Wedding videos can be pretty lame, unless you’re retracing your own memories. But in October 2016, one Utah couple — Mikayla and Cody Phillips — turned wedding traditions on their heads with a viral dance clip that’s racked up an incredible 41.4 MILLION views on YouTube to date!
Bride Mikayla, aged 25, is a trained dancer. Groom Cody met his soon-to-be wife at the International Folk Dance Ensemble at Brigham Young University, where they were introduced as dance partners. The rest is history, so they say, except their wedding turned them into internet legends!
Mikayla planned a grand surprise for her 400-person wedding party, roping her dad, Nathan Ellison, into the shenanigans. Rather than a cookie-cutter father-daughter dance with all its old-school ballroom traditions, Mikayla and Nathan shocked the crowd with an epic four-minute mash-up of Top 40 hits, choreographed with addictively modern moves.
Mikayla and Nathan fooled the room for a split second, commencing their daddy-daughter dance swaying to Bob Carlisle’s slow-paced “Butterfly Kisses”. Suddenly, the vinyl scratched like a hip-hop remix and MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” blared from the sound system, packing the wedding party with screams and hollers as Nathan and Mikayla donned matching sunglasses and broke vibrantly into disco moves.
Their synchronized “running man” dance was gold, but when the song switched again, this time to Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache (Jump On It),” their ridiculous Gangnam-style cowboy moves sent the crowd wild. LMFAO’s high-energy “Party Rock Anthem” was glitzed with hilarious arm waves and street dances, before dissolving into a modern disco-ballroom routine to the tune of Peaches & Herb’s “Shake Your Groove Thing.”
Mikayla and Nathan’s ridiculous routine also saw Bollywood moves performed like pros, Tom Jones lip-sync impressions and a dirty drop into the hyper-modern hip-hop track, “Dessert” by Dawin. But despite the silk wisp of Mikayla’s veil ripping from her hair in a graceful wardrobe malfunction, it was dad Nathan who stole the show, slaying the dance moves as if he was a dance pro like his daughter.
Mikayla later told ABC news, “I’ve danced my whole life but my dad hasn’t,” revealing that Nathan is actually a salesman. The duo spent only one week choreographing and rehearsing their epic dance routine prior to the big day, picking songs saturated in personal meaning before taking their list to the soon-to-be husband Cody to remix into a four-minute track.
The dance was extra special: Mikayla is Nathan’s eldest and only daughter, so this wedding was his one shot at a memorable daddy-daughter dance. According to Mikayla’s ABC interview, “He for years has talked about doing that and he finally convinced me,” adding, “Every night [in the week] prior to the wedding we’d run through it a few times. I think since we’d talked about it for years that it was pretty easy for it to come together.”