About

Smug Dancin, or Smug Dancing Hat Kid, is an emote dance of Hat Kid, the main character from the game A Hat in Time. This dance is often photoshopped into dance GIFs and GIFs of important video game, cartoon, or movie moments that sometimes contain spoilers. These are accompanied, usually, by KRONO's remix of Aaron Smith's song "Dancin'". This video format is widely popular across YouTube.

Origin

On March 20th, 2013, producer duo KRONO uploaded their remix of the 2004 house song "Dancin'" by DJ Aaron Smith featuring vocals from singer Luvli to Soundcloud. The remix would garner over 17 million plays within the next 6 years. On April 15th, 2013, YouTuber TheSoundYouNeed uploaded a video of the whole song. As of January 26th, 2019, the video has 237 million views with about 48,000 likes (shown below, left).^[1]

On December 18th, 2018, Gears for Breakfast published a video entitled "A Hat in Time OST [Seal the Deal] – Peace and Tranquility" in which Hat Kid dances (shown below, right). The video resembles and references the video "No One's Around To Help" by YouTuber JerryTerry, which was posted on November 27th, 2017 and received more than 2 million views.^[7]

The following day, on September 19th, YouTuber CTRL-X created a video of Hat Kid's smug dance, gaining roughly 68,000 views (shown below).^[2]

Spread

On November 8th, 2018, the first video to have the song was posted on YouTube by Smegma Bandit, attaining more than 1.4 million views (shown below).^[3]

On December 20th, 2018, YouTuber DosPuntosUbe :v published their own example of this video format, garnering more than 1 million views (shown below, left).^[4] A day later, YouTuber Boi Beep uploaded their version, which gained about 147,000 views (shown below, right).^[5]

On December 22th, 2018, YouTuber Ramz made a 10-hour challenge video of Smegma Bandit original video, reaching over 286,000 views (shown below).^[6]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References