Giga Pudding

Overview

Giga Pudding is a make-your-own dessert kit manufactured by the Japanese toy company Takara Tomy^[1] that was first released in 2008. The candy product became heavily discussed on 4chan in October 2010 after one of the moderators embedded a commercial clip of Giga Pudding on the site.

Background

On October 27th, 2008, YouTuber sukogi^[3] uploaded a video titled "Giga Pudding," which featured an advertisement for the Giga Pudding Japanese creme caramel dessert kit (shown below). In the commercial, a child repeatedly sings the phrase "Purin purin purin purin Giga Purin" while several skits are played in stop motion animation. The video remained largely unnoticed until October 13th, 2010, when it was featured on the Internet news site BoingBoing.^[2]

Notable Developments

On 4chan

On the evening of November 30th, 2010, moderator invisibro on the imageboard site 4chan embedded a clip of the Giga Pudding commercial on the /jp/ (japanese) board. The same night, moderators enabled a word filter across the site, which turned all user posts into an endless sequence of word “PUDDI,” a phonetic translation of the loanword “purin” derived from the English word "pudding." The same day, YouTuber Barricade Madness^[5] submitted a video with several screenshots of the word filter in action (shown below).

Several users began posting images urging others to flag the YouTube video to remove it from the site (shown below, left) and malicious instructions to delete system32 in Windows to remove Puddi from the site (shown below, right). Eventually, some users began informing others that the video can be easily blocked by utilizing the ad block browser add-on.

Online Reaction

The same day, Urban Dictionary^[10] user mikehawk151 submitted an entry for "giga puddi," which included the spammed phrase "PUDDIPUDDIPUDDI" in the description field. On December 2nd, the Asian Internet news blog Asiajin^[13] published a post titled “Japanese ‘Giga Pudding’ becomes massive meme on 4chan overnight,” which compared the “PUDDI PUDDI” spams to the Internet meme "Desu" that had been word-filtered by the site moderators on similar grounds. On December 6th, the YouTube Internet news show Rocketboom uploaded a how-to video on making Giga Pudding at home (shown below).

On December 9th, Yahoo Answers^[11] user KatieCruce submitted the question "What is 'Puddi Puddi'?", to which user Ben responded by citing 4chan's posting of the Giga Pudding commercial. On July 6th, 2011, the online retailer Level Up Studios^[9] began selling t-shirts with the Giga Pudding logo screen printed on the front (shown below). As of October 5th, 2012, a Facebook^[12] page for "Giga Pudding!" has accumulated over 10,800 likes.

Notable Examples

Images

The Giga Pudding commercial inspired the creation of image macros and animated GIFs featuring the product's mascot and mash-ups referencing other well-known Internet characters. Additional example images can be found on Tumblr^[8] under the tag "#puddi puddi."

Videos

Several YouTubers uploaded parody versions of the commercial, as well as remixes substituting new musical tracks.

Search Interest

External References