To Be Continued

Origin: an anime ending card and a 1971 prog track

Both halves come from the 2012 anime adaptation of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, produced by David Production. At the close of each episode across the Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency arcs, the action freezes mid-motion, a yellow arrow curls in from the left with the words TO BE CONTINUED, and the guitar intro of “Roundabout” starts up.

“Roundabout” is not anime music. It is an eight-and-a-half-minute progressive rock track by the English band Yes, released on the 1971 album Fragile; an edited single reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1972. The show’s choice to end on a decades-old prog song is deliberately incongruous, and that incongruity is the whole reason the pairing travels.

The joke

The edit does one thing extremely well: it declines to show you the outcome. A skateboarder commits to a rail, a toddler eyes a stack of cups, someone leans back too far in a chair — freeze, arrow, guitar. The consequence is obvious and the video refuses to deliver it.

Two effects stack. First, the freeze retroactively casts an ordinary clip as an episode of a serialized anime, which is funny in exact proportion to how mundane the footage is. Second, and more importantly, it defuses. Because everyone knows what happens next, the format lets a genuine wipeout land as comedy rather than as something you flinch at, which is why it works on clips that would otherwise be uncomfortable to watch.

Spread

The template broke out on Vine. Know Your Meme dates the earliest documented use to January 27, 2016, a remix titled “Danksmash” that ran the arrow and guitar over the Squidward Dab clip; it passed two million loops and set the pattern. Derivative versions followed on other Vine-era staples, and the format moved to YouTube, Tumblr and Reddit as Vine wound down.

By 2017 it was standard equipment in fail compilations, and the audio migrated cleanly into TikTok’s sound library — which meant a whole generation encountered “Roundabout” as a meme sound before ever encountering Yes as a band. The arrow graphic was widely available as a transparent PNG, so making a version required only a video editor and a freeze frame.

The bigger picture

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is unusually generous to meme culture, and this is only its most exported artifact. The series has also produced the “Za Warudo” time-stop, the menacing “ORA ORA ORA” barrage, the “Is that a JoJo reference?” running gag, and a house style of exaggerated poses that fans reproduce in photographs. “To Be Continued” is the one that escaped fandom entirely — most people using it cannot name the show.

Its closest structural relatives are other musical stings that comment on a fail: the Coffin Dance for total disaster, the Curb Your Enthusiasm credits for self-inflicted social ruin. “To Be Continued” occupies the narrower slot of a consequence that is coming but has not landed yet — a cliffhanger for something the viewer already knows the ending to.