About

Play The Forbidden Note is a line from the cartoon series Amphibia, used to incite a character to blow a magical horn. This scene has been the subject of many edits on YouTube, with the sound of the horn being replaced with various sounds and music.

Origin

The episode Return to Wartwood was released on March 6th, 2021. At the beginning of the summoning scene, Hop Pop orders Sprig to "play the forbidden note", to which Sprig answers by blowing into a Sky Goat horn.

The earliest edit of this scene was posted on Reddit ^[1] on March 19th, with the Doom Eternal soundtrack playing through the whole summoning.

Spread

The first occurrence of the scene on YouTube, in its more popular short form, limited to the first part of the horn blowing, was uploaded on May 18th, 2021 and featured the Undertale song Megalovania; it is the most popular video featuring this meme as of yet, cumulating more than 500,000 views and 25,000 upvotes within 100 days (shown below).

Other popular examples include a June 16th edit posted by The Emerald Bunny which used music from Terraria and gained over 50,000 views (shown below, left). On May 31st, user MilesTailsTheFox posted an edit that used the Tetris beatbox by Verbalase, gaining over 51,000 views (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References