What is the origin of the “Little Miss” meme that has gone viral?

The newest social media craze far pre-dates the recent wildfire explosion of popularity on Instagram. There are doubts about who really desires credit for it going viral but the “Little Miss” and “Mr Men” memes that garnered a following on the photo and video sharing social media site are now spreading to other platforms.

The memes are based on the children’s book series started by the late British author Roger Hargreaves and carried on by his son Adam. People are using screenshots of the various cartoons and then giving them their own titles to reflect character flaws, moods and personalities.

Where did the “Little Miss” meme originate

The “Little Miss” and “Mr Men” memes have been around since at least 2014 according to a deep dive by Mashable, which along the same lines as the recent iteration were created as parodies to explain the plight of Millennials. However, it wasn’t until Instagram meme creator @juulpuppy dumped a series of memes based on the adorable, colorful, animated figures from the Hargreaves, that the fad really took off, at least according to reporting from various outlets.

Know Your Meme credits the creation to 2021, starting on Tumblr before moving on to Instagram. But Mashable thinks that’s wrong because the post was actually published nearly two months after @juulpuppy’s memes that garnered well over 50,000 likes. But the story doesn’t end there, their digging uncovered prior meme post by another Instagram user just a couple of days before. However, it only got around 36,000 likes.

@juulpuppy doesn’t expect credit though for the creation of the concept saying “I’m not saying no one has ever done this type of little miss parody before me or saying u need to care at all,” she wrote. “But I did create this as a meme format.”

Adding, “My initial 30 little miss/mr. memes went viral and birthed subsequent meme pages on tiktok and instagram and thousands of followers for other creators using this template!”

The “Mr Men” got their start as an explanation to what a tickle looks like

The “Mr Men” and “Little Miss” cartoon series got their starts in 1971 and 1981 respectively. Hargreaves’ son Adam when was a child asked him to describe what a tickle looked like which gave birth to Mr. Tickle and thus the “Mr Men” series. Ten years later “Little Miss” came along as well as numerous BBC shows. After Roger died in 1988 the younger Hargreaves whose question sparked the series took over creating new material.