Uber driver Danny Blanton said that he initially thought to himself, “Do I know this guy?” before instinctively brushing it off.
Two friends in Texas unexpectedly ran into each other for the first time in more than 20 years — and became a viral TikTok sensation in the process!
In January, Uber driver Danny Blanton, 51, picked up passenger John Johnson, 60, for a ride to Dallas’ UT Southwestern Medical Center. As captured via Blanton’s dashcam video, both men initially didn’t recognize each other and just made small talk about the weather.
Then several seconds into their ride, Johnson sensed something familiar about the driver.
“What’s your name again?” asked Johnson, as Blanton replied, “My name is Danny.”
“I think I know you,” Johnson said. “You don’t know me?”
Blanton then appeared to glance at the rearview mirror, turned around to look at his passenger, did a double-take and shouted, “Man…what the f—!” before shaking each other’s hand and laughing.
Blanton, who hails from Mesquite and also bartends and does 3D printing and woodworking, says that Johnson was his last pickup of the day. As for whether he had any inkling there was something special about his passenger, Blanton — who points out that drivers don’t see pictures of their passengers on the app before picking them up — admits that the thought did cross his mind, but he brushed it off.
“I thought for a brief second, ‘Do I know this guy?’” he said, but then he thought, “No, it can’t be. I don’t know anybody here [in this part of South Texas].”
For Johnson, a Dallas resident who collects medical specimens for the hospital, it was hearing his friend’s voice that tipped him off. “That voice really sounded real familiar to me,” he recalls, adding that when his friend said his name, “I knew it was him.”
The pair’s friendship began in the late 1990s when they both worked at the Dallas nightclub Phenomenon, which in its heyday attracted celebrities and athletes; Johnson served as head of security and Blanton was a bartender.
“He was just nice, laid back, chill, and just probably one of the best people that I’ve ever met,” Blanton says.
“Danny was always cool with me,” Johnson adds. “We always enjoyed each other’s company and got along.”
But the two men, who weren’t close friends outside of work, ended up losing track of each other.
“I don’t know who stopped working at the club first, me or Danny,” says Johnson. “It was probably me. After that. I pretty much didn’t see Danny anymore.”
During their Uber ride, the friends got to reminisce about old times and loved ones, some of whom have since passed away.
After dropping Johnson off at the hospital, the pair exchanged numbers — and Blanton went on to post video footage of their surprise reunion on Facebook so his family could see what happened. Then last month, he shared the same clip on TikTok so that his friends who didn’t have Facebook could see it.
As is so often the case on TikTok, the clip ended up finding a much bigger audience. It was actually Johnson’s son who told him about the viral video.
“He said, ‘Well, a friend of mine just called me. He said you and Danny went viral,’ ” Johnson recalls. “So I called [Danny, and] I was like, ‘You posted a video?’ The video was blowing up.”
Blanton says that video was the first clip he has ever posted on TikTok. ”It was crazy because in two hours it got 2,000 views,” he recalls. “Four hours, it was like 4,000 to 6,000. And then after six hours, it was like 4.1 million.
“It touched all over the globe,” he adds of the clip, which now has over 10 million views. “It was crazy how it went so viral like that.”
“We’re both elated by it and to see all the positive comments that it got,” he adds. “Just people saying, ‘This is my favorite video,’ and how many people have watched it… It’s been positive.”
Johnson says that he and Blanton recently met up to get drinks, and they “laughed and talked like normally do.”
“We got to talking [and] getting to know each other,” says Blanton. “We’re like, ‘Man, your life is interesting.’ ”
As for what they hope people walk away with after seeing their reunion, Blanton says it’s that “genuine love and admiration…never goes away.”
“[We’re] just two little old guys from Mesquite and Dallas that went viral on the internet,” he adds. “That’s it.”