Nyan Cat

About

Nyan Cat, also known as Pop Tart Cat, is an 8-bit animation depicting a cat with the body of a cherry Pop-Tart flying through outer space. While absurd themes like flying kittens and pastry cats have been around for some time, the surreal humor behind this particular combination has captivated YouTubers and online art communities, spawning fan illustrations as well as user-interface designs and homebrew games across multiple platforms.

Origin

The Pop-Tart Cat animation was posted on the daily comics site LOL-COMICS^[1] run by illustrator Chris Torres, also known as prguitarman, on April 2nd, 2011. The original drawing was based on his own Russian Blue cat, Marty, and was drawn after receiving two separate suggestions for a cat and a pop tart during a Red Cross charity drawing event on Livestream^[28]. Prior to the Pop-Tart Cat, prguitarman had already gained a relatively large audience with a few other instances of comics circulating on the web. The GIF animation was also reblogged via Tumblr^[2] on April 2nd, 2011, accumulating more than 3,000 notes (likes & reblogs) in its first two weeks:

On April 5th, 2011, YouTuber saraj00n posted a video titled "Nyan Cat"^[3] using comic artist prguitarman's Pop-Tart Cat animation set to the well-known Japanese Vocaloid song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya" by Japanese artist Daniwell-P looping in the background, Although the song had been originally composed for Hatsune Miku to sing, The version used in the video was of the cover sung by the Utauloid Momo Momone. The video (since privated) gained more than one million views in its first two weeks.

On April 12th, 2011, the official NyanCat YouTube channel then uploaded the version of the animation with "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya" playing in the background, receiving over 2.4 million views and 19,000 likes in roughly 12 years (seen below).

Spread

On April 10th, the Nyan Cat video was picked up by popular blogs and social networking sites, including Memebase,^[4] BuzzFeed, ^[5] Tumblr ^[6] and Facebook ^[7] among others.

On April 12th, the Tosh.0 blog ^[8] posted the Nyan Cat video, as did CollegeHumor ^[9] and G4TV.^[10] There are several remixes and spinoff variations of the original video circulating on YouTube, many of them customized with alternative characters and background music.

Nyan Cat has been also briefly seen on Sprint's Nexus 4G "Cats" commercial^[16], which featured a number of popular cat video clips.

Slipknot's Psychosocial Video

YouTuber xDaZJMx^[11] commented on the original Nyan cat video by saraj00n telling viewers to watch Slipknot’s Psychosocial (muted) with the Nyan cat song playing in the background. The comment instructed other YouTubers to play the Nyan Cat video and hardcore rock band Slipknot's "Psychosocial" music video simultaneously in sync, which virtually resulted in a Nyan Cat audio dub (mirror below, left).

xDaZJMx's instruction quickly gained hundreds of likes, was featured as the highest comment, and many users began flooding the Psychosocial video’s comments^[12] with Nyans. As of April 26th, 2011, Slipknot's "Psychosocial" music video page on YouTube has over 111,000 comments, with tens of thousands reading "NYANNYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYANYA" (example below, right). This caused confusion among Slipknot listeners, and further spread the Nyan cat meme.

":https://knowyourmeme.com117365

Single-Serving Sites

Nyan.cat^[13] was launched on April 13th, 2011, featuring the text "NON-STOP NYAN CAT" and another single serving site Slowbro.org^[14] was launched on the next day, featuring a "rainy" version of the original. The flash game version featuring a timer display similar to Nyan.cat was uploaded by Newgrounds^[15] user Blind-Bane on April 27th.

Games

Many game developers began to create assorted Nyan Cat games, such as "Nyan Cat Lost in Space,"^[23] "Snake Nyan Cat," "Nyanicorn (Robot Unicorn Attack variant)," "Nyan Cat Fly" and more. A site listing all the Nyan Cat games while also hosting one of its own is located at Nyan-Cat.com.^[31] Some Nyan Cat games have also been released onto the mobile platform, enabling use on various smartphones. A small tech demo of Nyan Cat that will work on the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) has also been created,^[27] It currently runs on NES emulators.

Nyan Cat has also been referenced in "Buffalo Bison Revenge"^[29]. The game, developed by Juicy Beast Studios^[30], uses in-game items, held by gummies, to temporarily benefit the player. One item is a poptart that causes the player to turn into a poptart bison and fly for a few seconds, trailed by a rainbow.

PBS LulzSec Hack

On Sunday, May 29th, the PBS website was hacked by the group "LulzSec", and several of the website properties were defaced with Nyan Cat related images. The group claims the hack was a reaction to the Frontline episode called "Wikisecrets", that some felt was biased against Wikileaks. LulzSec released the following statement explaining the motivations behind the hack:

Greetings, Internets. We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed. We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further… perusing. As you should know by now, not even that fancy-ass fortress from the third shitty Pirates of the Caribbean movie (first one was better!) can withhold our barrage of chaos and lulz. Anyway, unnecessary sequels aside… wait, actually: second and third Matrix movies sucked too! Anyway, say hello to the insides of the PBS servers, folks. They best watch where they're sailing next time.^[17]

On May 30th, 2011, LulzSec tweeted a link to a pastebin post saying that PBS was not hacked by SQL, but rather a "0day we discovered in mt4 aka MoveableType 4".^[18][19]

Nyan Cat Progress Bar

On June 16th, 2011, YouTube enabled a custom flash player for the original Nyan Cat video that showed an animated mini Nyan Cat flying across the progress bar with a rainbow trail. A screenshot was posted to Reddit^[21] the same day. On the 5th of July 2011, YouTube made a global update on the video player user interface and to everyone's disappointment the Nyan Cat custom progress bar was permanently removed.

