Raft Kid

Submission 17,536

About

Raft Kid is a photoshop meme based on a photograph of a toddler boy screaming with the netting of a swimming float stuck around his face. The image spawned dozens of photoshopped parodies online upon its submission to Reddit in June 2016.

Origin

On June 9th, 2016, Redditor Beerdancer submitted a photograph of a toddler standing and yelling while stuck in the netting of a round swimming float to /r/PhotoshopBattles^[1] in a post titied "Child With Raft on his Head." The post garnered 4,822 points (93% upvoted) and over 400 comments, including at least 100 photoshopped responses, prior to being archived.

Spread

As photoshopped responses began to flood in, various images of unidentified flying object (UFO) emerged as a prominent theme in numerous instances of parodies, including the "I Want to Believe" poster from the American sci-fi TV series X-Files.

On June 9th, Someecards^[2] highlighted the Reddit thread in a compilation article titled "Kid with a raft on his head becomes the meme the Internet needs, not the one it deserves." On June 10th, Imgur^[3] user WhyTheFuckDoINeedAUserNameOkCallMeChris started a gallery of photoshopped parodies from the /r/PhotoshopBattles thread in a post titled "Meet Raft Kid," which garnered more than 10,756 points and 143,811 views in five days. On June 11th, FunnyJunk^[4] user christinap submitted the images from the compilation on Imgur using the same title. On June 14th, The Daily Dot^[5] and Uproxx^[6] picked up on the photoshopped adventures of the "Raft Kid."