About

Numa Numa is a video created by New Jersey amateur videographer Gary Brolsma, in which he performs a lip dub of the song "Dragostea din tei"^[1] by the Moldovan pop group O-Zone. Since its online debut on Newgrounds in December of 2004, the video has gained significant fame both online and offline for its parodies and re-enactment videos.

Origin

Broslma uploaded a lib dub video of the song "Dragostea din tei" titled "Numa Numa Dance" to the flash animation site Newgrounds^[3] on December 6th, 2004, receiving over 15.7 million views and 2,200 pages of comments over the next eight years. On August 14th, 2006, YouTuber xloserkidx uploaded a mirror of the video, which has accrued over 49 million views as of December 6th, 2012.

Dragostea din Tei

"Dragostea din tei" (roughly translated as "Love in the Linden Tree") is a 2003 dance single by the Moldovan pop trio O-Zone. Its nickname "Numa Numa" comes from the song's Romanian lyrics "nu mă, nu mă iei," which translates to "you don't want, don't want to take me."^[2] Upon its release in Europe in 2004, the song topped the single charts of nearly a dozen European countries as well as Japan's Oricon album charts in 2005.

Spread

On February 23rd, 2005, the flash video site Jeff is Cool^[17] uploaded a flash embed of Brolsma's video. On February 25th, the first Urban Dictionary^[19] entry for "numa numa" was created by user ShortbusGus, defining the term as a "repetitive fad" on Newgrounds. On February 26th, Free Republic Forums^[16] member zeugma linked the NewGrounds video in a thread about the song Mahna Mahna. The same day, The New York Times^[6] published an article titled "Internet Fame is Cruel Mistress for a Dancer of the Numa Numa," which included an interview with Brolsma, members of his family and Newgrounds creator Tom Fulp. In the interview, Brolsma revealed that he discovered the song in a Japanese flash animation with anime cats (shown below).

On August 24th, 2006, Brolsma created the NewNuma^[12] YouTube channel, which receives 28,880 views a day as of December 2012. On September 9th, Gary released a follow up video titled "New Numa: The Return of Gary Brolsma",^[9] which received over 16 million views over the next six years (shown below, left). On November 27th, the BBC^[21] published an article reporting that Brolsma's video was the second most viral video in the world with 700 million views, falling 200 million views behind the Star Wars Kid. On November 14th, 2007, Gary returned to the casual webcam format with a video titled “Numa Three – Crazy Loop!” (shown below, right), which received over 1.2 million views within the next five years.

In March of 2009, Gary collaborated with Geico Insurance to make a fourth Numa video (shown below, bottom, left). In late 2008, “Dragostea din tei” was used as the main sample in the hit single “Live Your Life” by T.I. and Rihanna (shown below, bottom, right), which topped the Billboard Hot 100 on November 8th, 2008.

Notable Examples

Parodies and remixes of the original Numa Numa videos began appearing on YouTube in 2006.

Search Interest

Search query volume for the keywords "Numa Numa" began rising in December of 2004 when Brolsma uploaded his video to Newgrounds and peaked in April 2005, a few months after the major news coverage took place.

Numa Numa 10th's Anniversary

On December 6 ,2014 Gary Brolsma uploaded a new video video title "Numa Numa 10-Year Reunion" honoring the video's 10th anniversary where he can be seen dancing to various music. On the same day Newgrounds posted a picture on it's front page honoring the video's anniversary.

External References