Lightning McQueen's Death

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Part of a series on Cars (film franchise). [View Related Entries]

About

Lightning McQueen's Death refers to the first trailer for the 2017 film Cars 3 which shows the main character, Lightning McQueen, being involved in a severe accident during a race. Due to the tone of the trailer and the severity of the accident, jokes were made saying that Lightning McQueen had died.

Origin

The scene is first shown in the first Cars 3 trailer, posted to YouTube on November 21st, 2016.

The video instantly drew the attention of news outlets who picked up on the unexpectedly dark tone of the trailer, including US Magazine,^[2] Daily Caller,^[3] Jalopnik,^[4] Daily Mail,^[5] and more.

Spread

The next day, Tumblr user speedmifune posted a series of black-and-white stills of Lightning McQueen, including of the crash, with the words "Rest In Peace Shitlips" over them and the caption "Lightning McQueen 2006-2017" (shown below).^[7] In 4 months it has received over 17,000 notes.

After speedmifune's post, Lightning McQueen's death began becoming a popular joke on Tumblr,^[6] and was incorporated into various meme formats. For example, one popular post was of a Twitter screenshot of a Loss Edit that gained over 69,000 notes on Tumblr^[8] (shown below).