Murph the NERF Mascot

About

Murph the NERF Mascot is a mascot revealed for the Hasbro product of toy foam guns, NERF. The character is depicted as a humanoid covered in multi-colored foam strings, meant to represent NERF darts. After the company's reveal in mid-June 2022, many commented about his uncanny design and posted humorous edits of the character, similar to other viral mascots like Gritty.

Origin

On June 17th, 2022, Hasbro introduced its first mascot for NERF products, named Murph.^[1] The character, confirmed by Hasbro to be genderless and should be referred to with they/them pronouns, was tweeted about that day by Twitter user @azalben,^[2] gaining over 3,900 retweets, 4,800 quote-tweets and 25,000 likes in four days (shown below).

Spread

The character was quickly joked about on social media following its debut on June 17th, 2022, as many users found the design creepy but lovable, similar to how people originally felt about Gritty. For example, Twitter user @Thataldendiaz^[3] posted a tweet comparing Murph to Gritty, gaining over 20 retweets and 100 likes in four days (shown below, left). Some celebrated that the character was confirmed non-binary. Twitter user @coleisnugatory^[4] posted on June 17th, " I am being 100% sincere when I say this is the first instance of non-binary representation in commercial advertising that actually feels like it could have been devised by a trans person. This design fucking rules," gaining over 500 retweets and 3,100 likes in a similar timeframe (shown below, right).

Others made humorous edits with the character to heighten its surreal design. On June 17th, Twitter user @spacemacchiato^[5] photoshopped Murph into a trail camera image, making them look like a cryptid (shown below, left). That same day, user @TeaBreeshark^[6] posted an edit of Murph in front of the non-binary pride flag, gaining over 140 retweets and 500 likes in four days (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References