A dance scene from the Indian film Donga, given English subtitles that phonetically approximate what the Telugu lyrics sound like to an English speaker. One of the best-known examples of a whole late-2000s subtitling genre. The record's entry for a format the internet has largely stopped defending.
Died around 2012 as the phonetic-subtitle genre curdled. It survives as a case study in how a joke made entirely at the expense of another language sounds a decade later.
The clip is not a Thriller parody and has no connection to Michael Jackson. The name was attached by whoever subtitled it, and has stuck to a film scene that predates the joke by seventeen years.
The joke is entirely in the mishearing. The film is not doing anything unusual; the subtitles supply the absurdity and then credit it to the original, which is the problem with the genre.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
