Shopping Cart Wheels

What the picture shows

The image is divided into four equal squares. The upper-left, lower-left and lower-right corners repeat one and the same frame: a person with long dark hair against a background of green foliage, gazing downward and smiling slightly, almost guiltily. The upper-right corner shows a completely different frame: a gray, bony creature with huge pale eyes and wet strands of hair on its forehead, photographed from the shadows.

These two images show one character in two states. Three panels in a row with the “good” hero create the feeling that everything is going well, and one panel breaks the order. That is exactly why the drawing got its name about wheels: a cart has four of them, and anyone who has pushed one around a supermarket knows how one wheel suddenly starts behaving differently from the rest.

Sméagol and Gollum

The hero is taken from the film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel “The Lord of the Rings,” directed by Peter Jackson. In the film trilogy, the creature called Gollum is in fact named Sméagol, and this figure is locked in a painful inner struggle with the other side of its own personality. The character was played by Andy Serkis, who used motion capture technology: his movements and facial expressions became the basis for the digital image.

In such scenes Sméagol looks gentler, speaks almost tenderly, and recalls what he was like before he met the Ring. Gollum is malicious and obsessed, hisses, and talks about the Ring as “my precious.” In the picture these two sides sit side by side, and that is enough for the reader to grasp the meaning without any explanation.

Why a cart

The joke has no complicated backstory: it is built on recognition. Any object with multiple wheels, whether a cart, a suitcase or an office chair, almost always has one wheel that lets the others down. In the four panels, three “reliable” frames become a natural metaphor for working wheels, while Gollum in the corner depicts the very one that won’t cooperate.

The exact time this template appeared and the name of its author have not been established, so it is not worth citing a specific date. What matters more is that the meme is easy to read without a caption: it is enough to know what Sméagol and Gollum look like and to picture an even row of three identical panels and one exceptional one.

Examples for your own caption

“Three runs through the to-do list went great, and the fourth one fell apart” — the caption goes on the panel with Gollum, where he shows exactly what went wrong.

“Four people on the team: three handed in their reports on time” — Gollum here stands for the fourth, and the example works through familiar workplace recognition, without blaming any specific person.

“Three fingers press the keys obediently, and the fourth hits the wrong one” — a joke about a typo that always happens in the same spot.

“Three cart wheels roll straight” — the most direct version: you can caption each panel yourself, and on the Gollum panel write “and this is the wheel that wants to go to the cat food aisle.”

How to use the template

It works best in situations where one item with a personality stands out from a group of identical objects, people or actions. Caption only the Gollum panel or all four, but keep one style: plain words on the left, the glitch on the right.

You may change the order of the panels: if Gollum ends up first or last, the rhythm of the joke changes, as if the wheel broke right at the start or only at the end of the trip.