Advice Animals

2006Image macro series / meme genreclassic

Also known as: Advice Dog spin-offs · stock-character macros

Advice Animals is a 2006 image-macro meme genre originating with Advice Dog, featuring diverse character archetypes on colored backgrounds dispensing captioned wisdom.

Advice Animals are a genre of image macros featuring an animal or person on a colored background with captioned text representing a stock character archetype. Originating from the Advice Dog meme in 2006, the format spawned hundreds of character templates and became one of the most recognizable meme formats of the late 2000s and early 2010s. The genre defined an entire era of internet humor and laid the groundwork for modern meme templates.

TL;DR

Advice Animals are a genre of image macros featuring an animal or person on a colored background with captioned text representing a stock character archetype.

Overview

Advice Animals are image macros that pair an animal, person, or character with captioned text to represent a specific personality type or archetype4. The standard format places the subject against a multi-colored pinwheel background (though some use the unedited original photo), with white Impact font text at the top and bottom of the image5. Each "character" represents a consistent persona: Courage Wolf is aggressively motivational, Foul Bachelor Frog is gross and lazy, Paranoid Parrot overthinks everything.

The format works like a cast of stock characters6. Each image template carries built-in context, so the audience immediately understands the joke's framing before reading the punchline. Top text sets up the situation, bottom text delivers the twist. This structure made Advice Animals extremely easy to create and share, fueling their explosive spread across forums, Reddit, and social media.

The whole genre traces back to a single image: Advice Dog. On September 7, 2006, Evan Herrington posted a photo of a Labrador retriever puppy against a rainbow color wheel background on the Mushroom Kingdom forums4. Herrington said the rainbow background was inspired by the "royal rainbow" effect from the Katamari Damacy video game series4.

The original Advice Dog gave absurd, often terrible "advice" in the Impact font caption format. The character's appeal was the contrast between the cute puppy face and the unhinged suggestions. Other forum users quickly adopted the template structure, swapping in different animals and personas while keeping the color wheel background and two-line caption format.

Origin & Background

Platform
Mushroom Kingdom forums (original Advice Dog), Memegenerator.net (format popularization)
Key People
Evan Herrington, Ferenc Somos
Date
2006
Year
2006

The whole genre traces back to a single image: Advice Dog. On September 7, 2006, Evan Herrington posted a photo of a Labrador retriever puppy against a rainbow color wheel background on the Mushroom Kingdom forums. Herrington said the rainbow background was inspired by the "royal rainbow" effect from the Katamari Damacy video game series.

The original Advice Dog gave absurd, often terrible "advice" in the Impact font caption format. The character's appeal was the contrast between the cute puppy face and the unhinged suggestions. Other forum users quickly adopted the template structure, swapping in different animals and personas while keeping the color wheel background and two-line caption format.

How It Spread

The format stayed relatively niche on forums until dedicated creation tools brought it to a mass audience. On March 18, 2009, Ferenc Somos launched Memegenerator.net, the first web application purpose-built for creating these image macros. The site let anyone pick a template, add custom top and bottom text, and share the result with a watermark. Similar builders soon appeared on Memebase and Quickmeme.

Reddit's r/AdviceAnimals subreddit, created on December 7, 2010, became the genre's central hub. The subreddit quickly became a factory for new characters, producing originals like Misunderstood D-Bag, Rasta Science Teacher, Hood Dad, Internet Husband, Harmless Scout Leader, and Schrute Facts. By August 2011, the subreddit had over 56,000 subscribers and would eventually become one of Reddit's default subreddits.

Google search data shows interest in "advice animals" spiking in December 2010, the same month the subreddit launched. Courage Wolf was among the most searched Advice Animals during that period, though its popularity dropped sharply after peaking that December.

Tumblr also became a major distribution point. Numerous single-topic blogs cataloged specific Advice Animal series, and some characters originated from artwork first shared on the platform, including Hipster Kitty and Art Student Owl. The genre thrived under Tumblr's tag system, aggregated under "#advice animals".

The format crossed into mobile in the early 2010s. An official Advice Animals iOS app let users create their own macros from 20 built-in templates including Bachelor Frog, Philosoraptor, and Paranoid Parrot, plus any image from the user's photo library. The app supported sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and email.

Platforms

Reddit9GAGTumblrFacebookTwitter

Timeline

2006

R/AdviceAnimals subreddit created on Reddit

2007-01-01

Advice Animals started spreading across social media platforms

2008-2010

Explosive growth with numerous sub-formats emerging

2009-01-01

Brands and companies started using Advice Animals in marketing

2011-2012

Peak popularity as meme format dominates internet

2013-2014

Decline begins as reaction images and video memes gain popularity

2015+

Format largely abandoned in mainstream meme culture

View on Google Trends

How to Use This Meme

Select an animal format appropriate to your message. Image editing tools allow adding text to the image, typically in Impact font. The format emphasizes relatability and humor derived from universal experiences.

