Warner Bros cartoons from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies era built much of their comedy on reusable stock sound effects, including exaggerated screams for chases, frights and pratfalls. Short terror screams like this one were dropped in whenever a character was startled, creating an instantly recognisable cartoon language of fear. Clips lifted from those cartoons later spread across soundboards and meme edits, where the scream is now used on its own, detached from any specific scene, as a universal sign of overblown horror and panic.