VIRAL: A video starring Poly student Daniel Lara and filmed by student Joshua Holz is the newest social media sensation
By Emily Hughes, Staff Editor
Whether you attend Poly High School or not, you’ve probably heard about the extremely popular video-turned-meme “Damn Daniel.” The video, which has been retweeted over 200 thousand times, features Poly student Daniel Lara (9) along with his California swagger and very, very white vans (if saying that isn’t just a little too cliché yet). If like Lara, you attend Poly High School, you’ve likely heard even more gossip about the Twitter phenomenon as well as the phrase “Damnnnnn Daniel” about twenty times in the past few days. The instant fame has not only been shocking for Lara himself, but also for the Poly community.
The enterprise began with a video of Daniel Lara that was uploaded to Twitter by his friend Joshua Holz (10) on February 15. The video is a compilation of shorter clips featuring Lara, usually walking on or near Poly’s pool deck, as he sports different outfits and often a slightly embarrassed smile. The video is narrated by Holz’s strange and somehow hilarious voice, repeating the phrase “Damn Daniel” (hence the title of the video) and the phrase “Back at it again with the white Vans!” in later clips. Both phrases have already become iconic, entering into the vernacular of teens across the world. The video has millions of views on Facebook and the meme itself has been circling around the Internet, showing up in tweets by accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and in magazines like Seventeen and GQ.
Holz explains that he originally put the clips that make up the Damn Daniel video on his Snapchat story. After receiving a lot of excited reactions from friends who viewed his stories, Holz decided to “put them together in a big 30 second video.” He then uploaded the video to Twitter, and history was made.
According to Lara, the fame of the video almost seemed to happen overnight. “I knew my friend Josh had posted it, and I went to bed with it having 200 retweets. I woke up the next day with it having 700 retweets. From there, it really just took off,” Lara noted on the subject. “I was super surprised and shocked,” Lara continued, explaining his initial reaction to the instant popularity of the video. Holz, too, was amazed that the video went so viral. “I was honestly expecting maybe 100 retweets on Twitter. I was definitely not expecting 270,000 retweets and 22 million views,” Holz said.
The Poly community, too, is surprised at the attention. Poly has been mentioned in multiple online articles. Other Poly students initially helped start the fire that this video became by retweeting the video when Holz first uploaded it. Principal Dr. Michael Roe posted about the meme on his Instagram, and students have taken to saying “Damn Daniel!” in the halls, as well as “Back at it again with the white Vans!” Just recently, a geo-filter was added to Snapchat for a few hours, with a cartoon of white Vans and the phrase “Damn Daniel” written in white letters. The Poly community immediately took advantage of the filter, sending and posting dozens of snaps.
The two Poly students at the center of the phenomenon, Holz and Lara, have each gained tens of thousands of Instagram and Twitter followers. Pictures that Lara has been tagged in on Instagram have received hundreds of new comments from fans. “My life hasn’t changed too much at the moment, but social media is a lot different now,” Lara admitted, and it’s understandable. Lara’s newest Instagram post from February 20, an image of him at a swim meet holding a bottle of water, has over 80,000 likes. Many well-known magazines and websites have written about Lara and Holz. “The fact that I see myself in magazines is absolutely crazy,” Lara commented. “I still can’t wrap my head around it,” Holz said.
While Holz and Lara’s fame seems to be all in good fun, there have been some serious sides to this story. According to ABC7 Eyewitness News, an unknown caller claimed that a shooting had occurred at Holz’s house at 1 A.M. on the evening of February 23. Police showed up that evening and woke up Holz’s family, but found nothing to be wrong. If that isn’t enough, untrue rumors that Lara was put in the hospital after his famed white Vans were stolen are circling the Internet, and a few pairs of dirty white Vans that do not belong to Lara are on sale on Ebay for thousands of dollars. These events just go to show the dark side of instant communication and its power to promote violence and falsity.
At some point, the buzz about this video will die down, as it does inevitably with every funny video or picture that captivates the Internet. For Poly however, and especially Lara and Holz, the entire experience will probably live on for years to come. No matter how redundant “Damn Daniel” gets for all of us here at Poly High, we know that the origin of the newly coined phrase is right here, and somehow it seems to belong to all of us. There’s something just a little exciting and special in knowing that.