Chewbacca Mom

Submission 21,218

About

Candace Payne's Chewbacca Mask refers to a viral video uploaded to Facebook by Texas resident Candace Panye in late May 2016, in which she is shown wearing a mask for the Star Wars character Chewbacca while laughing hysterically in her car. The recording quickly became the most-viewed Facebook Live video in history, landing Payne interviews with several major publications and television shows.

Origin

On May 19th, 2016, Facebook user Candace Payne uploaded a livecast video of herself sitting in her car and enthusiastically presenting a Chewbacca mask she recently purchased at a Kohl's store (shown below) in . While demonstrating the mask's ability to produce a growling noise out of its built-in speaker, Payne begins to laugh excitedly and exclaims "I'm such a happy Chewbacca!" Within six days, the video gained more than 145 million views, 3.2 million shares and 2.6 million reactions on Facebook, becoming the most viewed Facebook Live video of all time.

Spread

On May 19th, YouTuber Jon Deak reuploaded Payne's video, receiving more than 3.1 million views and 3,900 comments.^[1] The following day, Redditor PI_Producer posted the video to /r/videos,^[4] where it gathered upwards of 11,500 votes (72% upvoted) and 3,000 comments in five days. On May 21st, actor Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the original Star Wars trilogy, posted a tweet praising Payne for her video (shown below).^[2]

That day, other Twitter users began posting about the video using the hashtag #HappyChewbacca.^[3] Also on May 21st, Kohl's posted a video to Facebook of a store representative delivering various Star Wars merchandise to the Payne family along with $2,500 in gift cards to the store. Within four days, the video gathered upwards of 32 million views, 725,000 reactions and 505,000 shares.

Meanwhile, the pop culture news blog Crave^[5] reported that the Chewbacca mask quickly sold out at various toy stores across the United States and United Kingdom not long after video took off. On May 23rd, Payne appeared in a comedy sketch about the video on The Late Show with James Cordon (shown below).

That day, the Schmoyoho YouTube channel posted a songified remix of Payne's original video (shown below). Also on May 23rd, Payne was interviewed on the morning talk show Good Morning America (shown below, right).

On May 24th, Payne visited the Facebook headquarters, where she was greeted by the Facebook Live team and given an award from the company (shown below).

On June 3rd, TIME Money^[8] ran an article speculating the total value of monetary gains that Candace Dayne and her family had received in "ballpark estimates," which concluded that the Daynes may have earned approximately $420,000 USD, mainly through various forms of gifts from corporations like Kohl's, Disney and Hasbro ($10,500), complimentary access to VIP services and treatments during their press tour in New York City (appx. $9,500), as well as Southeastern University's offer of all-inclusive scholarship for every family member (appx. $400,000).