About

I Smell Pennies refers to parodies of a TikTok video in which a person holds a bunch of pennies and is then attacked by a creature that screams "I smell pennies!"

Origin

The video was first posted by TikTok user @felionedm on October 28th, 2018.^[1] It was posted to YouTube the following day by user Ethanjustcuz (shown below).

Spread

The original was posted to the /r/youtubehaiku^[2] subreddit where it gained over 3,000 points. A different version posted to /r/perfectlycutscreams gained over 7,9000 points.^[3] Over the following months, other TikTok users parodied the video by taking the audio and adding their own video. Popular compilations were posted to YouTube by TikTok Antics (shown below, left) and BlueWaffle (shown below, right).

Some of these were reposted to Instagram. One of the most popular, originally posted by TikTok user logelit, was reposted to Instagram by user phoebegalaxy, gaining over 7,700 views (the post has since been deleted, shown below is a YouTube re-upload).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External Referenes