Teletubbies In Black And White: The Origin Of A Truly Disturbing Meme

The internet has long held an obsession with finding the darker elements in kids' cartoons and other children's media, but few memes of this variety have caught on quite like the black-and-white Teletubbies photograph. This bizarre little piece of internet lore dates all the way back to March 2015, when a disturbing black-and-white image of the Teletubbies all lined up in an empty field with vacant expressions and void-like pitch-black eyes began circulating around various social media sites.

Since that fateful day, the image has floated around the web, periodically popping up through memes or reposts, but those who have seen it have long wondered about its origin. For one thing, "Teletubbies" was never filmed in black-and-white, and the program debuted in 1997, decades after the advent of color photography. Then, of course, actually taking a screenshot of "Teletubbies" and turning it grayscale doesn't amount to such horrific results. So, where in the world did this creepy image come from?

While it's not extremely common knowledge, internet sleuths have long solved the mystery of the Teletubbies. As it turns out, the weird photograph isn't a photograph at all, but an edited screenshot from a certain infamous video game.

As various users have ascertained, the black-and-white Teletubbies image was actually created in the popular physics sandbox game "Garry's Mod." The title allows players to import 3D models and environments to create their own user-generated experiences, and it's birthed a metric ton of other memes over the years.

While the clues that led various users to this conclusion aren't obvious, they're hard to unsee once pointed out. Some individuals like u/Tetriswizard and u/CodmExe have noted that the field the Teletubbies are standing on in the image has a subtle repeating pattern that can be traced back to the exact same texture as the commonly-used "gm_flatgrass" map in "Garry's Mod." What's more, users like u/Significant-Depth-77 have explained that 3D models of the Teletubbies themselves can be found on the "Garry's Mod" page of the Steam Workshop and match the characteristics of the ones seen in the picture. A little editing and digital manipulation and — boom — a viral creepy image.

While the mystery of how the disturbing Teletubbies meme came to be has been more or less answered, there is still one unexplained thread: who actually made the image in the first place? On the earliest recorded date of the meme, different users were posting it to various sites within hours of each other, so it's hard to find a concrete answer. Perhaps that's one creepy little mystery that can remain unsolved.