Smiley Sings

2006viral videoclassic

Published September 28, 2026

Smiley Sings is an animated video format where a hand-drawn yellow smiley face lip-syncs to popular songs by stretching its mouth in time with the vocals. The trend started in 2006 on YouTube with an MS Paint rendition of Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger' and helped popularize a whole style of mouth-manipulation music videos that later fed into edits like Trumpet Boy.

lip sync memesms paint memesanimation memeslate 2000s memesmusic memes

Overview

Smiley Sings videos follow a strict visual formula. The uploader opens MS Paint, draws a basic yellow circle with two dot eyes and a horizontal line for a mouth, then vertically stretches that mouth line to mimic the shape of the singer's vowels for the length of a full song1. The audio is a straight rip of a well-known track, and the fun sits entirely in the mismatch between a crude paint doodle and the emotional delivery of hits like 'Eye of the Tiger' or 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams'2.

The format is a direct ancestor of the mouth-manipulation edits that later blew up on YouTube, including Trumpet Boy style overlays where a mouth or instrument is animated onto a pre-existing image3. Early Smiley Sings uploads stuck to the plain paint face, but the channel eventually branched into full-body smileys performing songs like 'Numa Numa,' which pushed the joke closer to a full character animation4.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube
Creator
kentdoddsproductions
Date
2006

The earliest known Smiley Sings video was posted on December 1st, 2006, by YouTube user kentdoddsproductions and set the smiley face lip-syncing to Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger'1. The clip is roughly four minutes of a paint-drawn smiley on a white background with a mouth that squashes and stretches for every line of the chorus, and it picked up more than 63,000 views over the following twelve years according to Know Your Meme3.

That same day, kentdoddsproductions uploaded companion videos set to 'Weird Al' Yankovic's 'The Night Santa Went Crazy' and Green Day's 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams,' establishing the channel's rapid one-a-day workflow56.

How It Spread

On January 12th, 2007, kentdoddsproductions expanded the format with a full-bodied smiley singing 'Numa Numa,' a video that pulled in more than 24,000 views over the next decade7. A few months later, on April 4th, 2007, the same user posted a follow-up asking viewers to vote for the Numa Numa entry in the official 2007 New Numa Contest, where the submission ended up finishing in 47th place83.

The real jump in reach came from a repost. On June 28th, 2008, the YouTube account randomvids300 re-uploaded the 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams' Smiley Sings video, and that mirror crossed 4 million views by 2019, dwarfing the original uploads on the source channel9.

Years later, on May 19th, 2013, a dedicated YouTube channel called Smiley Sings was created, with Know Your Meme noting circumstantial links to a separate account called Rikard Games in the channel's about section3. The channel sat idle until September 13th, 2018, when it uploaded 'Smiley sings britney spears one more time,' followed two days later by 'Smiley sings toto africa,' reviving the format for a new audience3.

Frequently Asked Questions