Nyan Cat is a

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

video uploaded in April 2011, which became an

internet meme An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...

. The video merged a

Japanese pop J-pop ( ja, ジェイポップ, ''jeipoppu''; often stylized as J-POP; an abbreviated form of "Japanese popular music"), natively also known simply as , is the name for a form of popular music that entered the musical mainstream of Japan in the 1 ...

song with an animated cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso flying through space and leaving a

rainbow A rainbow is a meteorological phenomenon that is caused by reflection, refraction and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a spectrum of light appearing in the sky. It takes the form of a multicoloured circular arc. Rainbows c ...

trail behind. The video ranked at number five on the list of most viewed YouTube videos in 2011.

Origin

Animated GIF

On April 2, 2011, the

GIF animation The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , #Pronunciation, see pronunciation) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scie ...

of the cat was posted by 25-year-old Christopher Torres of

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Texas Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...

, who uses the name "prguitarman", on his website ''LOL-Comics''. Torres explained in an interview where the idea for the animation came from: "I was doing a donation drive for the

Red Cross The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is a Humanitarianism, humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million Volunteering, volunteers, members and staff worldwide. It was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure re ...

and in-between drawings in my

Livestream Livestreaming is streaming media simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real-time over the internet. It is often referred to simply as streaming. Non-live media such as video-on-demand, vlogs, and YouTube videos are technically streamed, but no ...

video chat, two different people mentioned I should draw a 'Pop Tart' and a 'cat'." In response, he created a hybrid image of a Pop-Tart and a cat, which was developed a few days later into the animated GIF. Nyan Cat was based on a real cat: Torres' pet cat Marty, who died in November 2012 from feline infectious peritonitis.

Song

The original version of the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" was uploaded by user "daniwell" to the Japanese video site Niconico on July 25, 2010.ニコニコ動画(原宿).【初音ミク】Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!【オリジナループ】. Fro
nicovideo.jp
July 25, 2010. Retrieved May 30, 2011. The song features the

Vocaloid is a singing voice synthesizer software product. Its signal processing part was developed through a joint research project led by Kenmochi Hideki at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, in 2000 and was not originally intended to b ...

virtual singer

Hatsune Miku , also called Miku Hatsune, and officially code-named CV01, is a Vocaloid software voicebank developed by Crypton Future Media and its official moe anthropomorphism, anthropomorphic mascot character, a 16-year-old girl with long, turquoise bu ...

. The Japanese word is

onomatopoeic Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...

, imitating the call of a cat (equivalent to English "

meow A meow or miaow is a cat vocalization. ''Meows'' may have diverse tones and are sometimes chattered, murmured or whispered. Adult cats rarely meow to each other, so an adult cat meowing to human beings is probably a post-domestication extens ...

"). The song was later included in the

rhythm game Rhythm game or rhythm action is a genre of music-themed action video game that challenges a player's sense of rhythm. Games in the genre typically focus on dance or the simulated performance of musical instruments, and require players to pres ...

'' Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F'', released by

Sega is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo. Its international branches, Sega of America and Sega Europe, are headquartered in Irvine, California and London, r ...

in August 2012. On January 30, 2011, a user named "Momomomo" uploaded a cover of "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" featuring the UTAU voice Momone Momo. 【UTAU】Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!【桃音モモ】【ミクカバー】 ‐ ニコニコ動画(原宿). Fro
nicovideo.jp
, January 31, 2011. Retrieved May 30, 2011. The voice source used to create the Momone Momo voice was a Japanese woman named Momoko Fujimoto.

YouTube video

user "saraj00n" (whose real name is Sara June) combined the cat animation with the "Momomomo" version of the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!", and uploaded it to YouTube on April 5, 2011, three days after Torres had uploaded his animation, giving it the title "Nyan Cat". The video rapidly became a success after being featured on websites including G4 and

CollegeHumor CollegeHumor is an Internet comedy company based in Los Angeles. Aside from producing content for release on YouTube, it was also a former humor website owned by InterActiveCorp ( IAC) until January 2020, when IAC withdrew funding and the websi ...

. Christopher Torres said: "Originally, its name was Pop Tart Cat, and I will continue to call it so, but the Internet has reached a decision to name it Nyan Cat, and I'm happy with that choice, too." In March 2019, ownership of the YouTube channel hosting the original Nyan Cat video was transferred to

Means TV The Means Cooperative, or ''Means'', is an American anti-capitalist mass media worker cooperative. Means was founded in 2019 by filmmakers Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes in Detroit, Michigan as an expansion of their video production company Means of ...

, a

worker-owned A worker cooperative is a cooperative owned and Workers' self-management, self-managed by its workers. This control may mean a firm where every worker-owner participates in decision-making in a democratic fashion, or it may refer to one in which ...

video streaming service.

Remastering and sale as an NFT

In February 2021, it was reported that the gif's original creator, Chris Torres, had created an updated version and sold it as a non-fungible token (NFT) for 300

ether In organic chemistry, ethers are a class of compounds that contain an ether group—an oxygen atom connected to two alkyl or aryl groups. They have the general formula , where R and R′ represent the alkyl or aryl groups. Ethers can again be c ...

, the equivalent of US$587,000 at the time of sale.

