The Boy From The 'Success Kid' Meme Is Looking Pretty Different These Days

#1 Plea: Sammy Griner is pictured with his 39-year-old father, Justin, who needs a kidney transplant

#2 Famous face: Sammy is better known as the face of the 'Success Kid' meme.

Sammy Griner was 11 months old when his mum Laney took a photo of him holding his fist up, with a determined expression on his face.

She posted it on her Flickr page, little knowing that it would soon be part of one of the Internet's most abiding memes.

Sammy is now famous as "Success Kid" - visual shorthand reeled out to accompany brief tales of triumph:

#3 Grimace: An image shows Sammy, who is now eight years old, posing beside a t-shirt bearing his face

#4 Close: Justin, pictured, discovered his kidneys were failing before Sam was born and receives dialysis

#5

Appeal: The boy's mother, Laney, said she initially didn't want to use the boy's famous face to raise funds because she wanted the focus to be on Justin, but she said she just wants to see him healthy.

She put the photo on her Flickr page in 2007 and two years later, she noticed that it was being used for memes before eventually becoming the beloved 'Success Kid' meme around 2010.

His face has featured on billboard, TV commercials and t-shirts, which Mrs Griner called both 'weird' and 'awesome'.

#6

An up-to-date image of Sammy appeared on Reddit today, posted by user ThoseWhoDoVoodoo, and showing him with alongside Laney, who's holding a model of a younger Sammy in full Success Kid-pose.

#7 Justin, Sammy, and Laney Griner

Sammy, who's now 10-years-old, last made headlines in 2015, as his family attemped to raise funds for father Justin, who was in need of a new kidney.

Laney set up a GoFundMe site to help find a living donor and raise the $75,000 needed for the transplant. With Sammy in tow, she called upon all the might of the internet to help Justin get a properly functioning kidney.

#8

Laney explained to ABC News that she didn't want to use the Success Kid picture to front the campaign as her efforts were about her husband, not her son. However, she says that without Sammy's online fame, she would never had managed to pull in so many donations.

The family raised all the funds needed, and Juston underwent a successful operation last August

#9 Sign of success: His face has since been used to create the internet's most positive meme, pictured

"There's so much positivity," Sammy's mother Lainey Griner told ABC News. "There's not a single thing we regret about ‘Success Kid.' ... It's pretty crazy how it all happened. I still can't wrap my head around it."

#10 watch the video here!

'By now, it's just out there,' she said. 'What am I going to do? At least it's positive. Without that happening, how much could I get this recognition about my husband's kidney transplant?'

There are more than 100,000 people waiting for a kidney transplant in the U.S., and of the 29,531 kidney transplants carried out last year, 23,715 were from living donors, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.