Trang Vu thought that she was on a simple date, touring her alma mater UCLA with her boyfriend, Nam Tran. Little did she know, however, that a whole mob of students and family members waited to bust a move on the school’s campus.
Tran proposed to Vu on Thursday, Sept. 28 during a flash mob, which he organized, choreographed to Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”
“I knew that I wanted to propose about a year ago, and we both love musicals, and we both love dancing, so this is really the closest, I think, that one gets to a real-life musical,” Tran said in an interview with CNN.
Flash mobs like the one organized for Tran’s proposal, have been drawing attention the past few years, becoming popular across the world. For the purposes of entertainment and artistic expression, groups of people assemble in these mobs to perform a brief, sporadic dance ensemble in public venues. Such events require much preparation and are typically organized through social media networks.
After viewing this flash mob proposal, I decided to reflect upon some of my favorite flash mob moments on network television and online:
1. The Michael Jackson mob– On June 27, 2009, 1,400 inmates at the Cebu Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines payed tribute to iconic singer/songwriter Michael Jackson in the form of a flash mob. After ten hours of rehearsing, the group was able to perform to Jackson’s hit song, “Thriller,” imitating the exact steps and moves of Jackson in his “Thriller” music video.
2. The Rachel Berry Barbara-vention– In season 2 of FOX’s hit television show Glee, Puck (Mark Salling) and Kurt (Chris Colfer) as well as the other New Directions stage a flash mob for Rachel, to dissuade her from cosmetic surgery. Dancing to the song, “Barbra Streisand” by Duck Sauce, the gang argues to Rachel that Barbra Streisand, Rachel’s idol, was fine with her image, so why can’t Rachel be too.
3. The Modern Family mob– In ABC’s popular series, Modern Family, Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) lured Cam (Eric Stonestreet) to a mall in order to participate in a flash mob choreographed to En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind.”