Also quite remarkable are the efforts made by some developers to recreate YouTube's progress bar and integrate it to different operating systems as a fancy replacement for some user interface elements. On June 24th, 2011 InstantElevatorMusic (@instantelevator) released Nyan Cat Progress Bar, a modification for Windows default progress bars.^[24]

Also, on the 19th of July 2011, Nikos Lykousas (@dummydev) released NyanSliders for jailbroken Apple devices, a tweak that aims at replacing any slider in iOS with an animating Nyan Cat leaving a rainbow trail, just like the original YouTube progress bar.^[25][26]

Copyright Claims

On June 27th, 2011, the original saraj00n video was taken down by YouTube, claiming that they had received a copyright claim to the video from Prguitarman (shown below, left). However, Prguitarman stated on his own site^[22] that he did not file any claims, and that he is contacting several people who have contributed in any way to the video to begin filing a counter DMCA to have the video restored (shown below, right).

Funny how someone can easily make a complaint but to actually prove it the owner has to jump through all of these hoops. FUN TIMES! But seriously, there is a lot of work involved here and it’s pretty stressful.

Meanwhile, people are flagging my videos on YouTube and giving me death threats just like upstanding Internet citizens usually do. Good job.

Anyway, I’ve been working at this for about two or three hours and have done the most I can for now. Saraj00n, Daniwell, and YouTube have been contacted and I am just now waiting for each of their replies so we can work on getting the video back up.

On June 28, 2011, YouTube restored the video after having confirmed that Prguitarman had not filed a claim, and restored everything from the original video including the custom Nyan Cat seek bar. However, because of YouTube's interface update on July 5th, the custom seek bar has been removed.

Nyan Cat To-Go Bookmarklet

In July 2011, a New York University student (@blackrabbit) introduced a javascript bookmarklet allowing the browser user to summon Nyan Cat at any time and anywhere online.

Click to Play

Musical Tributes

Marty's Death

On the evening of November 1st, 2012, Chris Torres tweeted out a series of messages, telling the story of Marty's life. In December 2010, he adopted the gray cat along with a brown and white cat he named Buster, after Buster Bluth from the comedy series Arrested Development. Soon after the two were adopted, Buster was diagnosed with Feline infectious peritonitis, a disease that attacks the animal's white blood cells, and passed away soon after. In late October 2012, Marty was diagnosed with the same disease and his condition quickly worsened. At approximately 9 p.m. on November 1st, Marty passed away in Torres' arms. The default animation on Nyan.cat was changed to Sad Nyan Cat, showing the Pop-Tart Cat with his eyes closed and without his rainbow.

Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat Lawsuit

In April 2013, Chris Torres and Charlie Schmidt, the creator of Keyboard Cat, sued Warner Bros. over unauthorized uses of their copyrighted internet cats in the game Scribblenauts. The lawsuit was settled that September for an undisclosed amount.^[33]

Nyan Cat NFT Sale

On February 18th, 2021, Nyan Cat's original creator Chris Torres sold a Nyan Cat NFT on the digital art marketplace Foundation^[32] for 300 ETH, about $587,658 at the time, following a 24-hour auction. Shortly after, Torres tweeted his reaction to the sale of the historic meme NFT (seen below).

On February 22nd, 2021, Know Your Meme then interviewed Torres about the NFT and sale where he shared his reaction and thoughts on meme crypto art (shown below).

Interview with Know Your Meme

On February 18th, 2021, Know Your Meme interviewed Chris Torres for the 10-year anniversary of the meme where we retraced the origins and discussed the Nyan Cat NFT just before it was sold (seen below).

2023 Original Nyan Cat YouTube Video Takedown

On November 6th, 2023, the original saraj00n YouTube channel, which first combined the Nyan Cat animation with the "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" song into one video, broke years of silence to post a video supporting the Palestinian cause and calling for a ceasefire in the 2023 Israel-Hamas Conflict. ^[34] While some online expressed support for the video, others criticized it (examples shown below).^[35][36]

In the days following, Torres, the artist who drew the original Nyan Cat, addressed the controversy and then stated on his X / Twitter account that the video was moved to a new channel dedicated to Nyan Cat (seen below).^[37]

On November 17th, 2023, Torres then told Know Your Meme in an article covering the controversy:

Regarding the video, in recent years the owner of the channel chose to license out their page to studios unrelated to Nyan Cat. This resulted in a number of unrelated videos appearing on the channel since 2011, causing confusion among fans. To stay true to the original Nyan Cat spirit, we've recently established an official Nyan Cat YouTube page. This step is aimed at making it simpler for fans to locate and enjoy authentic Nyan Cat content. The classic video has found a new home on its official YouTube page.

The saraj00n YouTube^[38] channel changed its bio line in response, saying the meme had been "forcibly displaced" (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References