Groove Battle / Dancing Stickman

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About

Groove Battle or Dancing Stickman is a viral video originally created by YouTuber Cyranek that uses the stickman from oh yeah woo yeah on YouTube and other platforms. From there, it primarily was used as a surprise bait-and-switch punchline featuring the audio from the Tom Morello Guitar Battle meme when the stick figure begins dancing.

Origin

On August 23rd, 2019, YouTuber Cyranek^[1] uploaded a video called "Groove Battle" to YouTube, featuring two dancing stickmen while the Tom Morello Guitar Battle theme played in the background, helping to popularize that audio as a meme itself. The video went go on to gain over 7.2 million views in three years, with YouTube analytics showing the first seven seconds are the "most replayed" part of it (shown below).

The stickmen in question come from an example of a Bronze Age rock art, also known as a Petroglyph, from Tanum, Sweden^[4]. While the image was likely created between 1800-500 BC, the entitled "Petroglyph Group Nordic Bronze Age" comes from Wikipedia,^[5] which was "self-made" by Wikipedia user Lidingo and uploaded on March 16th, 2008 (shown below).

Spread

After being in low usage for roughly three years, the stick figures and dancing suddenly had a reemergence in June 2022. For example, on June 6th, 2022, the Chinese YouTube account 鉴无虚发^[2] uploaded a meme in which the dancing stick figures were added to a video about doing the morally correct thing, which was intended to show someone that being greedy does not go well, which went on to get over 4.2 million views in four months (shown below).

While many more of those videos would be posted during June 2022, the actual stickman himself started to see inclusion in static memes as a visual element apart from Groove Battle variants. This can be seen in the Chainsaw Man meme uploaded to Twitter by the artist @giganticbuddha^[3] on August 28th, 2022, in which the stickman is used as a fake Jordan's logo (shown below).