I grew up on YouTube and Vine, so I never really felt the need to get a TikTok account. Whenever anything goes viral on there (for better or for worse), I usually hear about it second hand. This month, the biggest TikTok trend seems to be the Chicken Jockey meme, courtesy of “A Minecraft Movie”.
If you don’t know, there’s a scene in “A Minecraft Movie” where a baby Creeper, one of the game’s enemies, decides to fight Jason Momoa’s character while riding a chicken, leading to Jack Black’s character yelling “CHICKEN JOCKEY!” And out of the ridiculousness, a meme was born, inspiring teens to ironically cheer at the scene while seeing the movie at the theatre.
There’s nothing wrong with cheering, just a few months ago I was cheering at Sonic 3’s “Live and Learn” scene. But like most things on the internet, the trend was quickly taken to the extreme and teens began throwing popcorn and drinks during their cheering. I’ll admit, when I first heard about this trend, I assumed it was only happening at theatres in big cities. No way could something that wild and destructive could happen around here, right?
I had the opportunity to speak with Muscatine Palms 10 Theatres manager Arissa Rivera-Gomez, and she shared with me the theatre has had to clean up bigger than usual messes following early showings of “A Minecraft Movie”. Worse still is because the cheering and food dumping happened so quickly, staff were unable to know who started it and who to kick out. All they could do was deal with the aftermath.
Manager Rivera-Gomez did have some good news though. She said these incidents have slowed down quite a bit since those first few showings, much to the relief of theatre staff, but it’s still disappointing that it happened in the first place. I guess kids from anywhere can be convinced to be a little foolish, so long as it’s for the sake of fun.
I can only hope any local kids who participated in this trend quickly grow out of whatever sort of attitude led them to think it was okay to make a mess at their local theatre, not giving much thought to employees who shouldn’t have to do twice their usual amount of work for no good reason.
What’s more, I think this is a good time to remind everyone of ANY generation to be a good example and always keep some empathy in the back of your mind for our customer service workers and custodial staff, whether they be at the movies, a restaurant, or our own schools and offices. Sure, cleaning up messes is their job, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still get tired or stressed out from these messes like the rest of us surely would. Basically, if you wouldn’t force a loved one to clean up a certain type of mess, don’t force it on a stranger if you can help it.
