Gary William Brolsma (born: January 14, 1986), is an American YouTuber, vlogger, and musician. He is more famously known as the Numa Numa Guy as he is the creator of the Numa Numa Dance.
History[]
Gary created his channel on March 15, 2007. As a YouTuber his videos range from vlogs, videos games such as Megaman 6, Wii Sports Club, Mario Kart 64, FIFA 15 and others, and used to make videos of different cars he drove ranging from a Ford Mustang, Ford F-250, Ford Focus, Ford Fiesta, Fusion Hybrid, VW Bunny, Porsche Cayenne and a Porsche Panamera. As of 2019, he started making EDM Music, some of his most popular are March of the Moonshiners (7k Views), High Paradise Movement (5k Views) and Yellow Traffic Light (1.2K Views).
Meme icon[]
By February 28, 2005, less than 3 months after Brolsma released the video on Newgrounds, it had been viewed more than 160 million times on that site alone. Brolsma later stated in an interview, "...I found "Dragostea Din Tei" in another (I believe it was Japanese) flash animation with cartoon cats". Others have noted Brolsma's inspiration was the Japanese flash animation Maiyahi by the Albinoblacksheep.com user "ikari", which featured soramimi wordplay (from Romanian into Japanese) and whose video featured an animated version of the popular Shift JIS art cat Monā.
On Newgrounds, "Numa Numa Dance" has since been seen more than eighteen million times. From there it has been copied onto hundreds of other websites and blogs. According to a November 27, 2006, report by the BBC, based on page impression figures collated by viral marketing company The Viral Factory, "Numa Numa Dance" was the second-most-watched viral video of all time, with 700 million views, losing out only to "Star Wars kid". As of November 2012, Korean rapper Psy has taken the number 1 most viewed video spot with his "Gangnam Style" pushing Gary and Star Wars Kids down to positions 2 and 3, respectively. "Gangnam Style" has more than 3 billion views. Brolsma received mainstream media coverage from ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and VH1's Best Week Ever and the "Numa Numa" video was listed as number 1 on VH1s Top 40 Internet Superstars. According to The New York Times, however, he was an "unwilling and embarrassed Web celebrity". He cancelled media appearances but reappeared in September 2006 with a professionally produced video, "New Numa", featuring a song specially made for him by Variety Beats. This video, hosted on YouTube, marked the start of the "New Numa Contest", which promised US $45,000 in prize money and a US $25,000 award to the winner.
On December 5, 2014, Brolsma uploaded a video entitled Numa Numa 10-Year Reunion to Newgrounds, a video of him lip-syncing several songs, including "Shake It Off" by Taylor Swift, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" by Bob Dylan, and "Firework" by Katy Perry. Both the original video and the 10-Year Reunion video have since been deleted by the Newgrounds moderation team due to music licensing issues and the site's focus on animations.
This meme was popular during the time between 2006-2015, and a few common resurgences throughout 2016-2020.