Pedro Raccoon

Origin

The audio behind the meme is ‘Pedro,’ an Italo-disco song first recorded in 1980 by the Italian pop and variety icon Raffaella Carra for her album Mi spendo tutto. Carra, one of the most beloved entertainers in Italian and Spanish-language pop, died in July 2021, so her 2024 return to the global charts through this remix was effectively a posthumous hit. The German producers Jaxomy and Agatino Romero built a sped-up techno version around the track, released digitally on February 20, 2024 (via Ultra Records), with the chant-like ‘Pedro, Pedro, Pedro, Pe’ hook at its center.

The remix turned into a meme in April 2024, when it was paired with a short clip of a raccoon filmed above a rotating camera, rocking rhythmically from side to side so that its waddle appears perfectly synced to the beat. The dancing-raccoon video was made independently, not by the artists, and its loopable, hypnotic sway is what carried the sound around the world.

What it means and how it is used

The Pedro raccoon is a feel-good, low-stakes loop: it stands for carefree vibing, harmless silliness, or an earworm you simply cannot escape. Editors sync the sway to other songs, drop it into games and TV shows, or run captions about being stuck in an obsessive loop or routine. Like earlier dancing-animal memes, its appeal is that it needs no explanation, just the beat and the bob.

How it spread

Through 2024 the clip and its audio blanketed TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, and the underlying remix became a genuine chart hit, topping airplay charts in countries including Estonia, Lithuania and Slovakia and reaching the top three in Austria, Finland and Germany. The ‘Pedro Pedro Pedro’ sound took on a life of its own as a widely used TikTok audio, applied to clips that had nothing to do with raccoons, and spawned countless one-hour loops and extended edits on YouTube for people who wanted the earworm on repeat.

Notable examples and variations

• The swaying motion applied to other animals and characters.
• The raccoon inserted into video games, cartoons and unrelated footage.
• Sped-up, extended and ‘techno’ edits of the Pedro remix.
• Captions using the loop as a metaphor for being stuck on repeat.

Legacy

‘Pedro’ is a textbook example of the 2024 pattern in which a decades-old song is resurrected by a remix and then supercharged by a single perfectly-timed animal clip. It joined a long lineage of looping dancing-animal memes, from earlier hamster and cat loops to 2024 breakout critters, while turning a 44-year-old Raffaella Carra track into an international earworm and introducing a new generation to one of Europe’s great pop stars.