The Inside Out 2 Trailer Has A Hidden Meme Easter Egg You May Have Missed
Pixar's "Inside Out 2" is gearing up to pluck on everyone's heartstrings again as it carries on the story initiated by its 2015 predecessor. With character additions like Anxiety and Ennui (some of which were too dark for the first "Inside Out") now officially in the mix, the sequel promises to take the youthful chaos inside of Riley Andersen's head to all new levels. While most of the early promotional footage focused on out-of-context teasers, on March 7, a lengthy new trailer dropped, providing a significant glimpse into the characters and narrative of the new movie.
It also included a blink-and-you-missed-it Easter egg based on one of the internet's most famous memes. Shortly before the second minute of the trailer, we get a shot of Anxiety (voiced by "Stranger Things" star Maya Hawke). The humanoid emotion is on a big screen surrounded by smaller screens as she remotely addresses a room full of industrious workers in playing card cubicles. And there, tucked away on the lower left-hand side of the shot, is a tiny image of a girl walking away from a couple. The boy in the couple is looking backward, ogling the other girl in what is only too clearly a recreation of the famous Distracted Boyfriend meme.
The meme parody is even harder to catch because, when the scene initially pops up in the trailer, that shot is nowhere in sight. It's only in the final milliseconds of the sequence that the screen inside of Riley's head switches over to Pixar's version of Distracted Boyfriend, making it a uniquely hidden Easter egg.
Distracted Boyfriend has been around for a while
Distracted Boyfriend has been around since 2015 — and went viral two years after that. Its near-decade lifespan makes it one of the great memes of the century — and that's not just opinion.
The year that it became a hit, it won Best Meme of 2017 at the Shorty Awards (an award event to honor short-form digital content creation and innovation). The meme wasn't a mistake, either. It was professionally captured on the streets of Barcelona by photographer Antonio Guillem while working with models for an official photo shoot. In the photographer's own words (via Wired), the group was in the midst of a shoot that was "representing the infidelity concept in relationships in a playful and fun way." The official name for the Shutterstock photo is actually "Disloyal man walking with his girlfriend and looking amazed at another seductive girl."
Integrating Distracted Boyfriend into "Inside Out 2" was a fun easter little Easter egg to the highly anticipated Pixar sequel. It's also worth pointing out that while the setup and body language in the scene are the same, the individuals in it are clearly changed — and not just because they're animated.
The offended girlfriend has the distant appearance of Riley herself, while the "boyfriend" looks an awful lot like the heroic "Imaginary Boyfriend" character that we meet, cloned en masse, in the first movie. He even seems to be sporting the same hairdo and ensemble (an open-button shirt, white T-shirt, and jeans) that we see in the first film. Of course, that earlier version is ready to die for Riley while this meme-worthy one seems to be exhibiting the very different concerns of an anxious girlfriend's mind — but that's a new story, presumably for the sequel to tell.