XSp.

I’m planning on starting a new series of posts about memes which are, in summary, “viral phenomena” on the Internet.

You might not know exactly what is a meme, but I’m pretty shure you already saw, watched, read or heard some of them.

Loituma Girl is one of them.

Also known as Leekspin, the original character is Inoue Orihime from Bleach anime. Particularly a scene from the second episode of the series, where the character is chatting with others while picking grocery store shopping that she had dropped during a car accident. She hold and twirls a leek while talking.

The quoted scene:


Someone had the brilliant idea of associating this small animation with part of a popular and traditional finnish song called Ievan Polkka.

First version, like many other memes, was a Flash Animation. Got it’s own homepage!

It’s also on YouTube:

After the original, the same mix was repeated several times with other anime characters, music remixes, and real people trying to imitate it.

Hatsune Miku from Vocaloid version:

(I’ll post a topic about Vocaloid soon)

Here a compilation of different versions… some kinda weird:

Here, a finnish band sings the original song:

And they even did a homebrew version for Nintendo DS (tested, works out, though it does nothing much):

And to have an idea of how popular it is, some different versions of the leek were made (plastic mostly), and are for sale out there… for instance, on jlist:

You can find lots of other versions and stuff about it just playing a bit with YouTube and Google…