Get Down/Geddan

About

Get Down is a Japanese meme that originated from a glitch in the N64 game Goldeneye, where the characters (and vehicles) would suddenly “spaz out” if the game cartridge was only partially inserted in the console.

Origin

The video footage depicting this glitch was uploaded onto the popular Japanese video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga on July 12th, 2007.

Less than two weeks after the first posting, another NicoNico user named “Chomimen” re-edited the ‘half-inserted cartridge’ footage and paired it with a 1997 J-pop love song entitled “Promise”. The resulting video was given the title of “007 Golden Eye Chaos Carnival – GET-DDAN”, with the word “GET-DAN” being Engrish for “Get Down.”However, it took another year for the Geddan prototype to be discovered by Lamaze P, a well-known NicoNico “archives digger”, who then posted an animated version of the dance.

Derivatives:

Soon other videos featured anime characters and live people doing the dance, adding a hip shake and pelvic thrust. Most “Get Down”/GEDDAN videos found on Youtube appear to have been posted heavily around the last week of November, 2008.

Audio disabled

In 2011 Victor Entertainment, the audio company behind the original song “Promise”, began disabling the audio on a large number of videos on Youtube for infringing copyright, claiming “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by Victor. The audio has been disabled.” Amongst the casualties from this mass censoring were the orignal Goldeneye and Nitori videos.