About

Brent Rambo, also known as Kid Giving Thumbs Up, is a child model featured in a promotional video for Apple's desktop products in the early 1990s. On Reddit beginning in the early 2010s, the animated GIF of Rambo giving a thumbs-up gesture in the video has been paired with humorous and suggestive clips as a seal of approval, in a similar vein to the use of Approval Guy on 4chan.

Origin

In the early 1990s, Apple Inc. released a promotional video for its Macintosh and Apple II products. In the video, a young boy identified as Brent Rambo is shown nodding at a computer monitor while narrating a letter to Apple CEO John Sculley^[8] (shown below).

Brent Rambo: "Dear Mr. Scully,
Mac rules the world.
Your Mac friend,
Brent Rambo"

The earliest known usage of the scene as a meme was published by Redditor^[13] phracker in the /r/mac subreddit on February 9th, 2013. The post, entitled "'Nuff said," received more than 260 points (86% upvoted) as of February 2020 (shown below).

Spread

On March 25th, 2013, Redditor ToadLicker93 submitted a post titled "Have an upvote!" to the /r/funny^[7] subreddit, which featured an animated GIF of Brent Rambo nodding approvingly from the Apple promo video (shown below). Within the next two months, the post garnered upwards of 13,000 upvotes and 130 comments.

On March 28th, 2013, Redditor DapperJules submitted the same GIF in a post titled "MRW I see boobs on the front page" to the /r/reactiongifs^[3] subreddit, receiving over 3,400 upvotes and 35 comments within the first month. On April 3rd, IGN Forums^[4] member bibabo posted a thread asking for the origin of the GIF. On May 1st, Redditor HotelWomb submitted a GIF of Rambo watching a video of a woman eating cereal out of a bathtub filled with milk (shown below) to the /r/gifs subreddit.^[2] Within 24 hours, the post gained more than 11,900 upvotes and 430 comments.

The same day, the /r/BrentRamboApproves^[1] subreddit was created, featuring various edited versions of the GIF with added scenes from other videos. In the same time frame, the subreddit received over 670 subscribers. Also on May 1st, the Internet humor blog PandaWhale^[5] posted about the animated GIF series, which outlined its spread on Reddit and linked to a Facebook^[6] page of man named Brent Rambo.

Notable Examples

Identity Revealed

On July 12th, 2013, Redditor VenusBlue submitted a link to an episode of Command Center, a TwitchTV web series that focuses on the massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game Planetside 2, to /r/BrentRamboApproves in a post titled "Brent Rambo works for [Sony Online Entertainment], and on Planetside 2. Here he is on the 'cribs' portion of this week's episode of Command Center."^[9] At about 22-minute mark in the episode, Rambo can be seen recreating his signature thumb-up gesture. Rambo appears at the 19:40 timestamp in a YouTube reupload as well (shown below).

That same day, Redditor dong_lover submitted a GIF^[10] pairing the younger Rambo's gesture with the grown-up version to /r/BrentRamboApproves. On July 13th, Brent Rambo (TheRealBR)^[11] responded in the comments section of the post, confirming that he works as a developer for Sony Online Entertainment and still remains an avid user of Mac computers and devices.

Search Interest

External References