By: Zeke Cameron
WE ARE NUMBER ONE MEMES
HISTORY
LazyTown is an Icelandic educational musical comedy made to teach kids about healthy lifestyles, and it uses a mix of live action, puppetry, and CGI. The show was created by Magnús Scheving.
LazyTown first premiered on August 16th, 2004 on Nickelodeon. The show ended in 2007, having 53 episodes, but got two more seasons between 2013 and 2014.
PLOT
The series focuses on the eight-year-old Stephanie, who had just moved into LazyTown to live with her uncle, Mayor Meanswell. She is surprised to find out that the residents of LazyTown are well, lazy. She gets help from the town's superhero, Sportacus, to teach the residents of LazyTown about being more active and healthy. Stephanie's attempts are often foiled by the villain, Robbie Rotten, who prefers a sluggish lifestyle and is irked by the folks of LazyTown being active. Robbie's attempts however, often don't work out well.
MEME
On October 3rd, 2014, the 107th episode of LazyTown aired, titled "Robbie's Dream Team". In the episode, Robbie creates 3 clones of himself, Bobby, Tobby, and Flobby, to help him catch Sportacus. However, the clones end up being very incompetent and clumsy. So Robbie teaches the clones how to be real villains, through a catchy song, titled "We Are Number One".
On September 13th, 2016, Youtube channel, Silvagunner, who was well known for song parodies, uploaded a video titled "We are Number One - LazyTown: The Video Game" which was a parody remix of, obviously, "We Are Number One". The video was very popular, and now sits at over 1,000,000 views.
With "_____ but _____" videos on Youtube being popular thanks to Bee Movie and the TV show, "The Nutshack", people started to change the "We Are Number One" video in many ways. In the song remixes, the word "one" would usually cause something to happen, since that word was used a lot in the song. Similar to the word "bee" causing a change for Bee Movie parodies. Some other LazyTown town songs became little memes as well. Those are "The Mine Song", "Cooking By The Book", and “You Are a Pirate”.
More videos can be found on YouTube, as well as the "Videos" tab on this website.
CANCER
In late September 2016, it was revealed that the actor for Robbie Rotten, Stefan Karl, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and would need to have surgery. On October 10, 2016, a GoFundMe page was created by LazyTown's head writer, Mark Valenti, to raise money for Stefan's surgery. As of February 8, 2017, the fundraiser has $115,786 of it's $100,000 goal.
MEME
On December 9th, 2016, the official LazyTown Youtube channel acknowledged the meme by uploading a video titled "We Are Number One but it's the original and it's 1 hour long...." with others soon to follow, like "We Are Number One but it has no words... (Instrumental)" and "We Are Number One but it's the instrumental and it's backwards....". On December 11th, 2016, Stefan Karl, the actors of the Rotten clones (Bjðrn Thors, Snorrl Engilbersson and Bergur Þór Ingólfsson), and Máni Svavarsson, composer of We Are Number One, hosted a live stream on Facebook. The live stream was an interview with the actors, as well as the composer of the song, followed by the actors performing We Are Number One live, and Stefan thanking everyone for the memes and helping with his fight against cancer. The video was then uploaded to Stefan's Youtube channel, titled "We Are Number One live but it's the live version with a interview 12.11.16". We Are Number One became one of the few memes acknowledged by the creators of the source material.