Nyan Cat

NYAN CAT

Team Member: Julianne Dragseth

Nyan Cat, also known as Pop Tart Cat, is an animated character that was first seen on the daily comic site LOL-COMICS on April 2nd, 2011. The Nyan Cat is an 8-bit animation that portrays a cat with a body consisting of a cherry pop tart that is flying through outer space. The illustrator is Chris Torres (also known as prguitarman), which found the inspiration for the Pop Tart Cat from his own Russian Blue cat, and the idea of the Pop Tart came during a  Red Cross charity drawing event on Livestream.

Prior to the Pop Tart Cat/Nyan Cat Chris Torres aka prguitarman had already received some attention for his comics, and hence gained a relatively large audience. This might be why this specific GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) got so popular. The existing audience was big enough to circulate the GIF enough so it would receive attention. The GIF was reblogged via Tumblr on April 2nd, 2011, which resulted in over 3,000 likes or reblogs during the first two weeks.

Also, in addition to this previous audience, and the reblogging, one other person helped give attention to the Pop Tart Cat. On April 5th 2011, Youtube saraj00n posted a video titled "Nyan Cat" with the Pop Tart Cat animation set to the Japanese Vocaloid song Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya by Japanese artist Daniwell-P looping in the background. This video accumulated over one million views in its first two weeks on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QH2-TGUlwu4

Nyan Cat has also been spread onto different platforms and to different social networking sites. This mainly started happening on April 10th when the Nyan Cat video was making its appearance on Facebook, Memebase, Tumblr, Buzzfeed and other blogs and social networking sites.

After a short period of time, there was created several spin offs and remixes of the video, with either alternative background music or characters. Here are some examples:

Hello Kitty Nyan Cat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dslp-JXTjiE

Tac Nayn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM-9Q0ac6Zs

In addition to these spin offs there has been created games, single-serving sites, a Nyan Cat progress bar among other things. In addition there has also been made a dubbed version of a Slipknot song, where the video is played with the song, which is now associated with the Nyan Cat, in the background.

Nyan Cat had its peak in June 2011, but thereafter the interest has been decreasing according to the Google Trends table.

What might have caused the Meme's publicity might be because the animator had a known blog that had loyal followers. This might make them more accessible to sharing the meme and hence contributing to the spread and popularity of the meme. Also the amounts of spin offs that have been created might have made this meme even more popular.