Numa Numa

The story

Brolsma first heard the song in a Japanese Flash cartoon of singing cats, and he filmed his video in one take to make his friends laugh; it stops halfway because he only recorded the first half of the song. He uploaded it to Newgrounds as Gman250, and the site’s founder, Tom Fulp, put it on the front page on 12 December.

It drew 2.8 million views there in its first three months, crashed the site’s servers more than once and spread by email to more than 80 other websites. TV vans turned up outside the family’s house before he had even told his mother about it, and by February 2005 he was in The New York Times.

In November 2006 a marketing firm ranked it the second most-watched viral video in the world, at about 700 million views, behind only the Star Wars Kid. The sudden fame was hard at first, and Brolsma turned down interviews for a while before deciding to enjoy it.

Why it matters

It was one of the first webcam lip-sync videos to go around the world, years before lip-syncing to a song became the everyday stuff of TikTok, and it carried a Romanian-language song from Moldova to people who had never heard of it.

Where it is now

Brolsma came back with New Numa in 2006, appeared in Weezer’s 2008 video Pork and Beans, and in August 2023 recreated the dance on YouTube to promote his own music. Across every site it has been posted to, the original is estimated at over a billion views.