What Year Is It?

About

“What Year Is It” is the caption of an image macro featuring a photo of Robin Williams’ disheveled-looking character from the 1995 film Jumanji. In rage comics, it is often used in similar fashion to the my face when reaction faces to convey the disoriented sense of time experienced when waking up.

Origin

Jumanji is a fantasy-comedy film released on December 15th, 1995, starring Robin Williams playing the role of Alan: a boy who is sucked into a board game only to emerge 26 years later. After being freed from the game, he asks the two children that have freed him “what year is it?”^[1] and is shocked to discover how much time has past. The image used for the caption “What year is it?” was taken from the official Jumanji movie trailer and can be seen at 1:09 in the following video:

The earliest known reaction image macro instance was posted to the r/pics subreddit in a thread titled “How I feel after an afternoon nap”^[2] on September 7th, 2011 by Redditor topshelf89. The thread managed to reach the front page and has accumulated 16,886 up votes as of November 30th, 2011.

Spread

The same reaction image reached the front page of the marijuana enthusiast r/trees subreddit in a thread titled “First words out of my mouth after waking up still a solid 6”^[7] on October 13th, 2011. The first known rage comic using the captioned image titled “Every damn night”^[5] was created by Redditor Arbypwnyou and reached the front page of the f7u12 rage comic subreddit on October 16th, 2011.

On November 11th, 2011, a Skyrim rage comic by Redditor JoshuaTheWarrior reached the front page of the r/gaming subreddit. Rage comics using the reaction image have since spread to FunnyJunk^[4] and Tumblr.^[3] Two Quickmeme^[6][7] pages have been created featuring the image with a total of 32 submissions as of November 30th, 2011.

Notable Examples

External References