You really can’t trust your eyes anymore! A 30-second clip of a scared woman, a dancing gnome, and a kiss that turns him into a prince has been circulating as if it were lost footage from an old fairy-tale film but it isn’t. It’s generative AI, and that’s exactly why so many people find it so hard to shake.
The video shows a blonde woman trapped in a hay-filled barn. A small, gnome-like figure, clearly meant to be Rumpelstiltskin, shuffles toward her while she screams. He dances around her in a stiff, tiptoeing jig, his face barely changing. He turns the straw into piles of gold coins. She stops screaming, smiles, and kisses him. He transforms into a handsome prince.
Viewers described it as “incredibly unsettling” and “kinda creepy,” and creators often pair it with some great tiptoeing music as a joke.
Half the comments are scared of the little weirdo and the other half can’t stop watching.
But the scariest part is how many people will assume it’s from an old film. “Looks real” is no longer evidence of anything.
That assumption was easy to make. The clip has the grain, lighting, and slightly off practical-effects feel of a 1950s or 1960s fantasy movie, or more specifically, the 1987 musical Rumpelstiltskin. That film, part of Cannon’s Movie Tales series, starred Amy Irving as the miller’s daughter and Billy Barty as the mischievous dwarf. Its plot follows the Brothers Grimm story: a boastful father claims his daughter can spin straw into gold, a strange little man saves her, and the price is her firstborn unless she can guess his name.
None of that footage is in the viral clip. The sequence also doesn’t match the actual fairy tale. In the Grimm version, Rumpelstiltskin doesn’t get a redeeming kiss and turn into a prince. He wants the child.
Instagram TV blogger Kevin Smith (@moviemanmanman) spent time trying to track the scene to a real movie and came up empty. In a reel posted on October 5th, he said the clip was throwing people because it “genuinely does look like an old-time, ’60s, ’50s film,” then added: “this is 1000% generative AI. Like, it’s AI.” He said he had been “combing the stratospheres of the internet” and confirmed it was not from any film.
The first video was posted on August 27 by the Instagram account stroinaya, linked to AI artist and filmmaker Tatyana Tereshchenko.
Recenlty they shared a reel saying:
“Looks like Rumpel has gotten a little out of hand 😂
We just created a character for our movie…
And now it is walking all over the world and the Internet, becoming a trend, a meme and gaining millions of views from people. Well, today we received hundreds of messages in direct with links to videos with the little guy😀 Only sadness is to track countries and continents where he travels.
So this video is in honor of our little internet invader 😂❤️”
It was shared as a demo of how to make a short fantasy film with no camera, no actors, and no big crew. The caption argued that you can now “create a fantasy world, shoot a short film without a camera and actors… today you don’t need a big team and a huge budget,” and pointed people toward a course on turning AI prompts into “cinema.” The same account has posted similar AI fairy-tale clips, including versions of The Frog Prince and Rapunzel.
The clip sat relatively quietly until late September, when TikToker @6aimbot9 set the gnome’s dance to Riff Raff’s “Tip Toe Wing In My Jawwdinz” and captioned it “The type of dreams I be having after taking dollar store melatonin.” That version blew up. Within days, it was a meme template: creeping downstairs at 2 a.m. for a snack, walking the aisle at Payless, passing a field sobriety test, or just “someone dancing like a fool.”
Know Your Meme, along with outlets including NBC, tracked it moving across TikTok, X, and Instagram Reels through early October, often under the hashtag #tiptoeinginmyjordans.
Even with the creators telling people how they made the short clip people still can’t quite agree on if it really is true or not.
