Tulio And Miguel Lying To Chief Tannabok

Origin¶

The scene is from The Road to El Dorado, the DreamWorks animated film released in 2000. Tulio and Miguel — two Spanish con men who have been mistaken for gods — are attempting to explain themselves to Chief Tannabok, the leader of the city they have talked their way into.

The composition is the meme. In the top half, the two of them gesture and elaborate, visibly improvising. In the bottom half, Tannabok regards them with a flat, entirely unconvinced expression. He is not angry and he is not fooled; he has simply decided to let them finish.

What it means / how it’s used¶

The format is object-labeling for an unconvincing explanation. The two liars are labelled with the party making a claim; Tannabok is labelled with the audience who is not buying it.

Common uses:

• A company explaining a decision to its customers.
• A student or employee explaining a missed deadline.
• Two people presenting a story to someone who already knows the truth.
• Self-implicating versions where the poster is doing the explaining.

Its distinctive feature is the power dynamic. Most “not buying it” formats show scepticism between equals; here the sceptic is plainly in charge and is allowing the explanation to continue out of amusement rather than credulity. That makes it the right template for institutional or authority-facing jokes.

How it spread¶

The format was built inside a fandom group. On July 21, 2020, a Facebook user uploaded the template to a Road to El Dorado meme group, and another member posted the first variation the same day, taking over 1,500 reactions within two weeks.

It reached Reddit two weeks later and immediately went much larger. Over August 3 and 4, 2020, posts across the major meme subreddits took between 75,000 and 95,600 points within a day.

The Road to El Dorado underperformed commercially on release and has since become a substantial cult favourite online, with an active fandom that produced several formats during 2020. This is the most widely used of them.

Notable examples & variations¶

• Corporate-explanation jokes, the dominant use.
• Versions where Tannabok is labelled as the poster’s own scepticism.
• Fandom edits substituting other characters.
• Multi-panel versions extending the explanation.
• Crops of Tannabok alone as an unimpressed reaction.

Legacy / cultural impact¶

The film’s internet afterlife considerably outstrips its original reception, and it belongs to a recognisable group of turn-of-the-millennium animated films — alongside The Emperor’s New Groove and Megamind — that flopped or underperformed and were later adopted as cult properties by an audience that grew up with them on home video.

The format persists because the situation it depicts is permanent. Somebody is always explaining something implausible to somebody who already knows better, and this is the cleanest available picture of that.