The Family Guy death pose is an image showing series star Peter Griffin lying at the bottom of his stairs beat up with his arms and one leg twisted behind his back.
This injured pose resulted from a serious fall down these stairs that made use of Family Guy‘s characteristically violent slapstick humor that often extends far beyond the expected time parameters and results in exaggerated injuries and a lot of swearing.
What is the “Family Guy death pose” meme?
The Family Guy death pose comes from a highly popular scene from the animated series in which Peter Griffin falls down the stairs and lands with his limbs contorted behind his back. Fans received the dramatic pose suggesting severe injury as particularly hilarious, aspiring to recreate the posture in various forms across mediums.
Additionally, folks edited the video clip of Peter falling down the stairs many times to add sound effects or set the beat of the impacts to popular songs.
In what episode of Family Guy does Peter fall down the stairs?
On May 12, 1997, a season 5 episode from TV series Highlander aired that briefly showed the bodies of two characters who had died from the impact of a fall from a significant height. One of the bodies has his arms and one leg twisted behind him in the same manner as Peter from the Family Guy season 10 episode that aired on January 15, 2012. Fans have speculated that the scene from Highlander was the inspiration for the death pose.
In 2012, Family Guy season 10 episode 11 aired in which Peter falls down the stairs after his wife, Lois, had them repaired to make them smoother because their son Stewie got a splinter from the rough wood.
Unaware of this change, Peter slips at the very top of the staircase after Lois calls him for breakfast and tumbles down, cursing all the way, until he lands in the famous death pose.
He immediately pops up, very much not dead nor severely injured, and begins yelling at Lois about the fall. Later in the episode, he attempts various methods to prevent falling once again such as sanding the bottom of his shoes, but repeatedly fails and ends up in a similar pose at the bottom.
How the Peter death pose went viral
Days after the episode aired, YouTube user Stefan posted the clip showing Peter falling down the stairs and landing in the death pose, allowing others to pause the video and get a good look at his mangled body.
Over the next several years, Family Guy fans would reference the fall by posting screenshots or creating art from various video games with characters lying in the same posture.
Characters in games ranging from Team Fortress 2 to A Hat in Time to Stardew Valley can now be found in the Peter Griffin fall pose. A user on Nexus Mods created a mod for the popular farming game and posted it on April 23, 2022, that replaces the image of your grandpa on his death bed with the old man in the death pose.
At the same time, social media users began seeing the Peter death pose in all kinds of other media, whether it was an intentional reference or not.
This trend eventually spread to real-world creatures and objects, to just about anything you could imagine.
Sonic Family Guy death pose
On March 31, 2023, the Sega Social Team posted a trailer for a free point-and-click adventure game titled The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega created the game as an amusing promotion for the franchise and a kind of April Fool’s Day prank, though the game itself is very real and available on Steam.
“We’re excited to announce… He’s dead,” the trailer reads.
The line “he’s dead” appears below an image of Sonic the Hedgehog himself lying on the ground in the same posture as that of the Peter Griffin fall meme. Fans of both Sonic and Family Guy quickly caught on to the joke.
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