KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A viral video made the rounds featuring a young boy purported to be Prince George reciting his alphabet using a bible verse to represent each letter. A post that went up in early February with more than 750,000 shares claimed the video is of Prince William's son, George.
But we're able to safely confirm it's actually Tanner Hemness, the 5-year-old son of 41 Action News anchor Taylor Hemness.
Brown hair? No accent? Tanner looked at a photo of the young British royal and didn't see the resemblance.
"That's not me!" said Tanner when he looked at the photo. "That's really not me."
Back in 2016, Taylor recorded his son, who was four years old at the time, reciting the 26-verse exercise at a wedding in Dallas, Texas. You can hear Taylor prompting his son with the letters in the background. Tanner was the ring bearer in the ceremony, hence the tuxedo.
The video garnered more than 40 million views across various platforms and landed the father-son duo interviews on national television, including an appearance on the Steve Harvey Show.
Since then, a video publisher obtained the rights, and the wild ride of being a viral sensation calmed down — until a repost from a Malaysian education advice page (yes, really) on February 13 struck a chord with internet fans all over again, reaching more than 1 million people worldwide in about a week.
Snopes wrote an article February 19 debunking the new post's royal claim, pointing to Taylor's original post and the information posted by his former station in Texas. As for a bit of community content policing, it appears anyone who'd ever seen a picture of Prince George called out the post for its error.
Turns out, that wasn't the only post claiming Tanner was Prince George.
In March, multiple people messaged Hemness saying there was another post with the video saying it was Prince George. That video was posted February 8 in a public group for pensioners, and it has almost 600,000 shares and more than 183,000 reactions.
Now, Tanner's twin brothers are learning their own version. Taylor says the 3-year-old boys have gotten to "E" so far.
Watch the original video below:
___
