About

"LeBron James" Kid is the nickname given to a young boy who repeatedly says the name of the famous American professional basketball player in a montage clip uploaded to Vine in June 2014. Similar to other mashup memes on the video-sharing platform, the soundbite of the boy saying "LeBron James" has been paired with various footage from TV shows, music videos and films, mainly for comedic effect.

Origin

The video clip was recorded by Viner DARius^[1] and uploaded to Vine on June 27th, 2014, featuring his little brother saying the name of the NBA athlete in front of their house. As of March 2015, the video has garnered more than 31.7 million loops, 661,000 likes and 472,700 shares.

Spread

In late January of 2015, the clip underwent a huge spike in popularity. On January 20th, Viner Harley Conway uploaded a mashup in which the boy is substituted by an adult (shown below, left), which remains as the most popular instance of the remix series to date. On January 22nd, 2015, Viner William45^[2] shared another remix pairing a scene from Taylor Swift's music video for "Blank Space" with the "LeBron James" soundbite (shown below, right). In less than three months, the remix video received more than 256,700 likes, 181,200 shares and 13.8k comments. In the following months of 2015, a number of other remixes and mashups featuring the "LeBron James" kid continued to emerge on Vine.

Various Examples

External References