 "The Simpsons and YouTube 'do the Harlem Shake'")
Many consider the Harlem Shake to be the biggest video meme on the Internet with over 250,000 versions and more than half a billion views in total, all in a span of less than a month. This 30-second video meme has been picked up by companies, army units, universities and many others and has also been performed in the weirdest of locations including inside a flight. Many of the individual videos have registered tens of millions of views and thousands of compilation videos have sprung up. While some reports suggest that the meme is topping out and is on a decline the versions just keep rolling in.
The latest to join in on the craze are The Simpsons. Television’s wackiest family joins in the fun with Maggie kicking off the action followed by the rest of the family and eventually almost all of Springfield. Unlike other versions of the meme, the track has been mixed with the words being sung by Homer Simpson and his signature ‘Doh’. If you ask us, that kind of takes the fun out of the video, using the original song would’ve been better.
YouTube too has come up with their version of the Harlem Shake but being the alpha geeks that they are, they haven’t put out a simple video. In true Google style they’ve come up with an ‘Easter Egg’ on their website. For those who aren’t aware, an ‘Easter Egg’ in web-speak is a treat (read gimmick) hidden in a website that is triggered off by a search term, in the case Google, or some specific key-stroke combinations. To ‘experience’ Harlem Shake YouTube style key in the search term ‘do the Harlem Shake’ and watch the results page perform the dance, with the YouTube logo starting the jig. This is similar to Google’s ‘do the barrel roll’ Easter egg and has been acknowledged as much by YouTube via a tweet that read “Hey @google, barrel rolls are cool, but when we do the Harlem Shake, that’s just crazy”. If you search for ‘do the Harlem Shake’ from India chances are you’ll see a sponsored result at the top of the results that says ‘Dhak Dhak Karne Laga’. Seems fitting for what follows.
Harlem Shake made it to our list of top viral videos for February and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Compared to Gangnam Style, the biggest YouTube breakout ever, it still has a long way to go, with Gangnam Style reportedly having almost 500,000 versions of the video.
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