1

Find the Advice Animals template on Imgflip or a similar meme generator

2

Think of a funny or relatable caption that fits the format

3

Add your text to the template using the meme generator

4

Share your creation on social media or in group chats

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

Advice Animals fundamentally shaped how people think about meme formats. The concept of a reusable image template with customizable text, where the image provides context and the text provides the joke, became the dominant meme structure for years. Characters like Bad Luck Brian, Success Kid, and Scumbag Steve broke out of niche internet spaces and became widely understood cultural shorthand.

The format's influence extended into academic research. In 2018, Stanford researchers Abel L. Peirson V and E. Meltem Tolunay built a machine learning system trained on 400,000 image-label-caption triplets from Advice Animal-style memes. Their system used a pre-trained Inception-v3 network with a long short-term memory model to auto-generate captions. The researchers found their AI "produces original memes that cannot on the whole be differentiated from real ones," though they acknowledged that capturing humor across cultures was the greatest challenge. They also noted a significant bias in the training dataset "towards expletive, racist and sexist memes".

The Cheezburger Network's Memebase site became one of the largest aggregators of Advice Animal content, helping push the format from forum culture into mainstream internet browsing. Rage comic faces like Forever Alone and Y U No Guy also crossed over into the Advice Animal format, blurring the line between the two meme genres.

The Wikipedia article on image macros identifies Advice Animals as one of the most significant subtypes of the format, alongside LOLcats. The article describes how characters like Bad Luck Brian, Success Kid, and Scumbag Steve each carry specific narrative roles: unfortunate situations, everyday good luck, and unfriendly behavior, respectively.

Fun Facts

The color wheel background that defines the genre was inspired by a visual effect from Katamari Damacy, a Japanese video game about rolling objects into a giant ball.

Memegenerator.net was the first dedicated tool for making Advice Animals, launching over two years after the original Advice Dog post.

Stanford's meme-generating AI was trained on 2,600 unique image-label pairs and produced results humans couldn't reliably distinguish from real memes.

The r/AdviceAnimals subreddit produced enough original characters (Hood Dad, Internet Husband, Harmless Scout Leader) to function as its own meme incubator.

The iOS Advice Animals app required only iOS 3.0, dating it to the very early days of the App Store.

Derivatives & Variations

Success Kid

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Socially Awkward Penguin

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Insanity Wolf

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Courage Wolf

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Confession Bear

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Malicious Advice Mallard

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Frequently Asked Questions

Advice Animals

2006Image macro series / meme genreclassic

Also known as: Advice Dog spin-offs · stock-character macros

Advice Animals is a 2006 image-macro meme genre originating with Advice Dog, featuring diverse character archetypes on colored backgrounds dispensing captioned wisdom.

Advice Animals are a genre of image macros featuring an animal or person on a colored background with captioned text representing a stock character archetype. Originating from the Advice Dog meme in 2006, the format spawned hundreds of character templates and became one of the most recognizable meme formats of the late 2000s and early 2010s. The genre defined an entire era of internet humor and laid the groundwork for modern meme templates.

TL;DR

Advice Animals are a genre of image macros featuring an animal or person on a colored background with captioned text representing a stock character archetype.

Overview

Advice Animals are image macros that pair an animal, person, or character with captioned text to represent a specific personality type or archetype. The standard format places the subject against a multi-colored pinwheel background (though some use the unedited original photo), with white Impact font text at the top and bottom of the image. Each "character" represents a consistent persona: Courage Wolf is aggressively motivational, Foul Bachelor Frog is gross and lazy, Paranoid Parrot overthinks everything.

The format works like a cast of stock characters. Each image template carries built-in context, so the audience immediately understands the joke's framing before reading the punchline. Top text sets up the situation, bottom text delivers the twist. This structure made Advice Animals extremely easy to create and share, fueling their explosive spread across forums, Reddit, and social media.

The whole genre traces back to a single image: Advice Dog. On September 7, 2006, Evan Herrington posted a photo of a Labrador retriever puppy against a rainbow color wheel background on the Mushroom Kingdom forums. Herrington said the rainbow background was inspired by the "royal rainbow" effect from the Katamari Damacy video game series.

The original Advice Dog gave absurd, often terrible "advice" in the Impact font caption format. The character's appeal was the contrast between the cute puppy face and the unhinged suggestions. Other forum users quickly adopted the template structure, swapping in different animals and personas while keeping the color wheel background and two-line caption format.

Origin & Background

Platform
Mushroom Kingdom forums (original Advice Dog), Memegenerator.net (format popularization)
Key People
Evan Herrington, Ferenc Somos
Date
2006
Year
2006

The whole genre traces back to a single image: Advice Dog. On September 7, 2006, Evan Herrington posted a photo of a Labrador retriever puppy against a rainbow color wheel background on the Mushroom Kingdom forums. Herrington said the rainbow background was inspired by the "royal rainbow" effect from the Katamari Damacy video game series.

