Pappara Dance

About

The Pappara Dance (also known as Rune Pose in images) is a Japanese animated dance meme, quite similar to Carameldansen, the Caipirinha dance, and the Paffendorf dance in the sense that the characters doing the dance are replaced with any anime or video game character of the editor’s choice.

Origin

The dance itself comes from the opening of a anime known as Galaxy Angel Rune which was the counterpart of the second Galaxy Angel game.^[1] It ran for 13 episodes in 2006 and generally did not receive very good reviews compared to it’s first season.

The song that is used is a sped-up version of Danish duo Me & My’s 1995 single, “Baby Boy”, by DJ Speedycake (famous for creating the sped-up remix of Caramelldansen).

Spread

Nico Nico Douga

The ever first instance of the looping scene from the OP using the “Baby Boy [Speedycake Remix]” can be found on the Japanese video-sharing website, Nico Nico Douga, uploaded on March 2nd, 2008. The video was entitled “Papapapa Papparappara”.^[2]

Derivatives did not start appearing, until November 12th, 2008 with a video entitled “Pappara by Sakuya and others”^[3] using the characters (from left to right) Sakuya Izayoi, Remilia Scarlet, and Hong Meiling from the popular manic shooter game series, Touhou Project.

The days to follow had users uploading their own versions of the meme.^[4]

deviantART & YouTube

As well as other anime dance memes, Pappara dance is also accepted in outside Japan. “Pappara baby boy template” made by a deviantART user DreamerSkyte in August 2009 helps the creation in English-speaking world.^[5]

Not a few illustrations and videos has been posted to deviantART^[6] and YouTube^[7] since about 2009.

Examples

Videos

For more videos, check out the videos section in this entry.

【手書きリボーン】双子とフランでパッパラ

Pappara TF Dance

Vyers/Mid-Boss style – Baby Boy _Pappara

Illustrations

Before Pappara dance came, this dance scene in Galaxy Angel Rune OP had been set to a subject for parody art works on 2chan (Futaba Channel) in 2006-2007. Threads of those aren’t archived. But several illustrations made in those days are left on the web, and some of users in pixiv, a Japanese social network service for illustrators, still post their art works.^[8]

Search Interest

External References

Editor’s Note: Registration is needed to browse the original videos listed in this section.