Chief Tannabok Gets the News

Origin: The Road to El Dorado¶

The panels come from The Road to El Dorado, released on March 31, 2000 by DreamWorks Animation. Chief Tannabok, the ruler of the golden city, is voiced by Edward James Olmos, alongside Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh as the con men Tulio and Miguel, Rosie Perez as Chel and Armand Assante as the high priest Tzekel-Kan, with songs by Elton John. It reportedly cost around $95 million against a worldwide gross of roughly $76 million — a commercial disappointment on release that acquired an unusually devoted online following two decades later.

The four panels are cut from a late scene. A messenger runs in to tell Tannabok that an army of strangers is approaching the city. The chief is unbothered: they will never find the gate. The messenger then adds that the strangers are being led by Tzekel-Kan, the banished priest, and Tannabok’s face collapses — “He survived! Warriors, prepare yourselves for battle!”

That structure is exactly why it works as an exploitable. Panels one and three carry the news, panels two and four carry the reaction, and the whole joke lives in the pivot between the calm of panel two and the alarm of panel four.

First postings¶

The template did not start on Reddit or Twitter. On July 10, 2019, Facebook user Jo Kaplan posted it in “The Road to El Dorado Goldposting,” a dedicated Facebook group for El Dorado shitposting. It reportedly gathered over 1,000 reactions and 8,300 shares across the following eight months. Derivatives appeared within days, including a July 14, 2019 version built on They Did Surgery on a Grape.

Breakout¶

On July 26, 2019, Twitter user @tak__eo posted the version that carried the format off Facebook: a digital-artist edition in which the devastating news is “You’re on the wrong layer!!” It reportedly collected more than 27,000 retweets in eight months, with reposts drawing around 9,400 upvotes on r/memes and roughly 91,800 notes on Tumblr.

A second peak came on February 25, 2020, when a Facebook version built on “Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf” reportedly drew 2,300 reactions, then more than 50,800 upvotes when reposted to r/memes. By March 19, 2020 the format had become so ubiquitous inside the Goldposting group that moderators temporarily banned it for overuse.

How it is used¶

Users replace the messenger’s lines so Tannabok reacts to shocking, absurd or unbelievable news delivered panel by panel. Because the arrangement gives four beats rather than two, it also works to “read” a copypasta, narrate a song lyric or stage a slow-building reveal, with the chief’s expression escalating as the text unfolds. The tone is comic disbelief, and the film’s expressive, slightly exaggerated animation gives each beat a clean landing. Everything depends on the fourth panel: a weak final line kills the entire edit.

The wider El Dorado meme economy¶

Tannabok was the first of several templates the same community produced. Tulio and Miguel Lying to Chief Tannabok — a different scene and a different joke — was first posted in the same Facebook group on July 21, 2020 and went enormously viral on August 3, 2020, reportedly clearing 95,600 points on r/dankmemes in a single day. “Both? Both. Both is good.” and edits built on Miguel’s guitar round out the set. Together they make The Road to El Dorado one of the most heavily mined animated films in meme culture, alongside the broader family of DreamWorks reaction formats.