Ditto Conga | Know Your Meme

About

Ditto Conga is a video meme involving the Pokémon Ditto dancing to the hit 1985 single “Conga” by Miami Sound Machine.

Origin

The Dancing Ditto animation sprite itself is from the credit sequence of Pokémon Crystal, released in 2000. It is likely that Ditto Conga was inspired by another similar Pokémon meme known as Disco Omastar, which gained popularity prior to the release of the first Ditto Conga video.

The first known Ditto Conga video was posted to YouTube by bob on August 8th, 2011, slowly amassing over 127,000 views over the course of several years (shown below).

Spread

The spread of the meme is largely due to Chilean web developer Matías Martínez, who created a single-serving site for Ditto Conga in 2013. The site includes a flashing color-changing background with multiple dancing Ditto sprites. The site received a minor amount of attention on Reddit, receiving 405 upvotes on the r/pokemon subreddit in June of 2013.

In October of 2013, YouTube user Kuno posted a screengrab of the site to YouTube. The video proved popular online, managing to gain over 485,000 views. The video also attracted the attention of several publications. Despite being the origin of the meme, Martínez’s site didn’t receive nearly as much attention as the videos and memes that were made from it.

The meme experienced yet another resurgence in October 2020, when it was used in a meme editing the Donald Trump tweet announcing he had COVID-19 to sing “Conga”. The video, posted by Suriun, gained over 6,100 likes on iFunny (YouTube repost shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

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External References