Popcat is an Internet meme originating in 2020, in some videos which show two images of a cat named ‘Oatmeal’, where one image has its mouth closed and the other has its mouth open, the second image was edited to give its mouth an ‘O’ shape
The meme later inspired a popular game and recently the POPCAT memecoin
Oatmeal is a cat owned by a Twitter user named Xavier BFB, who first started the meme by posting to a private Discord server a video of Oatmeal chirping at a bug in 2020.
It was then turned into a gif and posted on the reddit subreddit Meow IRL by a friend of Xavier BFB
It was then reposted on Twitter (now X) where it gained over a million views. This sudden popularity led to Xavier BFB uploading to Twitter the original video of the cat chirping at a bug
But it would be only until it was used in music videos on Instagram, where the gif was synced to the music to give the impression that Oatmeal was singing, that it would become really well known
Popcat’s popularity in music videos made it also known as ‘wide-mouth singing cat’