ViralWorld

2007·Early YouTube

Caramelldansen

You might remember it as Uma uma dance

No copy of this image is currently available to show.

  • SourceNo single original
  • MediaNot held by ViralWorld

A Swedish dance track sped up and welded to a two-second Japanese animation loop, in a form nobody designed.

The story

What this was

A gif classified under dance.

It first appeared in 2007, during early YouTube.

It is the definitive artefact of the mid-2000s anime internet, and one of the earliest examples of a meme whose parts come from three countries and no author. The Japanese release of the sped-up version, titled Uma uma, charted on Oricon — a Swedish pop song reaching the Japanese charts in a form its makers had nothing to do with.

Caramell reformed to capitalise on it. A promotional virtual group was launched. The loop has never really stopped: it recurs every few years on a new platform, most recently on TikTok, usually among people who have no idea it is Swedish, Japanese or twenty years old.

You were there

More from 2007

The same internet

Early YouTube

More like this

Related

Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.

What we know

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
A gif classified under dance.
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