After a long day of school and a commute home that took an extra thirty minutes, I wanted to lay down on the couch, watch TikTok, and decompress. After a bit of mindless scrolling, a video caught my attention. It was a clip from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which was not uncommon for my For You Page. Surprisingly, the video was titled “Taylor Announced Reputation (Taylor’s Version)?!” While I hadn’t been online much that day due to school and work, I was sure I would have noticed an announcement that big. Skeptical, I kept watching. In the clip, Taylor asked the viewers to direct their attention to the back big screen on the stage. Just as I was about to believe the title, I heard a sound that had become all too familiar in recent days. The first few notes of Flo Rida’s “Whistle” began to play as a video montage of nearly ten-year-old pictures of actor Josh Hutcherson quickly flooded the screen. Taylor had, in fact, not announced “Reputation (Taylor’s Version).” I had just become the most recent victim of the viral Josh Hutcherson “Whistle” Meme.Â
Josh Hutcherson, who is most known for playing Peeta Melark in The Hunger Games, has been known to stay off social media and out of the spotlight. Unlike his Hunger Games costar, Jennifer Lawrence, his career never really took off, except for a few roles in lesser-known films and TV shows. That was until Hutcherson landed the role of Mike Schmidt in the film adaptation of the popular horror video game Five Nights at Freddy’s, which was released in late October 2023. Coupled with the hype surrounding Hutcherson’s new film and the revival of The Hunger Games franchise with the prequel film The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes releasing mid-November, the Josh Hutcherson renaissance flame had been lit. Hutcherson was crowned TikTok’s November “Hot White Boy of the Month,” an honor bestowed upon a male celebrity who finds himself the center of that month’s thirst edits and memes.Â
The “Whistle” meme serves as the 2023 version of the “Rick Roll,”; the prank that involves an unsuspecting friend into watching Rick Astley’s 1987 “Never Gonna Give You Up.”. The “Rick Roll” meme dates back to 2007 and often resurfaces as a similar concept in other media like the 2022 meme “Getting Krissed,” which uses a picture of Kris Jenner instead of the Rick Astley song. While the “Whistle” meme has only been circulating the internet for a few weeks, it has quickly become my favorite rendition. The meme comes from an edit of Josh Hutcherson that was posted to YouTube by user MetroGirlzStation in October of 2014, which was the peak of Hutcherson’s time. The video features a montage of photos of Hutcherson with a cover of Flo Rida’s “Whistle” sung by Joel Merry in the background.Â
With the rediscovered interest in Hutcherson, TikTok began using the first few seconds of this YouTube edit (which now has over 6.3 million views) to take viewers by surprise, carefully placing the clip in the randomest of places like TV screens, a loaf of bread (very fitting) and even inside a cats mouth. With many hours spent scrolling on TikTok, I encountered many variations of the inescapable meme, but I never thought I’d be making my own.Â
It was late on the night of Sunday, November 19. I knew I should be getting ready for bed since I had school in the morning, but I couldn’t put down my phone. Having seen The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the Hunger Games prequel movie just three days prior, I couldn’t get my mind to shut down. It was full of analysis and ponderings about the film that I just couldn’t quiet, and for once in my life, my Twitter and TikTok feed was perfectly curated to feed my racing Hunger Games thoughts. By 11 pm, I was deep in the rabbit hole of Hunger Games prequel tweets, seeing everything from movie reviews to admissions of attraction for a young Coriolanus Snow. Suddenly, a specific picture caught my eye. On the surface, it appeared to be a picturesque town in Scotland; upon further glance, I saw something familiar. Embedded deep within the buildings and landscape was an AI rendering of the infamous Josh Hutcherson picture. I had again fallen victim to the “whistle” meme, but this time, I was taking people down with me.Â
I’ve never been a big social media poster; however, with the topic of The Hunger Games coming up more and more online, I found myself posting a few of my own videos to be a part of the conversation. Without much thought, I screenshotted the Scotland tweet and filmed a TikTok reaction. Since my other videos hadn’t gotten more than 300 views each, I figured my friends were the only people I would be sharing it with. When I woke up Monday morning, I was shocked to see that my video had reached 50,000 views. For some, that may not be a lot, but I only had eighty followers, and my most viewed video of my dog had 230,000 views, and even that took weeks. I quickly realized that my use of hashtags like #JoshHutchersonRenaissance and #JoshHutchersonSupremacy may have tipped the trending algorithm in my favor.Â
By the time I got to school, the video had reached 100,000 views. I was starting to get texts from my friends congratulating me on my newfound fame. Little did we know in the next few hours, I would hit 500,000. By Monday night, I had over 1 million views. I constantly refreshed my phone because I couldn’t keep up with the notifications. The comments on the video had me crying and laughing on my kitchen floor. Many comments had a general theme of people being unable to escape Josh Hutcherson on their feeds or the confused people who didn’t understand why they saw a face in a Scottish town. Some of my personal favorites include a commenter asking, “WHY AND HOW????? Is this a real place????” to which I replied, “It’s heaven,” or different people commenting, “Does anyone else see a face?” I merely responded, “What are you talking about?”
Over the next few days, I would go on to get millions more views and thousands of comments and likes. As of December 4, 2023, the video has 7.6 million views, 934 thousand likes, and 11 thousand comments. A recent clip of Hutcherson emerged of a fan asking if he had seen the meme; he replied, “I stay off the internet; it’s scary,” to which I respectfully agree.