Opera Portal News

In 2004 one of the first real viral videos was unleashed upon the Internet, spawning the rise of Webcam videos of lip syncing to Romanian pop lyrics -- courtesy of one Gary Brolsma.

The Moldovan pop group "O-Zone" had a pretty big hit in 2004 with their song "Dragostea din tei", which is Romanian for "Love of the linden tree". The song made it to #1 on the Eurochart Hot 100 for 12 weeks, but was relatively unknown in the US.

Gary Brolsma managed to change all of that, when he uploaded a single lip-synced video to the Newgrounds site in December 2004. Coupled with the subsequent rise of YouTube shortly after, Gary's Numa Numa dance became one of the first big viral video hits on the Web.

For your viewing pleasure, Gary's exquisite choreography is embeddded below.

Gary's Numa Numa dance would be mimicked, parodied and copied by people all over -- at least 6,000 versions of the Numa Numa dance were made.

In turn, the popularity of the original O-Zone song spiked sharply, inspiring many different remakes and covers of it, including translations into English, and other languages. In nightclubs across North America, people drunkenly tried (and failed) to imitate the Numa Numa dance. It was everywhere!

(And yes, there was even an opera version )

Originally, Gary only made the video to get a chuckle from a few friends and didn't think much of it. Yet within weeks, his friends had forwarded on to people all over the Web, and the viral spread of the video reached millions of people, making Gary one of the early youtube sensations.

Intent on exploiting his newfound fame for all it was worth, Gary recorded a professionally produced follow up video "New Numa" that even had a song written by one of the O-Zone founders. Although the video received millions of views, it didn't have as significant an impact as the original Numa Numa video. In 2007, "Numa Three: Crazy Loop" was released, returning to the original, simple webcam format that worked so well the first time. Geico Insurance sponsored a fourth iteration of the Numa videos as well, although none have had the sort of success or cultural resonance that the first had. Sometimes you just get something so perfect on the first try, in a flash of inspiration, that its likeness can never be repeated.

So what is the lesson that can be learned here? Perhaps the following:

1. If you are a European pop producer seeking success in the American market, there is no need to produce an English video -- an overweight kid lip syncing on youtube is way more effective.
2. Making funny videos of you dancing goofily for your friends can make you famous. Just don't get your hopes up that lightning will strike twice and that you can make a career out of it the second time around

By the way, on NewGrounds, you can see Gary's original video with Subtitles, if you'd like to see translations of the original Romanian lyrics (which are quite different than the lyrics in the English version of the song).

For our Vietnamese readers, there is a version by Vũ Hà.