About

Slowly Approaching Bear refers to a GIF of a brown bear walking. This is generally accompanied by a viral Tumblr thread featuring the same bear walking at increasing speeds. Since its initial spread in 2015, voice actor ProZD has narrated the thread, the audio of which has become popular in video remixes.

Origin

On March 27th, 2014, Tumblr^[1] user osoru shared the GIF of the bear and labeled it "slowly approaching bear." Before the deactivation of the account, the post received more than 401,000 notes (screenshot below).

The thread soon inspired numerous responses from other Tumblr users, adding GIFs of the moving at increasing speeds (repost below). Following the "slowly approaching bear," they wrote:

The bears will be in eventually.
Bear will arrive sooner than thought.
BEAR IS APPROACHING AT ALARMING SPEEDS.
BEAR IS GO FAST LOSING TRACK OF BEAR.
BEAR HAS REACHED MACH ONE.
WE HAVE LOST VISUAL ON BEAR.

Spread

On March 31st, 2014, Redditor ^[2] catsinbox shared a screenshot of the thread in the /r/tumblr subreddit. The post received more than 185 points (93% upvoted) in less than six years.

Three months later, on June 20th, 2014, voice actor ProZD responded to a request to read the thread "like a military radio operator." The recording he made received more than 11,000 notes.^[3] Five years later, on April 13th, he uploaded the record to YouTube, where it received more than 759,000 views in less than one year (shown below).

On August 20th, 2015, Tumblr^[4] linktoo re-shared the original post. As of October 2019, the thread has more than 880,000 notes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References