Howard the Alien — Bronze 3D alien character walking on green screen background

Howard the Alien

2018viral videoclassic

Published August 29, 2026

Howard the Alien, also known as Money Longer Alien, is a series of remix videos featuring a metallic 3D-rendered alien dancing to Lil Uzi Vert's 2016 track "Money Longer." Paired with the song by iFunny users in July 2018, the uncanny CGI clip became one of the signature ironic video memes of that year's bass-boosted era.

mashup video memes green screen memes cgi animation memes ifunny memes uncanny valley memes

Overview

The joke pairs a chrome-skinned CGI extraterrestrial performing stiff dance-loop animations against Lil Uzi Vert's trap production 1. The alien cycles through the same King Tut style motion set indefinitely while the song plays, and edits commonly stack ear-rape distortion, hard bass boosting, and unrelated audio swaps on top of the loop 2.

Because the source footage was originally uploaded as a free green-screen asset, remixers layered the alien over family photos, film scenes, and news broadcasts, treating him as a portable dancing sticker rather than a fixed clip 3. Later YouTube edits sometimes drop the Uzi track entirely, but the definitive pairing stayed the "Money Longer" combo that iFunny locked in during summer 2018 2.

Origin & Background

Platform
iFunny (meme pairing) / YouTube (source animation and viral spread)
Creator
iFunny user Feat; 3D Animation Land
Date
2018

Lil Uzi Vert released "Money Longer" on February 5, 2016 as his debut commercial single, later appearing on the mixtape Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World that May 1. The dancing alien clip itself came from a separate upload nearly two years later. On December 2, 2017, YouTube channel 3D Animation Land posted "FREE GREEN SCREEN – METAL ALIEN DANCING," a chroma-key asset built inside the animation app iClone using the built-in "Opening" and "King Tut 01" motion presets 3.

The alien and the song were welded together on iFunny by user Feat on July 3, 2018, in a post joking about the alien standing at the foot of the bed during sleep paralysis. The image pulled over 12,000 upvotes within two weeks and set the template every later edit borrowed from 6.

How It Spread

Within days, the pairing jumped to Instagram and YouTube. On July 8, 2018, Instagram user @sawisdead1234 uploaded their own alien-plus-Uzi cut 6. That same day, YouTuber Kawhi mirrored the original green-screen animation over the song for a wider YouTube audience 4. The next day, channel d sufa uploaded "Alien Dancing to money longer bass boosted," an edit that pushed the low end into speaker-shredding territory and helped tie the format to YouTube's bass-boosted meme circuit 2.

Compilation and reaction channels picked up the format across the second half of 2018, folding it into the broader ear-rape and bass-boosted subgenre already popular on YouTube 5. The character eventually settled under the fan-given nickname "Howard," which stuck across reuploads, edit packs, and later ironic revivals 7.

How to Use This Meme

Typical Howard the Alien edits drop the green-screened dance loop over any background and score it with "Money Longer" or a heavily bass-boosted variant 5. The iFunny convention often adds a first-person intrusive-thought or sleep-paralysis caption, while YouTube variants tend to swap the audio for other songs and lean on hard distortion and loudness spikes 2.

Frequently Asked Questions