Pappara Dance

About

The Pappara Dance, also known as “Pappara Series” (Japanese: パッパラシリーズ), is a Japanese animated dance meme, quite similar to Carameldansen Caipirinha dance and Paffendorf dance in the sense that the characters doing the dance are replaced with any anime or video game character of the editor’s choice.

Origin

The dance itself comes from the opening of a Japanese TV anime Galaxy Angel Rune, the counterpart of Galaxy Angel II games (shown below, left).^[1] It ran for 13 episodes in 2006 and generally did not receive very good reviews compared to it’s first season. Meanwhile The song that is used is a sped-up version of Danish duo Me & My’s 1995 single, “Baby Boy”, by DJ Speedycake who is famous for creating the sped-up remix of Caramelldansen (shown below, right).

Spread

The ever first instance of the looping scene from the OP using the “Baby Boy [Speedycake Remix]” can be found on the Japanese video-sharing website Nico Nico Douga uploaded on March 2nd, 2008. The video was entitled “Papapapa Papparappara” (shown below, left). Derivatives did not start appearing, until November 12th, 2008 with a video entitled “Pappara by Sakuya and others” (shown below, right) using the characters (from left to right) Sakuya Izayoi, Remilia Scarlet, and Hong Meiling from the popular manic shooter game series Touhou Project.

Niconico パパパパ　パッパラッパラ Niconico 咲夜さん達でパッパラ

The days to follow had users uploading their own versions of the meme.^[2]

deviantART & YouTube

As well as other anime dance memes, Pappara dance is also accepted in outside Japan. “Pappara baby boy template” made by a deviantART user DreamerSkyte in August 2009^[3] helps the creation in English-speaking world.

Not a few illustrations and videos has been posted to deviantART^[4] and YouTube^[5] since that year.

Various Examples

Videos

Niconico 紅魔館deパッパラ Niconico 【ダンガンロンパ】トリオでパッパラ【手描き】
Left: Touhou Project | Right: Dangan Ronpa
Niconico 【手書きリボーン】双子とフランでパッ.パ.ラ Niconico 【手描きIb】3人でパッパラ
Left: Reborn! | Right: Ib

Left: Transformers | Right: Pokémon

Illustrations

Before Pappara dance came, this dance scene in Galaxy Angel Rune OP had been set to a subject for parody art works on Futaba Channel (2chan) in 2006-2007. Threads of those aren’t archived. But several illustrations made in those days are left on the web, and some of users in the Japanese illustrators community pixiv still post their art works under the tag “Rune OP Parody” (る～んOPパロ).^[6]