TikTok: The biggest dance crazes of all time
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Whether it's the Woah, the Toosie Slide or the Renegade, dance crazes are everywhere at the moment.
The #blindinglights challenge, for example, has had over 75 million searches on the social media site, TikTok.
But, believe it or not, even before all of the TikToks and Milly Rocks, dance crazes have been captivating audiences for generations.
Here are five dances to try at home with a little bit of help from the Newsround presenters.
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The Carlton (1991)
You might recognise this particular dance from Fortnite where it's used as a character emote under the name "Fresh".
It actually became popular all the way back in 1991 when actor Alfonso Ribeiro threw some shapes during the filming of the American comedy series, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
To this day, Alfonso still gets asked to perform the dance and viewers were desperate to see it during his time as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing in 2018.
However, Alfonso wasn't very happy when Fortnite used the dance and he attempted to trademark it.
That basically means he would own the rights to the dance. Unfortunately for Alfonso, he lost his claim.
The Macarena (1993)
When most of the team now working at Newsround were growing up, the Macarena was the sound of school discos all over the UK.
It was initially released in Spain in 1993 with little success, but when an English-speaking version was created two years later its popularity exploded all over the world.
It was so popular that it stayed in the US Top 100 music chart for 60 weeks - a record at the time.
The dance has become really popular on TikTok after rapper Tyga remixed it for his 2019 song, Ayy Macarena.
Cha-Cha Slide (2004)
If you love Drake's Toosie Slide, then you've probably got DJ Caspar's Cha Cha Slide to thank for it.
The song was first used as part of a fitness class in the USA in 1996, and by 2000 it had been picked up by a record company.
It wasn't until 2004 that the song made its way over the pond to the UK, when Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills debuted it on national radio.
It hit number one in the UK charts and became THE dance routine that even your grandma could master.
Gangnam Style (2012)
Before BTS and BLACKPINK were even featured in a K-Pop manager's imagination, Psy was dominating the global charts with his track, Gangnam Style.
Within months, the music video for this song had more than one billion views on YouTube, becoming the first video to do so in the website's history.
The Floss (2017)
The Floss became really popular because of an Instagram-famous American schoolboy called Russell Horning - also known as the backpack kid.
In 2017, the dance had become so popular that Russell was invited on to Saturday Night Live in America to perform it with popstar, Katy Perry.
Just like with The Carlton, makers of the game Fortnite loved it so much that they included it as a character emote.
- Published2 April 2020
- Published7 April 2020