About

Think Of A Big Black Man Chasing You refers to a scene and quote from the Ghost Stories ADV Dub where Hajime Aoyama tries to get Keiichirou to run faster by telling him to think of a big black man chasing him, which only speeds Keiichirou up by 0.2 seconds because he is not racist. A remix of the scene's audio became popularized in lip-dubs on TikTok in November 2021.

Origin

On November 26th, 2000, the fifth episode of the Ghost Stories English dub anime premiered in North America. In the episode, Keiichirō is training for a race when he meets a young ghost boy named Datto who died while training for the race and now exacts revenge by cutting off the legs of runners. In one scene, Hajime and Leo are watching Keiichiro run. To get him to run faster, Hajime yells, "Think of a big black man chasing you!" Keiichiro slows and stops from exhaustion shortly after. Hajime says, "Well he's not racist," and Leo responds, looking at a stopwatch, "I guess not, he's only 0.2 seconds faster." The clip was uploaded to YouTube^[1] in April 2020, gaining over 312,000 views in a year (shown below).

Spread

On October 22nd, 2021, TikToker^[2] @susduets posted a remix of "Ya Ya" by Yeat mixed with the audio from the clip and from Skyviewray's 'let's go' reaction, gaining over 2.4 million views in two months. A more complete version of the song was uploaded to YouTube^[3] by divin8tion! in early November 2021 (shown below).

The original sound became significantly popularized on TikTok over the course of October and November 2021 in lip-dub skits reinterpreting the dialogue into new scenarios. The highest engagement videos using the sound were uploaded to TikTok^[4][5] by @notsuparova on November 4th and @bigyuyu17 on November 8th, gaining over 29 million views on the former and 20 million on the latter in a month (shown below, left and right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References