About

BFDI Mouth refers to a social media trend of spotting assets from the YouTube animated series Battle for Dream Island, namely mouths, being used in YouTube thumbnails, videos, advertising and product design. The trend first achieved virality in the Battle for Dream Island community in the early 2020s, being further boosted by the 2022 episode "Why is the BFDI Mouth Everywhere?" The trend later developed into users editing the BFDI mouth into various GIFs and videos as an exploitable meme.

Origin

On January 1st, 2010, episode one "Take the Plunge" of the animated Battle for Dream Island, created by JackNJellify, premiered on YouTube,^[1] accumulating over 68 million views in 14 years (shown below, left). The series follows a group of anthropomorphic objects as they take part in the eponymous competition.

Notably, assets used in the series, including the "BFDI mouth" previously appeared in earlier animated videos by JackNJellify, with the earliest known appearance being "I Can Make a Difference!" uploaded to YouTube^[13] on May 5th, 2008 (shown below, right).

Assets for Battle for Dream Island, including eye and mouth assets, were made publicly available by JackNJellify.^[2] During the 2010s, the assets were uploaded to various PNG repository websites such as PNG Wing,^[3] PinClipArt^[4] and StickPNG^[5] (popular PNG images from the set shown below), as well as archived on the show's Wiki.^[6]

On September 24th, 2019, Redditor bleepitybloop555 posted a photograph of robot Nelly from BattleBots, noticing that it had a mouth asset from BFDI. The post garnered over 140 upvotes in the /r/BattleForDreamIsland^[7] subreddit, with JackNJellify making a post about it on X^[8] / Twitter on September 25th, 2019 (shown below).

Spread

On October 3rd, 2019, Redditors zaydenmYT and ljcool2006 launched /r/BFDI_assets,^[9] a dedicated subreddit for gathering instances of BFDI assets being used in YouTube thumbnails and videos or elsewhere on the internet and in real life (example posts from the subreddit shown below).

On April 25th, 2022, X^[10] / Twitter user @DipsumValley made an observation about repeatedly encountering a certain mouth clip art in Roblox and on YouTube. The post, which received multiple replies identifying the clip art as the BFDI mouth, gained over 460 reposts and 3,900 likes in two years (shown below).

On November 21st, 2022, JackNJellify released a special episode "Why is the BFDI Mouth everywhere?" that showcased the universal use of BFDI mouths on the internet. The episode, which featured instances of BFDI mouth being used by YouTubers such as MatPat and Nostalgia Critic, gained over 2 million views on YouTube^[11] in two years (shown below).

The BFDI mouth later achieved popularity as a prevalent exploitable, being combined with GIFs and videos. For instance, on August 12th, 2023, X^[12] user @exclam0 posted a compilation video of edited GIFs created by Discord users. The post received over 1,300 reposts and 5,200 likes in one year (shown below).

made some several bfdi mouth edited gifs that I stole from discord into a video with sound effects pic.twitter.com/0gY2MSqYM1

— exclamo🍉 (@exclam0) August 13, 2023

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References