Ka-Chow (Lightning McQueen)
Where it came from
Lightning McQueen's catchphrase from Pixar's Cars (2006). It started getting used ironically in May 2015 via a Facebook meme page, spread to Onsizzle in July 2016, and went properly viral across Twitter, iFunny and Reddit that autumn. In Brazil he's Relâmpago McQueen and 'katchau' has its own separate TikTok life.
"Ka-chow" is a race car's catchphrase from a kids' movie, and the joke is deploying it with total sincerity in contexts where it makes no sense. It works as a punchline the way an air horn works as a punchline — it doesn't mean anything, it just arrives loudly at the end of a sentence and ends the conversation.
There's a whole degraded branch of this called "Kerchoo," where the image gets compressed into oblivion and the spelling falls apart. Those usually carry sad captions instead of confident ones, which is a very specific kind of funny: a JPEG that has been through hell, a race car, and the words "when you try your best and it still isn't enough."
Brazil runs its own parallel version where McQueen is Relâmpago and the sound is spelled "katchau," and it's arguably more alive there than in English right now. Same car, same three syllables, completely independent meme economy.
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Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends
