About
Behind the GIFs is a community on Reddit that curates a series of illustrated comics offering humorous and fictitious backstories to a variety of animated GIFs that are frequently shared on the website.
Origin
On January 1st, 2014, Tumblr[1] user pizza-omelette posted several illustrated comic panels depicting the events leading up to an infomercial failGIF of a man dropping a bowl of snack food (shown below). In the next five days, the post garnered upwards of 197,000 notes.
On the following day, the /r/BehindTheGIFs[2] subreddit was launched for Redditors to submit humorous images explaining the stories behind animated GIFs. In the first four days, the subreddit gained over 31,000 subscribers.
Spread
The same day /r/BehindTheGIFs was created, BuzzFeed[3] highlighted several notable examples from the subreddit. Also on January 2nd, 2014, actor Wil Wheaton tweeted about /r/BehindTheGIFs.
r/behindthegifs is your new favorite subreddit.
— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) January 2, 2014
On the following day, the Internet humor blog Pleated Jeans[5] reblogged several images from the subreddit. On January 6th, the Internet news blog UpRoxx[4] published an article about /r/BehindTheGIFs, noting the Tumblr post that inspired its creation.
Notable Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1]Tumblr – pizza-omelette
[2]Reddit – /r/behindthegifs
[3]BuzzFeed – Behind the GIFs is your new favorite subreddit
[4]UpRoxx – Meme Watch – Behind the GIFs
[5]Pleated Jeans – Behind the Gifs