99. A smiley face is not used to mark a minefield.
The yellow smiling face with the message "Have a Nice Day". Gained popularity as a Fun T-Shirt, and now has some parodies.
Originally designed to stop postal employees from, well, Going Postal. The smiley face is also commonly used as a sort of ironic symbol of psychopaths, typically those who are also mentally ill.
A company called Smileyworld Ltd. owns the trademark on yellow smiley faces.
Compare Emoticon.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Irresponsible Captain Tylor: Captain Tylor wears a smiley face button pinned to his baggy UPSF coat as a sign of his cheerful nature and casual disregard of military formality.
Comic Books
- In Doomsday Clock, Rorshach II's moving ink blot face forms a smiley face when seeing Batman's pancakes, referencing Watchmen (which the miniseries is a sequel to).
- Evil Ernie: Ernie's sidekick Smiley the Psychotic Button is a smiley face button that's gained sentience and a Slasher Smile.
- Boss Smiley, the Big Bad of Prez (1973) — probably best known to modern readers for an appearance in The Sandman (1989) — has a smiley face for a head. In the 2015 reboot, it's a holographic mask, but in the original, it goes unexplained.
- In the Red Dwarf Smegazine Superhero Episode comic Super-Ace, Lister's counterpart is an Expy of The Punisher with a smiley Chest Insignia instead of a skull.
- Transmetropolitan has one with three eyes. This is to signify that Transhuman or not, people are still shallow and stupid.
- Watchmen has one, but trademark issues caused problems in the Watchmen fan community when Smileyworld refused to let Warner Bros. release memorabilia involving the series' famous bloodstained smiley logo. Smileyworld's trademark can been seen at the end of the movie's trailers and on its posters. This smiley face, with a streak of blood, was probably the first use of the "ironic symbol" of the smiley face. Originally the Comedian's symbol, it acquired a streak of his blood from his murder. Alan Moore, the writer, himself noted how the meaning of the smiley face changed so much from such a small change. Additionally, the smiley face is the first use of the recurring "five minutes to midnight" symbol, with the streak of blood acting as a minute hand pointed at 11.
- Gahan Wilson hated this smile and drew several cartoons about it (including one with an Adolf Hitler Expy using smiley faces instead of swastikas).
Films — Animation
- In Turning Red, Mei has a pin button on her bag of a variation of this with a stuck-out tongue.
Films — Live-Action
- In Blazing Saddles, Hedley Lamarr's "army" of evildoers includes among its ranks a pair of Ku Klux Klansmen with smiley faces and the phrase "have a nice day!" written on the back of their robes. This is either hilarious or terrifying, depending on how you look at it (or both!).
- Bloodshot (2020): The man whom Ray Garrison intends to kill is inside a bullet-resistant SUV covered in flour (because Garrison rammed it with a flour truck). Garrison brushes away a couple of eyeholes to peer inside at him, then draws a smiling mouth underneath them, just before he walks off to get a means of blasting his way in.
- The poster for Dazed and Confused features a stoned Smiley Face.
- The poster for Evolution (2001) has one with three eyes.
- Forrest Gump spoofs the origin of this.
- Interceptor: The Big Bad Boom Headshots a hostage when the heroine refuses to let him into the missile control room and then draws a smiley face in the blood covering the window.
- Last Action Hero: One of Benedict's glass eyes has this in place of the pupil, which he pulls down his glasses to reveal when he meets with Jack for the first time. He even punctuates it with a "Have a nice day" to see them off.
- Smiley uses this as a nightmarish Serial Killer motif
◊.
- Used in the poster for Smiley Face, naturally.
Literature
- In Infinite Jest, recovering alcoholic Big Don Gately uses the smiley face as a symbol for relapse.
AA's disciplinarian looked damn good and smelled even better and dressed to impress and his blank black-on-yellow smile never faltered as he sincerely urged you to have a nice day. Just one more last nice day. Just one.
- The Stand introduces Randall Flagg, the Walkin' Dude, who, among other interesting buttons, wears one with a smiley face with a bullet wound in its forehead. Carried over to The Dark Tower, in which he sometimes signs his messages to the ka'tet with one of these.
Live-Action TV
- Serial Killer Red John in The Mentalist leaves a smiley face painted in his victims' blood at his crime scenes.
- Used in the Idiosyncratic Wipes of the early seasons of That '70s Show.
Music
- The Bon Jovi album, song and album cover "Have a Nice Day" uses the phrase and symbol as a sarcastic/ironic subversion, as seen here◊.
