Keeping It Briefs for Viral Video Success

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Greg Fass at MeUndies knew he had to jump on the “Harlem Shake” fad as fast as possible.

The viral videos typically feature a group casually listening to an up-tempo track with only one person dancing mildly – that is, until the beat drops and the video cuts to the entire group dancing wildly.

Given the particular clothing choices of the dancers in the video, Fass knew it would be a good fit for his underwear e-commerce site.

“When I watched the first ‘Harlem Shake’ video it only had 5,000 views,” Fass said. “But we thought this could be a great thing for us because so many people were in their underwear.”

The trend quickly took off and variations on the video have racked up millions of views. Fire departments, teachers and pro basketball teams have all taken cracks at it.

The MeUndies team shot their “Harlem Shake” video in their Culver City office and shipping warehouse. It features a half-dozen female underwear models working and dancing on the assembly line, with one (naturally) in a space helmet.

Their timing was good, but not ideal. It took a few weeks for Fass and company to assemble the models, and in the week between sighting the first video and MeUndies uploading its version, about 12,000 other “Harlem Shake” videos had been posted.

Still, the 37-second video, which was shot in three takes, has brought in about 65,000 views to date.

“It was hard to get everybody there at the right time,” Fass said. “But it did pretty well considering how late it was.”

Arctic Shake

When he joined the Coast Guard a half-century ago, Bill DeWitt thought he’d be serving on a tugboat somewhere in Northern California.

Instead, soon after he finished basic training, he shipped off to Anchorage in the wake of one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded: the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964, which struck 49 years ago this month.

Dewitt, the 72-year-old president of General Veneer Manufacturing Co. in South Gate and a City Council member there, said what he remembered most about the aftermath of the quake is Alaskans’ reaction.

“The people there, they didn’t know what was happening,” he said. “The ground was shaking and there was all this gunfire going on.”

Gunfire? Turns out, the magnitude 9.2 quake shook trees and utility poles so hard that many snapped.

“When they snap, it apparently makes a sound like a shotgun,” DeWitt said. “This was during the Cold War, so people thought the Russians were attacking.”

Staff reporters Tom Dotan and James Rufus Koren contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].