About
The Mannequin Challenge is a participatory video fad in which a group of people are shown posing stock-still for the camera while music is playing in the background.
Origin
On October 26th, 2016, Twitter user @pvrity__[1] uploaded the earliest known viral instance of the participatory video fad, which shows a group of students from Edward H. White High School in Jacksonville, Florida pretending to be lifeless mannequins in a panning shot. In the following week, @pvrity__’s tweet garnered more than 4,400 retweets and 4,100 likes, while the video itself began circulating beyond Twitter, racking up several hundreds of thousands views in aggregate.
Spread
By November 2nd, the hashtag challenge had evolved into a full-fledged social media trend among high school and college students, spawning dozens of similar “living portrait”-style videos set to American hip hop duo Rae Sremmurd’s 2016 rap single “Black Beatles.” On November 3rd, Rae Sremmurd made their own contribution to the meme by participating in the challenge on stage during their live concert in Denver, Colorado. Uploaded to their official Twitter account on the next day, the video accumulated more than 47,000 retweets and 61,000 likes within the first 24 hours. On November 4th, the video fad was covered by a number of major sports news sites and blogs, including Deadspin, SBNation and USA Today, along with compilations of the challenge staged by various high school and collegiate sports teams.
Various Examples
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Search Interest
External References
[1]Twitter – @Pvrity__’s Tweet
[2]The Telegraph – What is the Mannequin Challenge?
[3]New York Magazine – Entire High Schools Are Freezing in Place for the Mannequin Challenge
[4]Mashable – Get ready for the #MannequinChallenge, internet
[5]Deadspin – The New Thing Teens Are Doing Is Called The Mannequin Challenge
[6]SBNation – The Mannequin Challenge is the next craze coming to a sports team near you
[7]The Daily Dot – The wild rise of Rae Sremmurd and the Mannequin Challenge
[8]Wikipedia – Mannequin Challenge
[9]Twitter – #MannequinChallenge
[10]USA Today – ‘The Mannequin Challenge’ is the next big thing taking over college football