Matt can’t dance . . . but he can dance wherever the hell he wants
October 5, 2008 by Andy Martin
I stumbled across this today, and while it doesn’t completely fit the “Geek Talks Tech” theme, it does certainly fit with the theme of the travelling geek. And the bad dancing geek. Matt was a self-professed deadbeat from Connecticut who thought the perfect life would be designing and playing video games (that’s the first geek tie-in). He did this for a while and found some success, but decided something was missing and in 2003 quit his job and travelled around Asia until his money ran out. His friend video taped him doing a really bad dance and uploaded it to the net, and the rest is really history. More on the story and the resulting video after the break.
He was contacted soon after by Stride Gum (why Stride Gum, I have no idea, but keep going) who wanted to pay for him to travel around to a bunch of countries, do his little dance at each stop, and upload the produced video. What 32-year old idiot without a job or kids wouldn’t take that offer? I would in a heartbeat, but it’s a little tougher to pull off with a job and a family. Anyway, that went over well and I vaguely remember the resulting video from that outing. About a year later, he decided that it would be even more cool if he got locals to dance with him, and Stride Gum footed the bill again. 14-months and 42 countries later, we get this new video that is absolutely one of the most humanly inspiring videos I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve embedded the YouTube Vimeo video here, but click on to his site for the better quality versions – he has a high-def one in 720p and the visuals in each locale are really stunning (I had originally embedded the YouTube one, but the Vimeo one is of better quality than that so I replaced it).
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
Really, what this video tells me is that no matter where you are in the world, bad dancing geeks are there somewhere. Whether it be Israel or the West Bank, Ireland or London, South Africa or Kenya, Japan, India, or Korea (well, maybe not Korea – that DMZ guard wasn’t playing along) we’re all really the same, we are all citizens of Earth. Inspiring, really.
“Where the Hell Is Matt?”, main site here
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LOL at papua new guinea
That is great
Wow, I got a surge of warm happiness! That’s so cool.
@beth -
It’s really amazing to see the places that he’s gone, in one of his earlier videos he was dancing on this boulder in Norway that was lodged between two sides of a narrow chasm about 1000 meters up, just crazy. But, to think of the experiences that Matt has had as a result of doing this, and to see the joy he brings to others when he’s doing this, it really just brings that happy feeling to you, it’s infectious.
He’s Got HAPPY FEET!!!!!
This really is way cool, I was smiling and didn’t even realize it. gonna send it out to my buddies.