Photo of a young woman with Malleo and Weegee composited beside her

Malleo

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Published September 5, 2026

Malleo is a vectorized image built from an oddly proportioned Mario sprite pulled from the 1992 DOS release of Mario Is Missing!, later reworked into unsettling artwork that spread through 4chan and YouTube around 2005. The character became a fixture of YouTube Poop as the supposed brother of Weegee.

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Overview

Malleo is a vectorized redraw of a stiff, off-model Mario sprite that appears in the DOS cutscenes of the 1992 educational game Mario Is Missing!1. The face is the whole joke: bulging eyes, a warped nose, and a frozen smile that reads as menacing rather than friendly, which is why it circulated as a discomfort image on early imageboards2.

Inside YouTube Poop, Malleo is treated as the brother of Weegee, the equally warped Luigi vector cut from the same game2. Fan lore gave him a signature line, with Urban Dictionary describing a version who can only say 'fireflower' and turns bystanders into fire flowers on contact3. The character usually shows up in short looped clips, layered image edits, and shitpost threads rather than a fixed caption template.

Origin & Background

Platform
Mario Is Missing! (source sprite) / 4chan and YouTube (viral spread)
Date
2005

The source art comes from Mario Is Missing!, a 1992 DOS edutainment title from The Software Toolworks, where the intro and ending cutscenes render Mario and Luigi as strange, low-detail sprites that do not match their console-era designs1. Those sprites, especially the Luigi frame that became Weegee, sat unnoticed for over a decade before internet users pulled them out for reuse.

The exact first upload of the 'Malleo' vector and the coining of the name are not documented, but the redraw entered wider circulation around 2005 alongside the already-spreading Weegee image2.

How It Spread

By around 2005, the vectorized Malleo image was being reposted across 4chan, deviantART galleries, and YouTube video edits, following the same route Weegee had taken slightly earlier2. On imageboards it was used the way Weegee was used, dropped into threads to unsettle other posters with the warped face rather than to deliver a punchline.

YouTube Poop creators folded Malleo into sentence-mixed Mario videos, often pairing him with Weegee as a sibling duo and cycling through the 'fireflower' gag noted in fan definitions3. Original uploads featuring the character are still archived on YouTube, including early Malleo compilations that helped codify the look and voice45.

The image never crossed over into mainstream Mario fandom the way official characters did, and it stayed inside the YouTube Poop and old-4chan orbit where it started2.

Frequently Asked Questions