- "Weird Al" Yankovic's music video for "Eat It" (a shot-for-shot parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It") puts the big smiley face and "Have a Nice Day" on the jacket of one of the gang leaders.
Professional Wrestling
- Mick Foley used the smiley sometimes in his Mankind character; he also used "Have a nice day" as his catchphrase.
Video Games
- Battlefield: Bad Company features the smiley prominently in its box art as well as in game grenades.
- Berzerk turns smiley faces scary — one's the symbol for the unkillable Evil Otto.
- Chip's Challenge: The trope is referenced in the level Nice Day (17th in the progression order), which consists of the eponymous character collecting computer chips arranged to show the image of a face smiling.
- Comet Busters! has cronies, little smiley faces that burst out when you shoot an as— er, "rock", and Zerg Rush the nearest ship.
- A smiley face pops up just before the Allied Time Bomb goes off in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, along with the caption "Have a Nice Day".
- Everybody Edits has the players represented as smileys.
- The Multi-Platform game Faceball 2000 is all about smiley faces in a maze shooting each other.
- Pictured above is one of the levels from Happy Game, in which the land is full of yellow smiley faces. However, the game also twists this trope by having similar faces plastered on the murderous enemies, making them Slasher Smiles instead.
- The Smileys gang in Manhunt wear dirty, worn smiley face masks, with messages like "Please stop me" scribbled on them.
- In Minesweeper, the players' actions are punctuated by a Smiley face. It "shouts" once the player clicks on any square, wears Cool Shades if he wins, and becomes a frown with X eyes if he loses. (clicking the Smiley ends the game and starts another)
- Quest for Glory I has a smiley face in Yorick's room. When you look at it, Yorick will say "Have a nice day!"
- In Sam & Max Hit the Road, the office next to the duo's (belonging to Flint Paper) is shot through the wall as they prepare to leave for the day; the bullet holes left behind are in the form of a smiley.
- Toonstruck: King Hugh, the benevolent ruler of Cutopia, has a yellow smiley face for a head.
- Unreal Tournament has the secondary fire of the flak cannon, which launches an explosive shell with a smiley face painted in the front. This means that you can only see the smiley face when being shot at with the flak cannon.
Webcomics
- Electric Wonderland displays eight in the menu for the character biographies, each bearing the same hat or hairstyle as one of the comic's stars. Some of them also have different color schemes.
- In Misfile, Rumisiel often wears a T-shirt with a straight line for a mouth and a slogan which simply reads "Have a Day".
Western Animation
- The Simpsons: In "The Good, the Sad and the Drugly", Lisa is put on anti-depression medication and sees everyone as a smiley face.
Real Life
- In the early 1990s, there was a gang of bank robbers in Sweden called "The Military Gang" (due to their use of stolen military weapons and equipment). During one of their first robberies, one of the gang members shot a smiley in wall with his 9mm SMG.
- Cuirassiers (armoured heavy cavalry) of the early 1600s wore menacing helmets with freakishly grinning faces◊ to intimidate the enemy.
- Wal-Mart used to have one in its ad campaigns (it was also part of their "Rollback" logo). It was de-emphasized during The Noughties, and was gone by 2007 in favor of an asterisk-like symbol that would become the corporate logo the next year.
- There was a restaurant in Cincinnati that was called Have A Nice Day that was covered in smileys. The restaurant may still be there, it has been a while.
- There's a smiley face on Mars.◊ It was used as part of the smiley face motif in both the book and the film of Watchmen when Dr. Manhattan & Laurie were on Mars.
- The smiley face was invented in 1963 by an artist for use in a morale-boosting campaign. He got paid $45. You can learn more here.
- In the 1960s, New York-based Top 40 radio station WMCA billed itself with the slogan "The Good Guys", accompanied by a smiley-face logo. Here's Mick Jagger donning a WMCA sweatshirt of the period.◊
- Sometimes when you get take-outs at restaurants, the container will have a smiley face on it followed by the words "Have a Nice Day" at the bottom. (This happens usually with Chinese food.)
- The smiley face came back into fashion with the rise of Acid House/rave culture in the late 1980s. Merchandise frequently bore a smiley with a wiggly smile or one messed-up eye, for some reason.
- Microsoft Bob used a smiley face wearing glasses as their logo, the smiley replacing the O in "Bob".
- Several U.S. small towns have smiley face water towers.
