Film + TV

YouTubers are fighting cancer by exhaustively remixing a children's song

by Jeremy Mersereau

The go-to source for live funerals, DPRK propaganda, and approximately 8 billion edits of Bee Movie, YouTube has long since surpassed its mandate of just simply sharing videos, and mutated into something far greater. But even with its unexpected potential, no one seriously ever thought YouTube could fight cancer… but it turns out, simply by editing the song “We Are Number One” from Icelandic children’s TV show LazyTown as much as possible, it might do just that.

Originally airing in 2004, LazyTown stressed the importance of being active and eating right to kids, all through the power of an insane production budget and disturbingly un-lifelike child puppets. You might remember its original meme status when an enterprising YouTuber mashed up Lil Jon with the show:

After the series ended in 2006, it was revived in 2013 for 2 more seasons, an episode of which featured the endlessly catchy, Madness-esque “We Are Number One,” sung by the series’ main villain Robbie Rotten:

Entranced by that catchy sax lead, YouTubers took up the LazyTown mashup mantle and started editing the music video endlessly, usually in insanely specific ways:

For once, all this memery ended up having a practical purpose, however. Robbie Rotten’s actor, Stefán Karl Stefánsson, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September, and a GoFundMe page was set up to help the actor and his family recuperate. The multiple memers behind the infinite versions of “We Are Number One” have been using their creations to spread the word about the fundraising effort, and it’s worked – the page recently surpassed its $100,000 goal and then some.

In thanks, and to facilitate even more ridiculous memery, Stefán not only organized a live, original cast performance of “We Are Number One” to be broadcast Facebook Live, but he also released the raw stems of the track, which will let even more ambitious creations see the light of day:

So what are you waiting for? Get meme-ing! If you need an ultra-specific idea, how about… “We Are Number One but the vocals are 1 octave higher and sax is 1 lower”? That should be easy enough to do with those stems… aw, crap.