About

Caramelldansen (eng. The Caramel Dance) is a series of animated dance videos that use the dance track with the same title. Its original track was released on Supergott,^[1] which is the 2nd album of the Swedish pop group Caramell,^[2] in November 2001. The song spawned a huge amount of fan-made videos and artwork on websites such as YouTube, deviantART and the Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga (NND) between 2008 and 2009. In February 2020, Caramelldancen regained meme popularity with Caramelldancen Lights edits.

Origin

According to Ruakuu's Blog^[3], the origin of Caramelldansen was the flash loop composed by Sven from Sweden in the first half of 2006, and it was originally posted on his personal website.^[4]

Its visual source is an animated gif taken from an opening movie of the Japanese adult visual novel Popotan, released in 2002.^[5] The animated GIF of the dance was entitled "Popotan dance" and had existed on the web since before 2005. In the interview by Ruakuu's blog, Sven said he found this animated gif on /gif/ in 4chan.

The song in the original flash loop is a sped-up version of the "Caramelldansen" composed by DJ Speedycake.^[6] He released this remix on 4chan around the same time Sven was combining the Popotan dance animated gif with several dance tunes.

Lyrics Translated

Spread

After the flash loop grew popular on 4chan, it quickly spread across the internet as people made their own parodies featuring other fictional characters performing the dance. It was also adopted by the anime community and was often featured at conventions, where cosplayers would dance to the track (example shown below).

The animated videos, illustrations and cosplay videos/pictures have been posted to many online communities such as YouTube,^[7] deviantART^[8] and NND^[9] since 2007. In an episode of the animated children's show Phineas and Ferb titled "Summer Belongs to You!,"^[12] which aired on August 2nd, 2010, characters from the show perform the dance (shown below).

Japan

Caramelldansen saw large success particularly in Japan. The video that led to a substantial increase in popularity of the series in Japan was posted to NND in February 1st, 2008^[10], and featured the characters from THE iDOLM@STER that was also a huge online phenomenon on NND at the time. In Japan, Caramelldansen was popularly referred to as "Uu-Uu-UmaUma" (Japanese: ｳｯｰｳｯｰｳﾏｳﾏ(ﾟ∀ﾟ)), which came from a misheard phrase in this song.

The Japanese record label EXIT TUNES gained the rights from the original Caramell producers and released the single CD for Caramelldansen, including its sped-up version, on the coattails of its popularity on the web on May 21st, 2008. This CD was sold quite well and soon ranked in the top 20 of Japanese weekly sales chart. Moreover, Caramelldansen recorded the best sales of an international song in 2008, and was awarded single of the year (international section) in the 23rd Japan Gold Disc Award.^[11]

Caramelldansen Lights

Caramelldansen Lights refer to a series of humorous edits which are accompanied by the song Caramelldansen, usually muffled, and feature a certain object, such as a window or a person's face, rapidly flashing rainbow colors in sync with the beat. The format is also known as "Parties Too Hard and Dies" due to a number of memes imagining SpongeBob and other characters dead due to partying to Caramelldansen too hard.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References