# Jay Jay the Jet Plane Jay Jay the Jet Plane, a CGI children's series that ran on TLC and PBS from 1998 to 2005, resurfaced online in the late 2010s when edit accounts turned its cheerful smiling airplane into an image-macro punchline. A 2018 Photoshop placing Jay Jay in a Syrian airstrike scene kicked off the meme run that peaked with a viral 2019 fart joke on Reddit. ## Origin The character comes from a computer-generated children's series that first premiered as a live-action pilot batch on December 13th, 1994, before relaunching in a CGI-plus-live-action format on TLC on November 2nd, 1998 and moving to PBS in 2001 until its run ended in 2005[5]. The original opening credits, which introduce the smiling plane and his airfield friends, are archived on YouTube[6]. The meme itself started in 2018, when Instagram user @icecoldmemes_ posted a Photoshopped image placing Jay Jay over a Syrian city being bombed, paired with a fake Donald Trump tweet as the caption[2]. A cropped version of the same composite was then reposted to the r/fakehistoryporn subreddit under the caption "U.S. Airstrike Kills 150 ISIS Fighters," which pushed the image out of a single follower base and into Reddit's meme feed[5]. - **Platform:** Instagram (source image) / Reddit (viral spread) - **Creator:** @icecoldmemes_ - **Date:** 2018 ## Overview The meme leans on the uncanny grin of the title character, a smiling anthropomorphic prop plane from the CGI-and-live-action kids show that aired on TLC and later PBS[1]. Edit accounts pulled the character out of his wholesome context and dropped him into scenes of war, farts, and general chaos, playing the cursed contrast between the character's toddler-friendly face and grim or gross-out captions. Two formats did most of the work. The first is the Photoshop composite, where Jay Jay's face is pasted onto real photographs, most famously an airstrike scene[2]. The second is the cropped close-up of Jay Jay's face used as a straight reaction image, with the joke living entirely in the caption[3]. Both variants keep the show's original character render intact, which is what sells the bit. ## How It Spread The bigger breakout came on March 25th, 2019, when Twitter user @AriElsaMax13 posted a cropped section of the image with the caption "When you fart in an aisle at the store and you walk away hearing the screams of your victims"[3]. Days later, Redditor RiCriostoir reposted the tweet to r/memes, where it picked up more than 40,000 points at a 93% upvote ratio and over 200 comments[4]. After the r/memes hit, Jay Jay's face got recycled as a general-purpose reaction image for jokes about doing something horrible while looking innocent about it. Reposts kept the character's original CGI render rather than redrawing him, so the humor stayed tied to the specific 1998 show model rather than a stylized version[1]. The video source material of the original show is still available on YouTube for context on why the face reads the way it does[6]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Jay Jay the Jet Plane? It is a smiling CGI airplane character from a children's TV series of the same name, reused online as a Photoshop and reaction-image meme starting in 2018[2]. ### Where did Jay Jay the Jet Plane come from? The character comes from a series that premiered as live-action in 1994, relaunched in CGI on TLC in 1998, and ran on PBS until 2005[5]. ### What does Jay Jay the Jet Plane mean? As a meme, the image is used to pair the character's wholesome kids-show grin with dark, gross, or violent captions, playing on the mismatch[3]. ### How do you use Jay Jay the Jet Plane? The common convention is to drop the cropped face into a Photoshop scene or use it as a straight reaction image with a caption about doing something bad while looking innocent[4]. ### Is Jay Jay the Jet Plane still popular? The meme peaked with the March 2019 r/memes post that hit 40,000+ points and is still passed around as a classic reaction image, though its viral moment was 2018-2019[4]. ## References 1. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92ljuh1emD4]() 2. [https://www.instagram.com/icecoldmemes_/]() 3. [https://twitter.com/AriElsaMax13]() 4. [https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/]() 5. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jay-jay-the-jet-plane]() 6. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qzn-eBsZVc]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/jay-jay-the-jet-plane Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library