Pitman Student’s Michael Jackson Dance Goes Viral

No, Michael Jackson is not alive and living in Turlock.

But a video (shown below) which has gone viral shows one Pitman High School student who has Jackson’s moves down to a tee.

The spot-on recreation of Jackson’s famous “Billy Jean” dance shows Brett Nichols, a junior, performing some of the legend’s moves better than he did. The performance builds to an absolutely impeccable moonwalk, and the crowd goes wild.

The video was produced by Pitman Daily Announcements as a highlight of the school’s annual Talent Rally. Those announcements and video sketches are produced by Pitman High School’s Video Arts class, and then posted on a YouTube page.

Pitman High School shared the video on its Facebook Page, liked by a modest 2,200 people, just after midnight on Wednesday morning. It was there that California State University, Stanislaus student and musician Jaydeep Bhatia, a Pitman graduate, saw the video.

“I just knew it belonged on reddit, so I posted and the rest is history,” Bhatia said.

Bhatia’s post on reddit, a social networking and news website which is among the top 25 most-visited websites in America, quickly went viral.

As of 11:30 a.m., the video had garnered more than 2,400 upvotes and 554 comments, and held the No. 2 overall spot in the Videos subreddit. More than 5.2 million people are subscribed to that subreddit.

The video also reached No. 46 overall on the Front Page of reddit, which is seen by roughly 1.5 million people every day.

The video’s success on reddit has led to several major news agencies picking up the story, ranging from television stations in Wisconsin to the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and the Netherlands’ largest news website. MTV news described Nichols’s dance as “better than Michael Jackson’s hologram.”

And, yes, he won the talent show, too. 

Update: Pitman Student Brett Nichols' Michael Jackson Video Hits No.1 on YouTube, Facebook