About

Skeleton Looking at Explosion refers to an exploitable image macro using the artwork from American thrash metal band Megadeth's album Peace Sells… but Who's Buying? The meme commonly depicts the mascot of the band, Vic Rattlehead, either interrupted by a nuclear blast behind him or ignoring it to keep rambling about a topic or create an excuse as to why he ignored it. The format briefly became known as Como te decía, which translates to "As I was saying," in Spanish-speaking communities due to the phrase it was often captioned with.

Origin

The original image used in the meme stems from the cover art of Megadeath. On September 19th, 1986, Megadeth released their album Peace Sells… but Who's Buying? (shown below).^[1] Additional pieces of artwork include Vic looking behind him at a nuclear blast devastating the U.N. Headquarters and multiple views of a war-torn city as he places a "For Sale" sign into the ground (shown below).

The first instance of the album art being used as an exploitable was posted on the blog Draven's Tales from the Crypt^[2] during September 2015 (shown below).^[3]

Spread

Five years later on March 29th, 2020, Redditor Orange-laddy posted an April 2020 Disaster Predictions meme, later known as 2020 Can't Get Any Worse, to the /r/dankmemes^[4] subreddit (shown below, left). On June 7th, the Facebook^[5] page El cuartel del metal posted another iteration of the same joke, receiving over 1,500 likes and 490 shares in five months (shown below, right).

In late 2020, memes from Spanish-speaking communities labeled the explosion with any disaster, bad news or mishap and made Vic Rattlehead ignore it saying sentence beginning with "Como te decía," or "As I was saying," although the use of similar phrases has been used in the past in reaction images and image macros to ridicule or express indifference about an original post or comment.

On October 15th, 2020, many Facebook pages started exploiting the format. For example, the Facebook^[6] page La USCO Mijo 1.0 posted an edit featuring Vic ignoring a mass murder over some celebrity gossip (shown below, left), accumulating over 400 reactions and 23,000 shares in 18 days. That same day, the Facebook^[7] page Shingeki no Memes posted another edit, accumulating over 7,200 reactions in 18 days. Also, the Facebook^[8] page El mismo video video de Hyungwon perreando con diferentes canciones posted another example comparing Vic to the Latin-American MONSTA X fandom, oblivious to the toxicity within its members (shown below, right), with over 3,800 reactions in 18 days.

On October 16th, Redditor burgervandreamz reposted a Facebook meme to the /r/Mujico^[9] subreddit, which gathered over 1,100 upvotes in 17 days (shown below, left). On October 18th, Redditor Aloysius shared a template to /r/MemeTemplatesOfficial^[10] garnering 932 upvotes in 15 days. On October 22nd, the Facebook^[11] page El Profe Romero posted a meme mocking Argentinians who equated quarantine to a totalitarian dictatorship, garnering over 5,100 reactions and 3,500 shares in 11 days (shown below, right).

Templates

Various Examples

Search Interest

Many of the search terms used to describe the meme include: "calavera," "como te decía" and "explosion." Due to the lack of a specific name, search interest is difficult to trace. Queries for "como te decia meme" show a small increase starting around October 15th, 2020, the day in which many Facebook pages started posting iterations of the meme. Search queries for the topic "Peace Sells… but Who's Buying?" and the terms "meme calavera" and "meme calavera explosion" also increased during that week.^[12]

External References