Squidward Dab

Confirmed 202,696

Part of a series on Squidward Tentacles. [View Related Entries]

About

Squidward Dab is a Vine video of an amusement park employee doing The Dab while costumed as the SpongeBob SquarePants character Squidward at Universal Studios Orlando in January 2016. Upon entering online circulation through Vine, the video clip quickly went viral and spread to other social networking and media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram.

Origin

The original video was recorded and uploaded by Deon_dunk to his Vine^[2] and Instagram accounts on January 26th, 2016 (shown below). In just over a week, Deon_dunk's Vine clip accrued more than 22 million loops. That same day, Instagram celebrity @Daquan^[1] re-uploaded the original video to his account, where it garnered more than 259,000 likes within the same timespan.

Spread

As the original video continued to gain traction on Vine and spread elsewhere online, several remixes, mash-ups and parodies began to surface on Instagram^[9], Twitter^[6]^[7] and Tumblr .^[8] On January 27th, 2016, Viner Michael K. uploaded a remix version featuring a tune from SpongeBob SquarePants (shown below), which gained seven million loops within the first week.

On January 28th, WorldStarHipHop tweeted a two-pane still image of the Squidward mascot doing the dab (shown below), accumulating over 2,800 retweets and 3,900 likes within a week.