The Vine What are those is a roughly six-second-long video of an off-screen man who says to a policeman "Officer I got one question for you", then shouting the question "What are those?!", in reference to the policeman's plain black work boots, while aiming the camera at them, which the policeman likely ignored. The phrase was first uploaded to the Urban Dictionary on 2 October 2011, defined as a question to be shouted at people with poor shoes. The footage for the memetic video was first uploaded to Instagram on 14 June 2015, getting upwards of 2,300 likes and 1,200 comments within three weeks. The video was reuploaded to Vine on 20 June 2015, getting 20 million loops, 271,000 likes, and 136,000 revines in two weeks. The meme's popularity increased greatly in the following months, spawning multiple variations, reenactments, and reuploads. In the style of the meme, someone at retired NBA star basketball camp asked him the question, to which he replied "Hey, look man, I'm lost on that Vine stuff. What are those? These are XX9 Lows", in reference to his then-unreleased Air Jordan basketball shoes. American consumer electronics store Best Buy ran an ad, in which the meme is referenced. The ad last ran on 11 December 2015. Though the meme seemed relatively obsolete by 2016, it was briefly brought back into the spotlight when contestant Sabrina Duong wrote "What are...THOSE?" as her Final Jeopardy answer. Since then she has been featured on People and Cosmopolitan. It was also mentioned in a sketch on Saturday Night Live.
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