Video and captioned pictures
Dramatic Chipmunk
2007
Dramatic Chipmunk is a five-second clip of a small animal turning its head to stare at the camera while a dramatic dun, dun, duuun sting plays. A YouTube user posted it on 6 June 2007, and within weeks it was everywhere. The animal is not a chipmunk: it is a prairie dog.
- Year
- 6 June 2007
- Made by
- A YouTube user, cutting a moment from Japanese TV
- Where it started
- YouTube, then the front page of CollegeHumor
- What it was
- A five-second video clip
- Also called
- Dramatic Look, Dramatic Prairie Dog
The story
The footage comes from Hello! Morning, a Japanese variety show on TV Tokyo, where a pet-shop worker brought animals to meet the members of a pop group. The music is a famous sting from Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy Young Frankenstein.
It exploded in the third week of June 2007, when it was reposted on YouTube and on CollegeHumor, whose front page called it the best five-second video on the internet. CollegeHumor also posted the uncut footage, which showed the moment was real, caught by a lucky camera angle.
Why it matters
It showed that a clip could go viral with almost nothing happening in it, and how memes are stitched together from found pieces: a moment from Japanese TV, a 1970s Hollywood music cue and a stranger’s edit.
Where it is now
The first upload is still on YouTube, and the stare keeps being copied: University of Minnesota football plays it on its stadium screen to put off opposing kickers, and a video game gave its hamster hero the same turn in 2019.
Sources
- Dramatic Chipmunk (Wikipedia)
- Dramatic chipmunk (Boing Boing, 2007)
- Dun dun duuun: where pop culture’s most dramatic sound came from (The Guardian, 2022)
- The rise of the Dramatic Gopher (Gopher Sports, 2019)
- Dramatic Chipmunk (Know Your Meme)
Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.