The original Advice Dog gave absurd, often terrible "advice" in the Impact font caption format. The character's appeal was the contrast between the cute puppy face and the unhinged suggestions. Other forum users quickly adopted the template structure, swapping in different animals and personas while keeping the color wheel background and two-line caption format.

How It Spread

The format stayed relatively niche on forums until dedicated creation tools brought it to a mass audience. On March 18, 2009, Ferenc Somos launched Memegenerator.net, the first web application purpose-built for creating these image macros. The site let anyone pick a template, add custom top and bottom text, and share the result with a watermark. Similar builders soon appeared on Memebase and Quickmeme.

Reddit's r/AdviceAnimals subreddit, created on December 7, 2010, became the genre's central hub. The subreddit quickly became a factory for new characters, producing originals like Misunderstood D-Bag, Rasta Science Teacher, Hood Dad, Internet Husband, Harmless Scout Leader, and Schrute Facts. By August 2011, the subreddit had over 56,000 subscribers and would eventually become one of Reddit's default subreddits.

Google search data shows interest in "advice animals" spiking in December 2010, the same month the subreddit launched. Courage Wolf was among the most searched Advice Animals during that period, though its popularity dropped sharply after peaking that December.

Tumblr also became a major distribution point. Numerous single-topic blogs cataloged specific Advice Animal series, and some characters originated from artwork first shared on the platform, including Hipster Kitty and Art Student Owl. The genre thrived under Tumblr's tag system, aggregated under "#advice animals".

The format crossed into mobile in the early 2010s. An official Advice Animals iOS app let users create their own macros from 20 built-in templates including Bachelor Frog, Philosoraptor, and Paranoid Parrot, plus any image from the user's photo library. The app supported sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and email.

Platforms

Reddit9GAGTumblrFacebookTwitter

Timeline

2006

R/AdviceAnimals subreddit created on Reddit

2007-01-01

Advice Animals started spreading across social media platforms

2008-2010

Explosive growth with numerous sub-formats emerging

2009-01-01

Brands and companies started using Advice Animals in marketing

2011-2012

Peak popularity as meme format dominates internet

2013-2014

Decline begins as reaction images and video memes gain popularity

2015+

Format largely abandoned in mainstream meme culture

View on Google Trends

How to Use This Meme

Select an animal format appropriate to your message. Image editing tools allow adding text to the image, typically in Impact font. The format emphasizes relatability and humor derived from universal experiences.

1

Find the Advice Animals template on Imgflip or a similar meme generator

2

Think of a funny or relatable caption that fits the format

3

Add your text to the template using the meme generator

4

Share your creation on social media or in group chats

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

Advice Animals fundamentally shaped how people think about meme formats. The concept of a reusable image template with customizable text, where the image provides context and the text provides the joke, became the dominant meme structure for years. Characters like Bad Luck Brian, Success Kid, and Scumbag Steve broke out of niche internet spaces and became widely understood cultural shorthand.

The format's influence extended into academic research. In 2018, Stanford researchers Abel L. Peirson V and E. Meltem Tolunay built a machine learning system trained on 400,000 image-label-caption triplets from Advice Animal-style memes. Their system used a pre-trained Inception-v3 network with a long short-term memory model to auto-generate captions. The researchers found their AI "produces original memes that cannot on the whole be differentiated from real ones," though they acknowledged that capturing humor across cultures was the greatest challenge. They also noted a significant bias in the training dataset "towards expletive, racist and sexist memes".

The Cheezburger Network's Memebase site became one of the largest aggregators of Advice Animal content, helping push the format from forum culture into mainstream internet browsing. Rage comic faces like Forever Alone and Y U No Guy also crossed over into the Advice Animal format, blurring the line between the two meme genres.

The Wikipedia article on image macros identifies Advice Animals as one of the most significant subtypes of the format, alongside LOLcats. The article describes how characters like Bad Luck Brian, Success Kid, and Scumbag Steve each carry specific narrative roles: unfortunate situations, everyday good luck, and unfriendly behavior, respectively.

Fun Facts

The color wheel background that defines the genre was inspired by a visual effect from Katamari Damacy, a Japanese video game about rolling objects into a giant ball.

Memegenerator.net was the first dedicated tool for making Advice Animals, launching over two years after the original Advice Dog post.

Stanford's meme-generating AI was trained on 2,600 unique image-label pairs and produced results humans couldn't reliably distinguish from real memes.

The r/AdviceAnimals subreddit produced enough original characters (Hood Dad, Internet Husband, Harmless Scout Leader) to function as its own meme incubator.

The iOS Advice Animals app required only iOS 3.0, dating it to the very early days of the App Store.

Derivatives & Variations

Success Kid

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Socially Awkward Penguin

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Insanity Wolf

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Courage Wolf

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Confession Bear

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Malicious Advice Mallard

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Frequently Asked Questions