Toy Story 3 Cymbal Monkey

About

Toy Story 3 Cymbal Monkey is the villainous toy monkey from Toy Story 3 known simply as The Monkey in the Disney Pixar film. The character began appearing in memes starting in 2020 as a reaction image before being adapted into a Drakeposting GIF caption template in 2022 where meme creators showed an ominous or dreadful reaction to something in the GIF of the monkey staring creepily and then an unphased reaction happily banging cymbals in the second scene.

Origin

In Toy Story 3, The Monkey is a villainous character who puts the main characters under surveillance, acting as a quasi-security guard at the daycare the main toys wish to escape from. In the scene used in the meme format, The Monkey is seen staring intently at security cameras before banging the cymbals as an alarm (shown below).

The earliest known appearance of the character in a meme was posted on Reddit on April 10th, 2020, by /r/memes^[1] user -acon-trash, gaining over 50,000 points in two years (shown below).

Spread

Over the following two years, the character continued being used as a reaction image, usually paired with captions about paying close attention to a certain event or video. On December 13th, 2021, Twitter user @unfunnymeat^[2] posted a joke about speedrunning using the character, gaining over 8,200 retweets and 70,000 likes in roughly 18 months (shown below, left). On February 13th, 2022, Redditor ironwolf6464 posted a joke about Beastars Rule 34 artists, gaining over 900 points in five months (shown below, right).

Beginning in June 2022, the character began seeing use in Drakeposting-style exploitables. These featured the monkey in an intimidating pose in the top panel and the monkey celebrating in the bottom panel. On June 27th, 2022, the template was posted to Reddit's /r/MemeTemplatesOfficial^[3] (shown below).

High engagement posts using the GIF caption template include a June 28th, 2022, post by Redditor adontlikedw in /r/dankmemes^[5] that gained over 20,000 points in one day (shown below, left) and another /r/dankmemes^[6] post by ernsthyper that gained over 9,800 points in two days (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References