Never underestimate Korea again
TL;DR · OriginThe line comes from the SBS daily drama Two Wives, which aired from May 4 to October 30, 2009 and featured Andy of the group Shinhwa.The scene takes place at an amusement par…
Origin
The line comes from the SBS daily drama Two Wives, which aired from May 4 to October 30, 2009 and featured Andy of the group Shinhwa.
The scene takes place at an amusement park shooting gallery. A group of foreign visitors score badly and complain that the guns are broken, but the stall owner does not understand English. Andy's character, who speaks some, ends up hearing them out — and one of the foreigners remarks, in effect, that everything is broken in Korea because it is a poor country. Stung, Andy picks up that very gun, hits every target, and tells them never to look down on Korea again. Rebutting a claim about broken equipment by demonstrating skill is dramatically coherent enough; what makes the logic float free is that marksmanship has nothing whatsoever to do with a country's wealth.
Spread
What made the scene funny was how earnestly it was staged. On a stage as trivial as a fairground shooting stall, with resolute expressions and swelling music as though national honor were at stake, viewers felt secondhand embarrassment rather than pride. A scene becomes a meme at exactly the point where the makers' intent and the audience's reaction run in opposite directions.
The line went on to become the standard example of "gukppong" — chest-thumping nationalism — in Korean internet humor. It gets quoted to mock content that inflates a minor achievement into a national triumph, and it hardened into the template "never look down on ___ again," with the target swapped out at will. It has lasted this long as mockery material precisely because the original was sincere.
How it is used
- Mocking content that blows up a small accomplishment into a matter of national pride.
- In the "never look down on ___ again" form, grandly defending something trivial.
- Pointing at a display of patriotism so overwrought that it becomes uncomfortable.
- As shorthand for any earnestly made scene that lands as comedy instead.
Sources
- Namuwiki, "다시는 한국을 무시하지 마라" — that the source is Andy's scene in the SBS daily drama Two Wives, and the sequence at the shooting gallery (blaming the gun, the interpreting, the disparaging remark, hitting every target, the retort)
- Korean Wikipedia, "Two Wives (drama)" — aired on SBS from May 4 to October 30, 2009
- SBS program page for Two Wives — the broadcaster's official archive
