Officer Spector

About

Officer Spector is an animated purple cyclops police officer featured in Disney Pixar's 2020 movie Onward. The character, voiced by Lena Waithe, is Disney Pixar's first openly gay character. Although the character has a small part in the movie, various conversations and photo edits of Officer Specter were shared on Twitter and Reddit.

Origin

On February 21st, 2020, Disney Pixar's Onward premiered at Berlin's International Film Festival.^[2] That day, Slate^[1] confirmed that Lena Waithe voices an openly gay police officer cyclops and shared an image of the character (shown below). That same day, Onward producer Kori Rae told Yahoo Entertainment^[3] “It just kind of happened. The scene, when we wrote it, was kind of fitting and it opens up the world a little bit, and that’s what we wanted.” Director Dan Scanlon also stated to Yahoo, “It’s a modern fantasy world and we want to represent the modern world.”

Spread

On February 21st, 2020, Redditor Lanochu shared a Mr. Krabs edit to r/dankmemes^[4] which claims that Disney Pixar created the character for profits (shown below, left). On February 28th, Life Petitions^[6] set up a petition to boycott Onward due to the character. The petition accumulated over 56,800 signatures in a week. On March 6th, Onward was released in United States theaters. The next day, Twitter user @TheNamesToeJam^[5] shared some images depicting excitment for the character's scene (shown below, right).

On March 7th, Twitter user @AsToldByNeon shared a video clip of Officer Spector's scene with the caption, "Me looking both ways before crossing the street:" (shown below). The tweet gained over 1,000 likes in two days.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References