Matilda Challenge

About

The Matilda Challenge or #MatildaChallenge refers to a series of videos that recreate a scene from the 1996 children's fantasy film Matilda. In the videos, participants create the illusion that they are moving household objects with their mind while dancing to the song "Itty Bitty Pretty One" by Thurston Harris

Origin

On July 28th, 2016, the film Matilda was released in the United States.^[1] In the movie, the character Matilda (played by Mara Wilson) learns to control her powers of levitation, moving the items and objects found around her house through the hair while dancing to the song "Itty Bitty Pretty One" (clip below, left).

The earliest known parody of the scene was published on the lip sync application Musical.ly by user @beto.musiic. On August 6th, 2018, the user uploaded the video (shown below, right) to YouTube. Within two weeks, the video received more than 19,000 views.

Spread

On August 8th, Twitter user @itzelrramirez published the video, which received more than 22,000 views, 295 retweets and 685 likes in less than one week.^[2]

Two days later, Twitter^[3] user @catarebolo posted a variation of the challenge being performed in a classroom. Within four days, the post (shown below) received more than 16,000 retweets and 86,000 likes.

On August 13th, Mara Wilson, who played Matilda in the film, began sharing the videos. She tweeted,^[4] "Hahahahaha I LOVE THESE #MatildaChallenge." The post (shown below) received more than 500 retweets and 2,000 likes in two days.

Several media outlets covered the popularity of the videos, including Mashable, ^[5] TIME,^[6] Fox News, ^[7] iO9^[8] and more.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References