About

Tap Dancing Cockroaches refers to a scene in the 2019 film Cats featuring dancing cockroaches with poorly CGI'd human faces and Rebel Wilson's character, Jennyanydots, eating the cockroaches and unzipping a layer of her fur. Soon after the films release in December 2019, Twitter users began to comment on the scene's disturbing aspects.

Origin

On December 20th, 2019, The Cats film was released to theaters. Soon after many Twitter users began to comment on the scene. On December 22nd, Twitter user @eliza__jane^[1] tweeted stills from the film and the caption, "my therapist: the cockroaches with human faces from the new cats movie are not real, they can’t hurt you / the cockroaches with human faces from the new cats movie:" (shown below). The tweet gained over 3,000 likes and 900 retweets in five days.

Spread

On December 24th, 2019, Twitter user @data_bayes uploaded a a clip of the cockroach dancing scene to Twitter with the caption, "WHO SAID THIS WAS OKAY?! It ain’t a damn spoiler cause nobody wants to see this. #CatsMovie" (shown below). The tweet garnered over 15,300 likes and 2,300 retweets in three days.

That same day, Twitter user @KaseyChante^[2] responded to the clip by tweeting, "I’m about to pitch every idea I’ve ever had, and if some big white producer tells me no, I’m showing them this and demanding an explanation" which received over 1,700 likes in three days (shown below, left). Twitter users continued to comment on the disturbing content and poor CGI within this scene. On December 26th, Twitter user @tayligionn^[3] posted a still from the scene with the caption, "I can’t believe cats had a $95m budget when this was in the movie " (shown below). The tweet accumulated over 1,100 likes and 120 retweets in a day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References