Where did Pop Cat come from?

It started with Oatmeal's owner, Twitter user @XavierBFB, and first spread after Redditor Skettidragon posted an edit to r/MEOW_IRL on October 9th, 2020.

What does Pop Cat mean?

There is no deep meaning. It is just a cat opening and closing its mouth while making a popping sound, used for laughs and lip-sync edits.

How do you use Pop Cat?

People cut between the closed-mouth and open-mouth images in time with music or a popping sound effect to make the cat lip-sync or react.

Is Pop Cat still popular?

Pop Cat is treated as a classic cat meme. Its biggest viral moments were in 2020 and 2021, and the popcat.click clicker game helped keep the format familiar.

Pop Cat

2020image macro / videoclassic

Published May 27, 2026

Pop Cat is a meme built from two images of a cat named Oatmeal, one with a closed mouth and one edited into a wide open O shape, swapped back and forth so the cat looks like it is popping its mouth. It blew up on Twitter in October 2020 and spread into lip-sync edits, a viral clicker game, and beyond.

cats animal memes gaming reaction memes accidental fame memes

Overview

Pop Cat is a meme made from two images of a cat named Oatmeal: one with its mouth shut and one photoshopped so the mouth gapes open in a big O shape1. Flip between the two fast and the cat looks like it is popping its mouth, usually paired with a sharp popping sound5.

The pull is simple. Oatmeal's wide, startled face is funny on its own, and the two-frame loop drops easily into edits, so people set it to song lyrics and built endless spin-offs2. That low-effort, high-reward format is a big reason Pop Cat ended up everywhere online1.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Discord / Reddit (creation), Twitter (viral spread)

Date

2020

The cat behind Pop Cat is Oatmeal, who belongs to Twitter user @XavierBFB1. By Xavier's account, it began when he posted a clip of Oatmeal chirping at a bird to a private Discord server, and friends turned a frame of it into the open-mouth edit1.

The edit reached a wider audience on October 9th, 2020, when Redditor Skettidragon, a friend of Xavier, posted it to the r/MEOW_IRL subreddit, where it picked up 122 upvotes within a month4.

How It Spread

Pop Cat really took off on Twitter. On October 10th, 2020, user @partitiongal reposted the edit alongside the original two images, and the tweet ran up over 1.6 million views, 57,100 retweets, and 161,600 likes3. After that, editors started syncing the two frames to music and spinning the cat into reaction images across other platforms2.

Pop Cat also jumped off social feeds. In August 2021, it went viral all over again when users from Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia competed to top a global click leaderboard3. That competition centered on popcat.click, a browser clicker where visitors tap the cat to pop its mouth1. A Solana meme coin named Popcat launched in 2022 and carried the name into crypto trading3.

How to Use This Meme

Making a Pop Cat edit is straightforward. The common setup pairs the closed-mouth Oatmeal photo with the open-mouth O-shaped version, then cuts between them in time with audio2. The pops are often matched to song lyrics or a simple popping sound effect, the same noise the meme is named for5.