Reception

The Nyan Cat music video reached ninth place in ''

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''s top ten

viral video A viral video is a video that becomes popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email.Lu Jiang, Yajie Miao, Yi Yang, ZhenZhong Lan, Alexander Haupt ...

s of April 2011, with 7.2 million total views. The original

video has received 199 million views . Nyan Cat won a

Webby Award The Webby Awards are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over two thousand industry experts and technology innovators. Categories include ...

in 2012 for "Meme of the Year". Due to the video's popularity, many new

remix A remix (or reorchestration) is a piece of media which has been altered or contorted from its original state by adding, removing, or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, book, video, poem, or photograph can all be remixes. The o ...

es and cover versions have been made, some several hours long. There are also

ringtone A ringtone, ring tone or ring is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call. Originally referring to and made by the electromechanical striking of bells, the term now refers to any sound on any device alerting of a new incoming ...

wallpapers Wallpaper is a material used in interior decoration to decorate the interior walls of domestic and public buildings. It is usually sold in rolls and is applied onto a wall using wallpaper paste. Wallpapers can come plain as "lining paper" (so ...

and

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

created for

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s and devices, including a

progress bar ...

substitute for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

which would show up in various places such as the file transfer progress indicator in

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, following a request on the

subreddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images ...

"Somebody Make This". Video games were developed for iPhone,

iPad The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating s ...

Symbian Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typic ...

, Android,

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design la ...

, and

HP webOS webOS, also known as LG webOS and previously known as Open webOS, HP webOS and Palm webOS, is a Linux kernel-based multitasking operating system for smart devices such as smart TVs that has also been used as a mobile operating system. Initially ...

, and a variety of

flash game A browser game or a "flash game" is a video game that is played via the internet using a web browser. They are mostly free-to-play and can be single-player or multiplayer. Some browser games are also available as mobile apps, PC games, or on co ...

s such as "

Snake Snakes are elongated, Limbless vertebrate, limbless, carnivore, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes . Like all other Squamata, squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping Scale (zoology), scales. Ma ...

" replicas using the cat's rainbow tail. "Nyan Cat Adventure", by

21st Street Games ''21st Street Games'' was a design studio based in Manhattan's Flatiron District with satellite studios in both South Florida and Mumbai, India. The studio specialized in gaming, mobile application, and web and technology development, and was be ...

, is an officially licensed game. An officially licensed

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. It i ...

entitled "Nyancoin" with the domain name nyanco.in (later nyan-coin.org) was launched in January 2014.

Website

Christopher Torres initially criticized the website www.nyan.cat, which originally featured a similar-looking cat with the pop tart replaced by a slice of toast, and the same background music. The site, which uses the

.cat .cat (pronounced in Catalan: ''punt cat'' ) is a sponsored top-level domain intended to be used to highlight the Catalan language. Its policy has been developed by ICANN anFundació puntCAT It was approved in September 2005. History Before . ...

sponsored top-level domain A sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) is one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet, alongside country-code top-level domains (ccTLD) ...

, was described by Torres as "plagiarized". Since 2012 the website has been operated by Torres, and shows the authentic version of the cat.

Temporary DMCA takedown

On June 27, 2011, the original YouTube video was taken down from the site following a

Digital Millennium Copyright Act The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or s ...

complaint from someone claiming to be Torres. Torres immediately issued a statement on his website ''LOL-comics'' denying that he was the source of the complaint, and contacted Saraj00n and daniwell, who hold the copyright for the video and the song, in order to file a counter-complaint to YouTube. During the period that the video was unavailable for viewing, Torres received numerous abusive e-mails from people who wrongly believed that he had filed the DMCA complaint. On June 28, 2011, the Nyan Cat video was restored to YouTube.

Lawsuit

In May 2013, Christopher Torres and Charles Schmidt, the creators of Nyan Cat and

Keyboard Cat Keyboard Cat is a video-based internet meme. Its original form was a video made in 1984 by Charlie Schmidt of his cat Fatso seemingly playing a musical keyboard (though manipulated by Schmidt off-camera) to a cheery tune. While Schmidt had uplo ...

respectively, jointly sued 5th Cell and

Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California, and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. D ...

for

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

and

trademark infringement Trademark infringement is a violation of the exclusive rights attached to a trademark without the authorization of the trademark owner or any licensees (provided that such authorization was within the scope of the licence). Infringement may o ...

over the appearance of these characters without permission in the ''

Scribblenauts ''Scribblenauts'' is a series of action puzzle video games primarily developed by 5th Cell. The series is owned and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The first game in the series was titled '' Scribblenauts'' and was first rel ...

'' series of video games. Torres and Schmidt have registered copyrights on their characters and have pending trademark applications on the names. Torres released a statement saying that he had tried to obtain compensation from 5th Cell and Warner Bros. for commercial use of the character, but was "disrespected and snubbed" multiple times. The suit was settled in September 2013, with Torres and Schmidt being paid for the use of the characters.

References

External links

*
Nyan Cat on ''LOL-Comics''
the original GIF animation by prguitarman (Christopher Torres), April 2, 2011. * {{youtube, QH2-TGUlwu4, Nyan Cat, saraj00n (April 5, 2011) 2011 YouTube videos 2011 works Fictional cats Fictional characters introduced in 2011 Internet memes introduced in 2011 IOS games Viral videos Webby Award winners Xbox 360 games