Fat Guy Sings Moana In a Canoe

Submission 14,578

Part of a series on Viral Videos. [View Related Entries]

About

Fat Guy Sings Moana In a Canoe refers to a viral video of YouTuber The Mighty Del rowing a canoe while singing "How Far I'll Go" from the 2016 Disney film Moana, then tipping the canoe over, completely submerging the camera in the water. The voice singing "How Far I'll Go" was added in post and is not part of the original 2019 upload. The edit went viral in late 2020, resulting in a number of remixes on YouTube.

Origin

On April 10th, 2019, YouTuber^[1] The Mighty Del posted a video titled, "Fat guy Canoe fails.." in which he tips over his canoe a number of times trying to get in it, garnering over 466,000 views in roughly two years (shown below).

On December 2nd, 2020, YouTuber^[2] Techlin uploaded the earliest known edit of the video, consisting of a clip of The Mighty Del rowing forward then flipping over, submerging the camera in water, followed by the Water Monke video (shown below, left). On December 5th, YouTuber^[3] Curious posted another edit of the meme, this time splicing the opening clip with the Shark Pog video, garnering over 776,000 views in three months (shown below, right).

On December 9th, YouTuber^[4] Jimmy Pickering uploaded a new edit of the meme in which a voice singing "How Far I'll Go" from the Disney film Moana is dubbed in as Del rows, titled, "Fat man singing in a canoe." This is the earliest known upload of the edit, garnering over 372,000 views in three months.

On December 21st, 2020, YouTuber^[5] Joe Brooks reuploaded a much higher quality version of Jimmy Pickering's video under the title, "Fat guy sings Moana in a canoe" going viral and garnering over 8.4 million views in just under three months as YouTube's algorithm started recommending it (shown below).

Spread

"Fat guy sings Moana in a canoe" and its previous edits were reuploaded numerous times to YouTube^[6]^[7] over the following months, also being uploaded to sites like Instagram and Reddit.

In March 2021 the video began to inspire new edits and receive significant attention. For example, on March 6th, YouTuber^[8] MemeNess uploaded a video in which the canoer gets shot down by lasers, garnering over 85,000 views in 12 days (shown below, left). On March 9th, YouTuber^[9] OhKayBee uploaded a video splicing the canoe footage with the Skyrim intro, garnering over 13,000 views in a comparable span of time (shown below, right).

On March 10th, Redditor u/nverkaik posted the video as an image macro to /r/memes,^[10] garnering over 1,700 upvotes in a week (shown below).

On March 17th, YouTube^[11] and Instagram^[12] page memes by cowbelly posted a Minecraft themed edit of the video, garnering over 70,000 views on the former and 25,000 on the latter in a day (shown below).