Toxic x Pony

About

Toxic x Pony refers to a TikTok dance trend set to the mashup song "Toxic x Pony" that combines the beats and chorus of Britney Spears song "Toxic" with Ginuwine's song "Pony." The dance trend, which primarily consists of a dance where people sweep their arms around their head as they lick their thumb before moving their hips, began on TikTok in late December 2021 and went on to inspire millions of individual dance videos on TikTok, as well as garner millions of views on YouTube, in the following weeks.

Origin

On December 27th, 2021, the TikTok musical group Altego posted the song mix^[1] on their profile. The song was also uploaded as a separate audio^[2] for others to create their own videos with, leading the audio to have 2.2 million videos made using it within one month and the video to have 1.5 million likes in that same time (shown below).

Spread

The audio quickly spread in the following days with a mixture of TikTokers either doing the same choreographed dance or creating something of their own. The highest engagement video to use the audio is a group of three boys doing an original dance in time to each other, which ends in a similar position to how it started, creating the illusion of a loop. The TikTok^[3] was uploaded on January 6th, 2022, by TikToker christiankesniel, and it gained over 9 million likes in three weeks (shown below).

On January 23rd, 2022, TikToker Bucketsthedrummer^[4] used the song in a new way as a bait-and-switch joke. Bucketsthedrummer starts off getting ready to drum to the beat of "Toxic," which plays first in the audio, before switching to drumming the beat line to "Pony" and stating in the video that the observer "got Pony'd," earning 1.6 million likes in two days (shown below).

The song was later uploaded to YouTube by the channel InvertOG^[5] where it gained 2.6 million views in three weeks (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References