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Professor Oak / Advice Oak
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About
Professor Oak, sometimes referred to as Advice Oak, is an image macro series featuring the face of Pokemon character Professor Oak, which is used to point out the various illogical details about the video game's world, also known as video game logic, and the alleged jerkish behavior of the character. Appearing in the form of an Advice Animal meme similar to Advice Dog, this format also uses a color wheel background with top and bottom text captions.
Origin
Professor Oak's character was introduced in the very first games, Pokemon Red & Blue for the GameBoy, released in Japan in 1996 and introduced to the Western world in 1998. A Pokemon researcher who is widely considered to be the best in his field, Oak is a source of much info and help throughout both the games and the spin-off anime series. Interestingly, he is also the grandfather of the equally memetic Gary Oak.
Although the exact first example of Professor Oak appearing in the Advice Animals format is unknown, the earliest post found online traces back to December 7th, 2010, when user St2udent shared two variants to the Penro forum on Forumotion[1] under a thread titled "Pokememes: Gotta spam 'em all!" (shown below). This is also the earliest-known instance of the meme being coined "Advice Oak."
Spread
The format continued to spread and was added to various meme-creator sites in the following months and years. On September 24th, 2011, FunnyJunk[2] user pokefunnies posted another example to the site referencing the game's logic (seen below, left). On July 28th, 2012, Redditor ipodbeast posted a stack of three memes to the /r/pokemon[3] subreddit, receiving 261 upvotes and 16 comments in six months (seen below, right).
On October 12th, 2012, MemeCenter[4] user unparalleled posted a version combining the Success Kid meme with the Professor Oak template, accumulating over 808 likes in roughly eight years (shown below, left). On October 9th, 2014, an unknown user created another variant on Quick Meme,[5] accumulating nearly 8,000 shares in roughly six years (shown below, right).
Various Examples
Template
Search Interest
External References
[2] FunnyJunk – pokefunnies
[4] MemeCenter – Successful Oak
[5] Quick Meme – "Naming Rivals":Successful Oak
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