If you’ve recently been flooded by pictures and memes of Looney Tunes‘ favorite yapper rooster, Foghorn Leghorn, there’s a reason behind it. There’s also an explanation for why we’ve also seen Foghorn Leghorn coaching anime characters like Vegeta and Dio.
Every now and then, a meme comes along that is so completely and utterly ridiculous that we can’t help but wonder: who came up with this? Today’s winner is none other than the anthropomorphic rooster from Looney Tunes, Foghorn Leghorn. Everywhere we look, he’s out there somewhere teaching someone how to do something. Actually, his bombastic and downright loud personality is the foundation of this meme, which surprisingly originated a couple of years ago.
What is the Foghorn Leghorn anime meme?
The Foghorn Leghorn anime meme essentially shows Foghorn photoshopped into random anime worlds, combined with a caption showing the rooster’s iconic Southern nature as he coaches the characters through life. This meme actually appears to date all the way back to 2021, and although the exact origin of this meme is still unknown, a three-year-old tweet showing Foghorn rambling to Naoto Hachiouji from Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro is the earliest mention of the meme that is still going viral.
The caption of the tweet includes Foghorn’s unmistakable speech pattern — which, by the way, is based on a Southern-U.S. politician character from the 1940s radio show The Fred Allen Show called Senator Claghorn — mixed with facts from that specific anime. In general, the essence of the meme lies in having Foghorn ramble to anime characters, teaching them how to behave in their respective anime universe.
Once again, why has this become a meme? Purely because another X/Twitter user stumbled upon the three-year-old tweet and recreated it. This prompted yet another user on the app to ask, “Can we please make it a trend to have Foghorn Leghorn ramble to random anime characters?” Thus began a wave of Foghorn Leghorn memes, featuring the rooster photoshopped into a roster (pun intended) of anime characters.
Of course, this has now spread to even more fandoms. K-Pop stans and cartoon fans have also begun their own selection of memes with Foghorn schooling their faves. But there’s nothing quite like the originals, so let’s get to some of my favorite memes coming from this Foghorn Leghorn fever:
Oddly enough, this is not the first time Looney Tunes characters have been combined with anime characters. Just last year, someone decided to make several characters into Luffy’s Gear 5 mode, and weirdly so, it worked. Good thing the Internet never truly dies, and someone somewhere will always go back to the roots.