About

Butt Racing uses stop motion photography to record people sitting on the ground with their hands outstretched, gripping an imaginary wheel. In the completed videos or GIFs, participants appear as if they are recreating an automobile race.

Origin

On August 12th, 2005, YTMND user joshawow^[1] created a site titled Butt Racing^[2] with a stop motion GIF of a young woman appearing as if she was spinning around in circles on asphalt with her arms outstretched as if she was grabbing a steering wheel (shown below). The GIF was paired with Marko Polo's song "Speedy Speed Boy" from the soundtrack of the anime series Initial D. As of August 2013, it has been viewed more than 37,000 times.

Spread

Six days later, joshawow created a follow-up site titled Butt Racing Grand Prix^[3], featuring a group of four young men attempting to recreate a car race in a park (shown below, left). As of August 2013, this has become the most popular Butt Racing site, gaining more than 405,000 views. The following day, crusader900 was the first person to create a derivative site^[4], depicting him butt racing through his kitchen (shown below, right). Both sites used the same Marko Polo song in the background. As of August 2013, there are 127 search results for "butt racing" on YTMND.^[5] On November 18th, 2005 "Butt Race" was added to Urban Dictionary.^[6]

On YouTube

On May 3rd, 2006, Spencer Elliot uploaded the first butt racing video to YouTube (shown below, left), using the Marko Polo song during the race. After a handful of butt racing videos were uploaded, on September 12th, 2007, YouTuber BillyM1965 uploaded a video (shown below, right) taken on 8mm film in 1965. The description claimed that it took 12 hours to film and contained no modern editing. Two years after it was uploaded, this video was featured on BoingBoing.^[8]

Notable Examples

As of August 2013, there are more than 181,000 search results for "butt race" on YouTube.^[7]

Search Interest

External References