Epic Handshake

Epic Handshake, also called the Predator Handshake, comes from Predator (1987). Dutch, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, spots his old comrade Dillon, played by Carl Weathers; their greeting becomes a suspended arm-wrestling pose while Dutch jokes that the CIA has Dillon “pushing too many pencils.”

The scene became a meme on August 25, 2007, when Kristian Odland's kreshjun YouTube account posted A Tribute to the Handshake in Predator, a live-action recreation built around the same shots and dialogue. It is the earliest meme use supported by this source set.

YouTube first treated the handshake as an editing challenge. A 2008 upload paired it with “Push It to the Limit”; later versions added Spanish dialogue, Guile's theme, pixel art, flatulence and explosions big enough to destroy the planet. Each remix pushed the scene's already excessive masculinity a little further.

The meme changed shape in 2012 as artists recreated the locked arms in watercolor and chalk. Those simplified compositions made the two biceps and the clasp easy to label separately.

On May 14, 2018, @mitchysuch posted the earliest object-labeled version preserved in this research set. By July, the format was circulating widely: the two arms represented different groups and the clasp named the opinion, habit or enemy they shared. In 2019, TikTok users turned the same structure back into performance, acting out unlikely pairs meeting over one common trait.

The image has outlived any single caption. It now reads instantly as alliance, mutual respect or surprising common ground, and even the marketing campaign for The Predator invited fans to recreate the Dutch-and-Dillon greeting.

The close-up does most of the writing: two opponents fill the frame, but the locked hands create a clean visual intersection. Labeling each arm and the center turns a three-part argument into one glance, while the ridiculous biceps keep agreement from looking polite.

Use it when two rivals, communities or unrelated things agree on exactly one point. The center label is the shared belief; the arms are the sides arriving from opposite directions.