About
Skull Trumpet is a two-second video featuring a skull playing a trumpet that has spread via remixes and parodies on YouTube and Tumblr.
Origin
The original Skull Trumpet video was uploaded by YouTuber Piepuppy89 some time in 2011, which featured an animated skull playing a trumpet. The original video was removed after Piepuppy89’s YouTube account was deactivated in August of 2012.
Spread
On February 15th, 2011, the artist Wolf Puppy tweeted a link to the original YouTube upload.
RT @wolfpupy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miNrxcggevA
— Hi I’m Bleep (@HiImBleep) February 15, 2011
Throughout 2011, the video was shared on various websites, including the gaming forum PlayStuff[4], the Something Awful spinoff board BYOB XP[5], the Call of Duty board on GameFAQs[6] and the Steam forums.[7] Additionally, a Facebook fan page[2] was created on March 8th, 2011 and that November, video remixes began appearing on YouTube.
In December 2011, the first single topic blog dedicated to Skull Trumpet was created on Tumblr.[8] The blog Skull-Trumpet[10] was launched on July 11th, 2012, reposting all the videos from Piepuppy89’s YouTube channel. Tumblr users began sharing fan art and videos under the “#Skull Trumpet” tag.[1] Though PiePuppy89’s YouTube account was closed during the first week of August of 2012[11], a handful of YouTubers uploaded mirrors of the original video and the parodies that were hosted on that channel.
Notable Examples
As of August 2012, there are 421 results for “skull trumpet” on YouTube.[9]
Search Interest
External Links
[1] Tumblr – tagged: Skull Trumpet
[2] Facebook – Skull Trumpet fan group
[4] PlayStuff – Skull Trumpet | 4/1/2011
[5]BYOB XP – ay yo ay ay | 7/24/2011
[6] GameFAQs – This is what it’s like playing against me
[7] Steam – Trumpet plays?
[8] Tumblr – Skull Trumpet
[9] YouTube – Search results for “skull trumpet”
[10] Tumblr – Skull-Trumpet
[11] Tumblr – Dear friends, we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of somebody very special to us all.