My Daughter Has Chosen the Dark Side

Submission 22,259

Part of a series on Viral Videos. [View Related Entries]

About

My Daughter Has Chosen the Dark Side is a parody video series based on a homemade movie of a toddler girl sweeping a toy car off the table before breaking into a classic evil-like laughter.

Origin

The video was uploaded via YouTube^[2] and Reddit^[1] on November 16th, 2011 by user Stardestroyer65, who shot the 8 second video of his daughter playing with a toy car.

The video immediately gained viral momentum on Reddit, reaching the frontpage within just hours of upload. Within two days, the YouTube video had over 1 million views.

Spread

From Reddit, the video clip subsequently spread over to Facebook, where it drew nearly 150,000 views on the same day. In response to the viral rise of the video, Stardestroyer65^[3] added this comment to his video:

Holy shit, it's not even been 12 hours since I uploaded. I didn't expect this kind of reaction! I will pass on your greetings to my daughter, though I expect this is all part of her plan…

The video was covered in the following days by a wide range of internet news sites and blogs, such as Huffington Post^[4] and The Daily What^[5], as well as CBS News^[7] and ABC News^[6] among others. On November 17th, an image macro series titled "Evil Toddler" was launched as a companion via Quickmeme.^[8] It has been also picked up by non-English language blogs including Polish humor site Kwejk and Joemonster and Portugese blog tabonito.pt.

Remixes

Numerous parodies and response videos have since emerged, many of which feature the same clip played at different speed. The most notable instance complements the slowed down laughter with the Darth Vader theme song from Star Wars.