He-Man Sings / HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA

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About

"HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA" is the unofficial title of a 2005 animated music video in which the fictional superhero character He-Man^[5] sings a rendition of 4 Non Blondes' 1992 hit rock single "What's Up." Since entering online circulation in May 2005, the video has been widely used as a popular material for bait-and-switch trolling, while spawning hundreds of remixes, parodies and music video tributes.

Origin

The music video was created by two animators at Slackcircus Studios^[2], who were inspired by Eric Fensler's G.I. Joe PSA series, by pairing footage of the titular protagonist from the 1980s American cartoon series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe with American alternative rock band 4 Non Blondes' 1992 hit single "What's Up." On May 8th, 2005, the original copy of the video file was uploaded to the Something Awful forums^[1] under the title "Fabulous Secret Powers" (shown below).

Spread

The same month the video was uploaded, the creators also launched a faux blog allegedly written in 1995 by the renamed He-Man character, Prince Adam.^[3] The video was shared on the eBaum's World forums^[8] on May 22nd, 2005 as "He-Man Sings a Gay Song," and on February 11th, 2006, the video was uploaded to YouTube^[9] for the first time as "He-Man does 4 non-blondes." The video continued to be reuploaded to the video sharing site, where there are approximately 110 search results for "He-Man Sings"^[10] as of February 2013. Later in 2006, another artist was inspired to create their own He-Man Sings video using Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Between 2006 and 2009, the video was discussed on TheSite.org forums^[11], the BodyBuilding.com forums^[12], MetaFilter^[13], Regrettable Music^[14], Buzzfeed^[15] and Comics Alliance.^[16] In January 2010, Slackcircus reposted the video to Vimeo^[4] where it saw an additional 257,000 views as of February 2013. In November of that year, a truncated two minute version with the intro, outro and dialogue removed was uploaded to YouTube as "HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA" (shown below), becoming the most popular version of the video. As of February 2013, this upload has more than 30.8 million views. This version is often used as a bait and switch link, in a similar manner to the Rickroll.