InfoSearched
Some proposals just aren’t content with a quiet dinner and a ring in a glass of champagne.
By December 2015, the marriage proposal had fully mutated into a genre of internet video, complete with its own tropes, its own anthem, and its own hall of fame. “The Most EPIC Wedding Proposals Ever” rounds up the stunts that made that shift permanent — the flash mobs, the fake movie trailers, the strangers recruited as extras — all built for one thing: getting shared millions of times over.
- Portland actor Isaac Lamb’s May 23, 2012 lip-dub proposal to girlfriend Amy Frankel — roughly 60 friends, family, and neighbors dancing down the street to Bruno Mars’ “Marry You” — is widely cited as the definitive YouTube proposal video.
- Lamb hid Frankel in the open trunk of a slowly moving Honda CR-V with headphones on so she’d hear the song in sync with the choreography unfolding around her.
- Filmmaker Matt Still pulled off “Making the Movies Jealous” in May 2011, screening a full custom-made movie trailer for girlfriend Ginny Joiner in a packed commercial theater before running in to propose live in front of family hidden in the audience.
The Lamb-Frankel Standard
No proposal video looms larger over the genre than Isaac Lamb’s. On May 23, 2012, the Portland actor told Amy Frankel he needed her help loading something into his Honda CR-V — then had her climb into the open trunk, put on headphones, and listen as the vehicle crept down the street. What she didn’t know was that roughly 60 people, friends, neighbors, and family members among them, were lined up along the route, lip-syncing in perfect unison to Bruno Mars’ “Marry You” as the car rolled past them.
The choreography built for blocks, dancers peeling off in waves until Lamb himself appeared to drop to one knee. The clip’s staging is exactly why it became the reference point for the format: a single continuous take, a hidden camera crew, and a soundtrack choice that instantly became the go-to song for flash-mob proposals everywhere afterward.
Bruno Mars Became the Unofficial Anthem
“Marry You” wasn’t written as a proposal song, but by the early 2010s it had been adopted as the genre’s default needle-drop, the same way certain movies always seem to get quoted at weddings. Lamb’s video is the biggest reason why — once his lip-dub racked up views, it became something close to a template: recruit a crowd, teach them the words, film it in one unbroken shot.
Roughly 60 people lip-syncing Bruno Mars down a Portland street, all timed to a car with the bride-to-be riding in the open trunk.
That single formula — public space, hidden choreography, a pop song everyone already knows — is the connective tissue running through the whole EPIC-proposal genre, whether it’s a shopping mall, a football field, or a movie theater full of strangers.
Proposals Evolve Into Movie Trailers
The other recurring staple of the genre skips the dancing altogether and goes cinematic. Matt Still’s “Making the Movies Jealous,” filmed and released in May 2011, is the version most compilations point to. Still built a full trailer using real footage of his relationship with Ginny Joiner, then arranged for it to screen in a packed commercial theater as if it were just another preview before the main feature.
Joiner had no idea what she was watching until the trailer built toward its own punchline: Still walked out from the audience, ring in hand, while family members who’d been planted in the seats around her revealed themselves on cue. It’s the same trick as the flash mob — a crowd in on the secret, a public setting turned into a stage — just swapped for a screen instead of a street.
A Genre Built for the Internet
What ties Lamb’s lip-dub to Still’s trailer and to every Disneyland flash mob or airport ambush in between is that none of them were really designed for the moment itself — they were designed to be watched afterward, by people who’d never met either couple. That’s the real shift the “EPIC Wedding Proposals” era represents: the proposal stopped being a private question and became a production with an audience built in from the start.
It’s the same instinct that turns a comedy bit or a live-TV blooper into a shareable moment rather than something that just happens and gets forgotten — the kind of thing compiled in lip-syncing mishap roundups or debated the way people argue over the most extravagant wedding dresses ever put on camera.
Lamb and Frankel’s video crossed well past ten million views in the years after it went up, and it’s still the clip every “best proposals” compilation opens with — proof that a Honda CR-V, sixty amateur dancers, and one Bruno Mars chorus can outlast almost anything a professional wedding videographer ever storyboarded.
9 Things You Don’t Know About Jason Momoa
Why Hollywood Dropped Chris Colfer
Surprising ESPN Scandals We Never Saw Coming
Judge Judy Sends a Brutal Message to CBS
Celebs That Hid A Tragic Secret For Years