Know Your Meme: We Are Number One

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 September 13th, 2016, the song was picked up by YouTuber SiIvagunner, starting with his uploads “We are Number One – LazyTown: The Video Game” and “We are Number One (Beta Mix)- LazyTown: The Video Game” , garnering over 900,000 views and over 130,000 views respectively.^[1]

The song has also been used as a Soundcloud meme in the form of Soundclown joke mashups

Since early November, Word Replacement Remixes of the song have risen 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” have become popular on 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 4, 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 12, 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.^[10]

.