Baby Yoda
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Biggest memes ever10 of 32
2019·The platform era·wholesome
A small green puppet from the series The Mandalorian, turned into captioned stills and GIFs from the week he first appeared.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- Grogu
- Spread in
- 2019
- Began as
- A commercial release
- Where it started
- commercial-release
- Format
- Meme
- Taken from
- The Mandalorian, from its first episode in 2019
- Who or what it shows
- A puppet built by Legacy Effects and worked by two technicians
- Original title
- Grogu; the series’ makers do not use “Baby Yoda”
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
At the end of the first episode of The Mandalorian in November 2019, the bounty the hero has been sent to collect turns out to be a very small, very old-looking infant of Yoda's species. Disney had kept the character out of all pre-release marketing, so nobody knew he existed until they saw him. The internet named him Baby Yoda immediately; the show did not give him a real name for a year.
The merchandising catch-up became its own story, since there were no toys to sell at Christmas. The character's real name, Grogu, arrived in late 2020 and never displaced the meme name in general use. Baby Yoda is the clearest recent case of an audience naming a character and the rights holder losing that argument permanently.
Why it matteredWhat changed
The character was kept out of all advance marketing and merchandise, so he arrived as a surprise, and about two million tweets named him in his first three weeks.
TimelineIn order
- Taken down
Giphy removes its GIFs of the character over what it calls legal confusion, restores them, and apologises to Disney.1
- Took off
From this day to 5 December about two million tweets use the words “Baby Yoda”.1
- Picked up
The series’ creator, Jon Favreau, tweets a piece of concept art of the character.1
- Mainstream
The Hollywood Reporter puts him on its cover as the future of Hollywood.1
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asA young Yoda.
ActuallyHe is not Yoda. He is a member of the same species, and the series later names him Grogu.1
Commonly remembered asHis name is Baby Yoda.
ActuallyFans coined that. The people who make the series do not use it.1
How it spreadFrom one place to everywhere
- A still of him sipping soup, from the fourth episode, was passed around in the way the picture of Kermit the Frog sipping tea had been.1
More from hereIn this collection
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · copied, redrawn and reused until the original stopped mattering · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
This was released commercially before the internet carried it. Originally published on commercial-release.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This was released commercially before the internet carried it. Originally published on commercial-release.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things