Where is the "those bastards lied to me" image from?

Pawn Stars season 1, episode 17, aired December 7, 2009. Richard "Old Man" Harrison reacts to learning his family secretly restored his car for their fiftieth anniversary.

Why is the meme's name in Spanish?

The English broadcast line is "that little bastard lied to me." The Latin American Spanish dub renders it as "Esos bastardos me mintieron," and that version became the meme.

As the reaction to discovering that something you had accepted as true was completely false.

When did it spread to English?

Late November 2018, after Spanish-language Facebook pages established the format that October. A December 29, 2018 Reddit post took over 16,000 points.

Those Bastards Lied to Me meaning, origin & examples

Origin

The image comes from Pawn Stars, season 1, episode 17 (“Old Man’s Booty”), which aired on December 7, 2009. Richard “Old Man” Harrison is filmed in an interview segment reacting to the discovery that his family had secretly restored his 1966 Chrysler Imperial as a fiftieth wedding anniversary surprise — having told him something else entirely.

His reaction is a slack-jawed, wide-eyed look of pure betrayal, and in the original English broadcast he says, “That little bastard lied to me.”

The meme’s name comes from somewhere else. In the Latin American Spanish dub, the line is rendered as “Esos bastardos me mintieron” — those bastards lied to me — and it is that version, in that language, that became the meme.

What it means / how it’s used

It is the reaction to discovering that something you accepted as true was completely false. Not a small correction — a full collapse of a belief you had been operating on.

Its uses:

Learning that a widely repeated “fact” is a myth.
Discovering a product, film, or service was misrepresented.
Realising advice you followed was wrong.
Fandom versions reacting to a retcon or a debunked theory.

The expression is what carries it. Harrison is not angry; he is stunned, which fits the specific moment of a belief giving way rather than the argument that follows.

How it spread

The meme was built in Spanish-language communities, which is why its canonical name is a translation. On October 29, 2018, a Spanish-language Facebook page posted the template, and on October 31, 2018 another page published the first documented example — a joke about The Divine Comedy.

It crossed into English-language platforms through late November 2018, and on December 29, 2018 an English version posted to Reddit took over 16,000 points at a 95% upvote ratio.

The Spanish-first pattern recurs constantly across formats of this era, and this case is unusually clean evidence of it: the meme is named after a dub line that does not exist in the original broadcast.

Notable examples & variations

“Things I was taught that turned out to be false” jokes.
Fandom versions reacting to retcons.
Versions retaining the Spanish caption.
Educational versions debunking common myths.
Crossovers with other “that was a lie” reaction formats.

Legacy / cultural impact

Pawn Stars has been running since 2009 and has produced several enduring reaction images, helped by a format that films people reacting to surprises in close-up.

Richard Harrison died in 2018, the same year the meme built around him took off, and the format has generally been used affectionately since — a picture of a man being pleasantly, comprehensively deceived by his own family, repurposed as the internet’s standard face for finding out you were wrong.