About

"We Are Number One" is a song sung by main villain Robbie Rotten in the Icelandic children's television show LazyTown, which was broadcast on Nickelodeon. Online, the song has gained a spontaneous surge of parodies and mashups through Soundcloud and YouTube.

Origin

On October 3rd, 2014, the 107th episode of the then long-running children's television show LazyTown, "Robbie's Dream Team," aired. In the episode, Robbie designs his own "dream team" (3 imperfect clones of Robbie) in order to capture the superhero Sportacus. Baffled by the incompetence of his clones, Robbie decides to teach the dream team to be villains through his song.

Spread

On July 23rd, 2016, Facebook ^[11] group Lazy Town Memes uploaded the clip of the song's performance from the series. the post received more than 1,500 reactions, 600 comments, 97,000 views and 15,000 shares.

Several months later, on September 10th, SoundCloud user NBG posted a remix of the track entitled "when montage parodies died a long time ago but u can't let go of the past". This track has amassed 460,000 views as of June 2023 (shown below).

On September 13th, 2016, the remix by NBG was picked up by YouTuber SiIvagunner, being uploaded as "We are Number One – LazyTown: The Video Game", garnering over 3,000,000 views.^[1]

On November 1st, then-unknown SoundCloud user and YouTuber Grandayy uploaded his first remix of the song, "we are waking up inside", eventually reaching 200,000 views. Subsequent remixes uploaded by Grandayy caused his popularity to skyrocket, eventually amassing roughly two and a half million subscribers. His most popular video is entitled "We Are Number One but it's woahed by Crash Bandicoot". This parody video mixed with Woah has reached 33 million views as of June 2023.

In November of 2016, Word Replacement Remixes of the song rose to prominence on YouTube.^[2] Some of these have achieved more than a million views.^[3] Due to the quotable nature of the song, memes referencing lines and scenes from "We Are Number One" became popular for a time on sites like Twitter and Instagram (examples below).

Stefan's Response

On October 13th, 2016, an Ask Me Anything thread titled "I am Stefan Karl (Robbie Rotten from LazyTown) and I am in the fight of my life against cancer! AMA!" was submitted to the /r/IAmA subreddit by user ClarkStreetGang.^[4] Robbie Rotten actor Stefan Karl acknowledged the popularity of the meme, and thanked everyone for their support in Karl's fight against cancer.

On December 4th, 2016, the original AMA post was edited, and a Facebook event created, to announce a livestream performance of the song.^[5] On December 9, 2016, the official LazyTown YouTube channel uploaded a video titled, "We Are Number One but it's the original and it's 1 hour long…."^[6] On December 11, 2016, Karl hosted a livestream performance of "We Are Number One" featuring himself, the original cast of Rottens (Bjorn, Bergur, and Snorri), and Máni Svavarsson, who composed the song.^[7][8]

On December 12th, 2016, the stems for the song were released for free download for anyone to use in their own remixes.^[9] The stems were also posted to Soundcloud (shown below) as well for listening. Concept audio and rejected lyrics were later added to the SoundCloud channel as well.^[10]

On December 15th, 2016, the LazyTown YouTube channel uploaded the full "Robbie's Dream Team" episode, gaining 18,000,000 views as of June 2023. On August 22nd, 2018, in response to the death of Stefan Karl, the channel uploaded a compilation entitled "Robbie Rottens Best Moments", with the video description reading: "Forever Number One. F"

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References