About

Train Hitting School Bus is an object labeling meme depicting a locomotive plowing through a school bus. In the exploitable variations, the bus represents an entity that gets obliterated by another entity which the train is labeled.

Origin

The screenshots originate from a YouTube video originally uploaded May 17th, 2007 by infinitefx. The video gained 11 million views over 14 years^[1] and was reuploaded by many channels.

During the following years, the image saw use in custom-made GIFs depicting various situations. The following picture, featuring the head of former Sony Interactive Entertainment president Kaz Hirai on the train, was seen at least as early as May 2013.

Spread

The earliest known use of the meme for object labeling was posted on October 9th, 2019 by reddit user u/Blizzando on r/UrinatingTree to describe Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS matchup between the St. Louis Cardinals v. the Atlanta Braves.^[2]

On May 29th, 2020 a template was posted to the subreddit r/MemeEconomy, and gained 69 points in six months.^[3]

Several more instances quickly followed. On May 31st, 2020, the Tumblr blog Hilarious Humor From Outer Space^[4] posted an example that gained over 1,000 notes (shown below, left). On June 19th, a deleted Reddit account posted an example to /r/MemeEconomy,^[5] gaining over and 6,000 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References