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| - Fact Check: Puppet dancing to 'Naatu Naatu'? Nope - Edited video goes viral
Anand Mahindra tweeted a video of a puppet dancing to 'Naatu Naatu' calling it the 'real evidence' of its popularity worldwide. But this video is older than the song.
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India Today Fact Check
This video is from 2017. The original video features the Spanish song 'Despacito'.
SS Rajamouli’s grand cinematic spectacle “RRR”, and its catchy song “Naatu Naatu” has won hearts in India and the world. It bagged a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for the best original song. And while fans have been trying their best to recreate the complicated dance steps from the song, if social media is to be believed, puppets aren’t far behind either.
A video was shared by Anand Mahindra, chairman of the Mahindra group. It showed a woman making a puppet dance to the song in a street.
He tweeted, "Ok. One last tweet, I promise, about #NaatuNaatu But couldn’t resist this one. Real evidence of it being a global phenomenon since it now has the whole world on its ‘strings’." An archived version of this tweet can be seen here.
Following that, several social media accounts also shared this clip on Twitter and Facebook.
News outlets like the Times of India, the Hindustan Times Telegu, Zee news, and several others featured the same clip in their reports while claiming the same. The archived versions of these can be seen here, here, and here.
India Today’s probe found that the video of the puppet dance is almost six years old, and originally did not feature “Naatu Naatu”.
The video’s origins
A reverse search of the keyframes from the viral video led to us the same clip uploaded to a YouTube channel on September 2, 2017. Being nearly six years old, it became clear that it could not have been related to “Naatu Naatu”, which was first released in November 2021.
This video, instead of the “RRR” song, featured a cover of the popular Spanish number “Despacito”. Subsequent searches led us to several articles on BuzzFeed and Jacaranda FM published in December 2017. Although neither of these reports confirmed the time or location of this video, they mentioned that this puppet dance was recorded with the tune of “Despacito”.
In these reports, we found the earliest version of the viral video uploaded to a YouTube channel named “Aleksandar Stevanovic” on August 21, 2017. This video was titled "Despacito Dancing Puppet!! Amazing."
Here, the original track of “Despacito” could be heard playing. The noise of people laughing and chattering around could also be heard here.
Thus, it is more than evident that the original video is at least six years old and shows a puppet dancing to “Despacito”, and not “Naatu Naatu”.
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