nostalgia." That day, a GIF of the South Park scene was uploaded to 9gag^[1] (shown below).

Also on September 16th, Tumblr user TheMeghaMind posted a photograph of an Old Orchard for Kids grape juice bottle with smiling purple grapes with the caption "Member berries IRL" (shown below, left). On September 17th, the Memesallovertheplace Tumblr^[6] feed posted a screen capture of the berries with the caption "'Member / Harambe" (shown below).

On September 26th, Redditor joegofett posted a member berries image macro with the caption "member when / Southparkstudios had all the episodes for free" to /r/southpark,^[9] where it gathered more than 8,500 votes (87% upvoted) and 890 comments within one month (shown below, left). On October 1st, a "Member Berries" message board was created on GameFAQs.^[5] On October 8th, Tumblr^[8] user dirty-south-park-confessions posted a photoshopped screen capture from the 1994 animated film The Lion King while a member berry superimposed over the lion Mufasa and the caption "Member who you are, Simba" (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References