- The Arthur clenched fist meme has gone viral on several different occasions and is a favorite online reaction meme
- The teachable moment comes from a season 4 episode of the beloved PBS Kids series
- Arthur came to an end in 2022 after 25 seasons
An Arthur episode that teaches kids why it’s wrong to solve problems with their hands has made an impression in more ways than one.
It’s been 25 years since a memorable episode of the beloved PBS Kids series first ran. On Oct. 4, 1999, “Arthur’s Big Hit,” first aired in the United States. The episode shows Arthur Read learning about why hitting is wrong in two separate incidents.
In one, the character’s mischievous younger sister, D.W., drops his model plane out of a window thinking it can fly. When she chastises him about doing a bad job building it, he thinks about how many times he told her not to touch the plane. He clenches his fist — a moment immortalized in a viral meme — then hits her in frustration.
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The meme gained a lot of popularity and spread online in 2016 through 2017, when Chrissy Teigen joked husband John Legend looks like the 8-year-old animated aardvark.
“John when you tell him he looks like Arthur,” Teigen wrote in the since-deleted February 2017 tweet, which included the popular meme of Arthur’s clenched fist.
In spring 2018, the couple appeared in a Google Duo commercial continuing the joke. There, Legend appeared in Arthur’s iconic yellow sweater.
“Arthur!” Teigen yelled in between giggles about her husband’s yellow sweater, white button-down shirt and blue pants.
“Who’s Arthur?” replied Legend, seemingly clueless that he was stealing the animated character’s look.
Arthur came to a conclusion in February 2022, after 25 seasons. Screenwriter Kathy Waugh developed the series based on the books by Marc Brown, with the first episode premiering on Oct. 10, 1996. The show is the longest-running children’s animated series in the U.S. Through its conclusion, it was the second-longest-running animated series in the country, behind The Simpsons
In 2019, Brown told PEOPLE that the hit show succeeded through the years because its producers always found new ways to expand the minds of its viewers.
“When we began Arthur 22 years ago, the agenda we began with was to make children want to read. And it worked!” the author said at the time. “So each year, the writers and the producers sit down to decide what kind of subject matter we want to deal with. After 22 years you think, ‘We’ve done it all!’ Yet, here was another opportunity! It sill excites me that we can come up with stories that are going to be interesting and helpful to children.”