About

Get Down, also known as ゲッダン or Geddan, is a Japanese MAD remix fad that originated from a glitch found in the Nintendo 64 first person shooter game GoldenEye 007, in which the characters and vehicles would begin to writhe in mid-air if the cartridge was only partially inserted into the console. In 2008, the glitch phenomenon went onto inspire an extensive collection of dance parodies and re-enactment videos on Nico Nico Douga.

Origin

GoldenEye 007^[1] was released exclusively for the Nintendo 64 on August 25th, 1997. Details of this specific glitch were mentioned online as early as December 2000 in a GameFAQs guide article^[2], which referred to the bug as “Spinning Guards." The article also explained how to deliberately achieve this effect by walking up to a guard and lift the left side of the cartridge out of the console slowly until the guard began to spin out of control. This type of glitching is also known as “cartridge tilting.”^[6]

Meanwhile, the first video demonstration of this glitch in GoldenEye 007 was uploaded to Japanese video sharing site Nico Nico Douga (NND) on July 12th, 2007.^[3] Nearly two weeks later on July 24th, 2007, another NND user paired the footage of the spinning guard with the 1997 J-pop song "Promise"^[4] by Kohmi Hirose. This version, titled ""007 Golden Eye Chaos Carnival – GET-DDAN"^[5], with the word “GET-DAN” being the Engrish pronunciation for the phrase “Get Down.”

Spread

However, additional derivatives or parodies of the glitch didn't arrive until more than a year later on October 16th, 2008, when NND's well-known archive digger Lamaze P (ラマーズP)^[7][12] recreated the J-Pop mashup as an animated dance video titled “☆ゲッダン☆”^[13], thus re-inventing the perceived glitch as a style of choreography.

The original video was removed from NND on June 22nd, 2012, after the site received a request for removal from Victor Entertainment, the copyright holder for Kohmi Hirose's “Promise.” At the time of deletion, the original NND upload had 2,905,400 views. A mirror upload is still available for viewing on YouTube, albeit without any audio track.

Over the following years, hundreds of Geddan style videos were created and uploaded onto NND and YouTube. In November 2009, a question about the meaning of "Geddan" was submitted to Yahoo! Answers.^[15] In 2010, the fad garnered more attention from English-language websites after the Engrish Blog^[14] posted a write-up about the videos.

Copyright Claim

In August 2011, Victor Entertainment^[9], the audio company who holds the rights to Kohmi Hirose’s song “Promise,” began issuing copyright claims^[10] on Get Down dance videos, which led to mass removal of the audio track from the uploaded videos, including the original GoldenEye clip and Lamaze-P’s animated video.

Notable Examples

As of July 2012, there are approximately 3130 results for Geddan on YouTube^[8] and 3564 results for ゲッダン on NND.^[11]

Search Interest

External References