About

Puss in Boots Scared of Death is an exploitable image macro that is taken from the 2022 movie Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, which depicts Puss as he suddenly realizes that Death has appeared to fight him. The screencap has been used extensively in object-labeling memes, primarily to depict something that is afraid of another thing, often to humorous effect.

Origin

The movie was released on December 21st, 2022, with memes of the scene not coming until early the next year. The scene the image template comes from is at the climax of the film, which was uploaded to YouTube on March 11th, 2023, by the YouTube channel Movieclips,^[1] being seen over 2.8 million times in one month (shown below).

The meme template itself was then uploaded to the site Imgflip in early January 2023, but the first example of a meme using it was uploaded in February 2023 by the user JustaCheemsDoge,^[2] depicting Death as 500 pages of homework that haven't been done yet (shown below).

Spread

The meme then started to spread outward from Imgflip to other websites as it was cross-posted or changed to a different punchline. On March 19th, 2023, Imgur user abbiistabbii^[3] uploaded a version that places Mosquitos in the place of Puss, with Death being humans that are attempting to extinct them without consequences (shown below).

On April 24th, 2023, the Redditor u/Skowak13^[4] uploaded a modified version of the meme template with an additional caption placed over it and the punchline being mostly butchered. This version, despite its missed point, reached over 13,200 upvotes on the /r/memes subreddit in one day (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References