About

Penguin Shake Dance refers to the viral dance created for the Penguins of Madagascar as part of their 2014 movie Penguins of Madagascar released by Dreamworks Animation. Online, the dance started to receive meme attention in late 2023 as people on TikTok started to re-enact it with different types of music and context added.

Origin

On November 11th, 2014, in preparation for the Penguins of Madagascar movie release, an informational video was released online showing the steps to the coordinated dance performed by the penguins. In the video uploaded to the YouTube channel Empire Movies^[1], the dance's creator Twitch explains the steps and at the end, showcases them along with the CGI characters (shown below).

The meme dance was able to quickly get used in video editing after a greenscreen version was uploaded to YouTube by the channel Sponandi^[2] on April 7th, 2021. In this version, the penguins are shown walking onto a greenscreen while the song from the original video, sung by Pitbull plays in the background. Having the video be used with the assets in front of a greenscreen background provided easy material for meme creators to rip and use the penguins for their own videos, helping the upload to receive over 750,000 views in two years (shown below).

Spread

On December 18th, 2021, the YouTube^[3] channel Abril Luciana Luly Campos 43 uploaded one of the first variations of the dancing meme, in which the penguins are shown already in position, in front of moving lights, with an electronic beat starting to play instead of the original song. This version showed the versatility of the dance to not only being used in its original context, inspiring future versions to use different songs (shown below).

Two years later, in mid-2023, the meme saw a sudden resurgence after the song Half On a Sack by Three 6 Mafia was used as the background music. In early August, the TikToker @nvrmre2k uploaded the original clip of the penguins dancing with Twitch with the changed background music, captioned as "proof that this video goes with anything." It spread quickly before being deleted. The earliest re-upload of the original TikTok^[4] was posted by NaturallyFunnyEntest2020 on August 3rd, which would later spin off into other people using the audio but showing themselves replicating the dance (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References