The sound parodies the flute-led theme from the 1997 film Titanic, best known through Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On. Badly played recorder and flute covers became a staple of early YouTube parody videos, where the contrast between the earnest original and the squeaky performance made it a shorthand for failure. It later spread across Vine, TikTok and meme edits as a reaction track, and remains popular because almost everyone recognises the melody within the first few notes, even when it is deliberately ruined.