Nyan Cat / Pop Tart Cat

About

Nyan Cat, also known as Pop Tart Cat, is an 8-bit animation depicting a cat with the body of a cherry pop tart flying through outer space. While such absurd themes like flying kittens and pastry cats have been around for some time, the surreal humor behind this particular combination has captivated YouTubers and online art communities, spawning dozens of fan illustrations as well as receiving some mainstream coverage in April 2011. (Also see: Cat Bread and Speedy Cat)

Origin

The Pop Tart Cat animation was posted on the daily comics site LOL-COMICS^[1] run by illustrator Chris Torres, also known as prguitarman, on April 2nd, 2011. The original drawing was based on his own Russian Blue cat, Marty, and was drawn after receiving two separate suggestions for a cat and a pop tart during a Red Cross charity drawing event on Livestream^[28]. Prior to the Pop Tart Cat, prguitarman had already gained a relatively large audience with a few other instances of comics circulating on the web. The GIF animation was also reblogged via Tumblr^[2] on April 2nd, 2011, accumulating over 3,000 notes (likes & reblogs) in its first two weeks:

On April 5th, 2011, YouTuber saraj00n posted a video titled Nyan Cat^[3], using comic artist prguitarman’s Pop Tart Cat animation set to the well-known Japanese Vocaloid song Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya by Japanese artist Daniwell-P looping in the background, Although the song had been originally composed for Hatsune Miku to sing, The version used in the video was of the cover sung by the Utauloid Momo Momone. The video gained over one million views in its first two weeks:

Spread

On April 10th, the Nyan Cat video was picked up by popular blogs and social networking sites including Memebase^[4], Buzzfeed^[5], Tumblr^[6], and Facebook^[7] among others.

Beginning on April 12th, Tosh.0 blog^[8] posted the Nyan Cat video, as well as CollegeHumor^[9] and G4TV.^[10] There are several remixes and spinoff variations of the original video circulating on YouTube, many of them customized with alternative characters and background music.

Nyan Cat has been also briefly seen on Sprint’s Nexus 4G “Cats” commercial^[16], which featured a number of popular cat video clips.

There’s also a website^[20] showing a mash-up animation of Nyan Cat and Speedy Cat.

Slipknot’s Psychosocial Video

YouTuber xDaZJMx^[11] commented on the original Nyan cat video by saraj00n telling viewers to watch Slipknot’s Psychosocial (muted) with the Nyan cat song playing in the background. The comment went as follows:

Step 1: Put this song to the start and Pause it.
Step 2: Open up Slipknot Psychosocial in another tab.
Step 3: Mute the Slipknot video.
Step 4: Play this song and the Slipknot vid at the exact same time
Step 5: ????
Step 6: PROFIT!

xDaZJMx’s comment quickly gained hundreds of likes, was featured as the highest comment, and many users began flooding the Psychosocial video’s comments^[12] with Nyans. As of April 26th, 2011, Slipknot’s “Psychosocial” music video page on YouTube has over 111,000 comments, with tens of thousands reading “NYANNYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYA.” This caused confusion among Slipknot listeners, and further spread the Nyan cat meme and its hilarity.

Single-Serving Sites

Nyan.cat^[13] was launched on April 13th, 2011, featuring the text “NON-STOP NYAN CAT” and another single serving site Slowbro.org^[14] was launched on the next day, featuring a “rainy” version of the original. The flash game version featuring a timer display similar to Nyan.cat was uploaded by Newgrounds^[15] user Blind-Bane on April 27th.

Games

Many game developers began to create assorted Nyan Cat games, such as Nyan Cat Lost in Space, Snake Nyan Cat, Nyanicorn (Robot Unicorn Attack variant), and Nyan Cat Fly, among others. A site listing all the Nyan Cat games while also hosting one of its own is located at Nyan-Cat.com. Some Nyan Cat games have also been released onto the mobile platform, enabling use on various smartphones. A small tech demo of Nyan Cat that will work on the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) has also been created,^[27] It currently runs on NES emulators.

Trending Nyan Cat Remixes

Musical Tributes

- Piano cover

- Guitar cover

- Three-Stringed Fretless Japanese Lute

PBS LulzSec Hack

On Sunday, May 29th, the PBS website was hacked by the group “LulzSec”, and several of the website properties were defaced with Nyan Cat related images. The group claims the hack was a reaction to the Frontline episode called “Wikisecrets”, that some felt was biased against Wikileaks. LulzSec released the following statement explaining the motivations behind the hack:

Greetings, Internets. We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed. We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further… perusing. As you should know by now, not even that fancy-ass fortress from the third shitty Pirates of the Caribbean movie (first one was better!) can withhold our barrage of chaos and lulz. Anyway, unnecessary sequels aside… wait, actually: second and third Matrix movies sucked too! Anyway, say hello to the insides of the PBS servers, folks. They best watch where they’re sailing next time.^[17]

On May 30th, 2011, LulzSec tweeted a link to a pastebin post saying that PBS was not hacked by SQL, but rather a “0day we discovered in mt4 aka MoveableType 4”.^[18][19]

YouTube Player

On June 16th, 2011, YouTube enabled a custom flash player for the original Nyan Cat video that showed an animated mini Nyan Cat flying across the progress bar with a rainbow trail. A screen shot was posted to Reddit^[21] the same day. On 5th of July 2011, YouTube made a global update on video player user interface and to everyone’s disappointment the Nyan Cat custom progress bar was permanently removed.

YouTube’s progress bar ports

Nyan Cat became an inspiration for many theme artists and programmers, who managed to design themes and homebrew modifications featuring this popular meme on a wide range of platforms. Quite remarkable are the efforts made by some developers to recreate YouTube’s progress bar and integrate it to different operating systems as a fancy replacement for some user interface elements. On June 24th, 2011 InstantElevatorMusic (@instantelevator) released Nyan Cat Progress Bar, a modification for Windows default progress bars.^[24]

Also, on 19th of July 2011, Nikos Lykousas (@dummydev) released NyanSliders for jailbroken apple devices, a tweak which aims at replacing any slider in iOS with an animating Nyan Cat leaving rainbow trail, just like the original YouTube progress bar.^[25][26]

Copyright Claims

UPDATE: 6/28/2011: The original saraj00n upload has been restored on YouTube.

On June 27th, 2011, the original saraj00n video was taken down by Youtube, claiming that they had received a copyright claim to the video from Prguitarman. However, Prguitarman stated on his own site^[22] that he did not file any claims, and that he is contacting several people who have contributed in any way to the video to begin filing a counter DMCA to have the video restored.

Funny how someone can easily make a complaint but to actually prove it the owner has to jump through all of these hoops. FUN TIMES! But seriously, there is a lot of work involved here and it’s pretty stressful.

Meanwhile, people are flagging my videos on Youtube and giving me death threats just like upstanding Internet citizens usually do. Good job.

Anyway, I’ve been working at this for about two or three hours and have done the most I can for now. Saraj00n, Daniwell, and Youtube have been contacted and I am just now waiting for each of their replies so we can work on getting the video back up.

On June 28, 2011, YouTube restored the video after having confirmed that Prguitarman had not filed a claim, and restored everything from the original video including the custom Nyan Cat seek bar. However, because of Youtube’s interface update on July 5th, the custom seek bar has been removed.

Nyan Cat To-Go Bookmarklet

In July 2011, New York University student (@blackrabbit) introduced a javescript bookmarklet allowing the browser user to summon Nyan Cat at anytime and anywhere online.

Click to Play

External References