Editor's Note: This entry may contain spoilers for Stranger Things; read at your own caution.

About

The Neverending Challenge, also known as the #NeverEndingChallenge, is a social game in which participants lipsync and dance to a scene from the American science fiction television series Stranger Things in which two characters sing the theme song to the film The Neverending Story.

Origin

On July 4th, 2019, the third season of Stranger Things premiered on Netflix. In the season finale, two characters, Dustin and Suzie (played by Gaten Matarazzo and Gabriella Pizzolo, respectively), communicate over a radio and sing the theme song to the 1984 fantasy film The Neverending Story (clip below).^[1]

Several days later, on July 10th, Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown posted a video of herself lipsyncing and dancing to the scene on Instagram. She captioned the post "I nominate YOU to do the #NeverEndingChallenge." The post received more than 4.9 million likes in two days (shown below).

Spread

Following the post, fans of the series began to post variations of the challenge. For example, that day, Instagram user pszczolkax posted a variation that received more than 256,000 views and 15,000 likes in two days (shown below).

Twitter user @kerensqan posted a variation on Twitter that received more than 65,000 views, 6000 likes and 460 retweets in two days (shown below).

Several media outlets covered the challenge, including Yahoo,^[2] Seventeen,^[3] PopBuzz,^[4] CNet,^[5] ComicBook.com^[6] and more.

My husband. #NeverendingChallenge pic.twitter.com/ICHSUCZg1I

— Keren Swanson (@kerenswan) July 11, 2019

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References