Shoop Da Whoop

Origin: an edited Dragon Ball Z frame¶

The face is a Microsoft Paint edit of a single frame from Dragon Ball Z, taken from the episode known in English as “Hour of Temptation” — first broadcast in Japan in September 1992 and in the United States on October 27, 2000. In the scene the villain Cell opens his mouth in a wide scream during a fight. He does not fire anything; the beam that defines the meme was drawn on afterwards by editors.

The edit flattened the frame into a crude cartoon: a huge circular open mouth, tiny eyes, and a laser exploding outward. It also darkened the face and enlarged the lips into what is now widely described as a blackface caricature, and the deliberately misspelled catchphrase was written to imitate a Southern African-American accent. Know Your Meme keeps the entry behind a content warning for that reason, and the character has been quietly retired or redesigned in several places it once appeared.

The name is a genuine mystery. Where “Shoop Da Whoop” came from has never been documented; the most-repeated theory, that it began with a Flash animation posted to 4chan, traces back to a single unsourced wiki claim and should be treated as unverified.

The catchphrase¶

The face travelled with two lines, in sequence: “IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER” as the wind-up, and “IMMA FIRIN MAH LAZER” as the payoff. The mechanic is a two-beat setup and release, which is why the meme worked as animation rather than as a still image — the whole gag is the pause before the blast.

How it spread¶

The earliest documented instance is a DeviantArt post by user CrabPope on October 19, 2006. What actually made it enormous was YouTube.

• January 29, 2007 — YouTuber DominicFear (Dom Fera) uploaded “The Lazer Collection,” a rapid-fire animated montage of characters charging and firing the beam. It reportedly passed 11 million views.
• The Lazer Collection ran to seven episodes, together accumulating a reported 20 million-plus views before Fera later took them offline.
• December 21, 2008 — a separate upload titled simply “Shoop da whoop” drew more than 3 million views over the following decade.

Know Your Meme’s entry records over 1.5 million confirmations, 252 images and 91 videos — the video count being unusually high, which reflects how much of this meme’s life was animated rather than static.

Notable examples and spin-offs¶

• Historical figures, animals, cartoon characters and film stills edited to fire the beam, at escalating scales — the standard exploitable use.
• Dr. Octogonapus, a character introduced in The Lazer Collection who fires his own beam, broke out as a separate meme and became a fixture of YouTube Poop.
• A “Shoop da Whoop!” item exists in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.
• The face recurs as an easter egg across the Henry Stickmin games and appears as a hazard in Roblox’s Survive the Disasters 2.

Legacy¶

Shoop Da Whoop is a fossil of a specific internet: 2006-2009 image boards, MS Paint edits, YTMND and early YouTube animation, when memes were things you drew onto pictures rather than captions you typed under them. Its structural contribution — the charge-then-release two-panel gag — long outlived the drawing itself, and is still the shape of countless reaction edits.

The image has aged badly for the reason described above, and it is no longer in general circulation on mainstream platforms. It is documented here as a significant piece of image-board history rather than as a template in current use.