Nyango Star

Confirmed 185,398

About

Nyango Star is a Japanese mascot that is a mix of a cat and an apple and plays heavy metal drums. Several videos in which the character plays heavy metal drums in unfitting contexts have gone viral.

Origin

According to its website,^[1] the character is the reincarnation of a cat who was buried in an apple field, leading to the fusion of apple and cat. A spirit told it it had to go to Hollywood to be fully reincarnated as a cat, and so it picked up the drums to become famous.

Nyango Star uploaded its first video to YouTube on July 8th, 2015, showing itself performing a drum cover of The Ventures "YOZORA NO HOSHI," gaining over 63,000 views (shown below).

Spread

In the following three years, the character uploaded several more drum covers. Some of its most popular videos include a cover of Slipknot's "Before I Forget," which gained over 275,000 views (shown below, left) and Babymetal's "紅月-アカツキ- AKATSUKI," which gained over 674,000 views (shown below, right).

The character began growing popular globally following a March 4th, 2017 Twitter post by @ak1225_062708 showed it playing along to the theme song of anime series Soreike! Anpanman. The tweet gained over 89,000 retweets and 114,000 likes, and the video was viewed over 2.84 million times (shown below). The video was covered by The Daily Dot^[4] and was featured on KnowYourMeme. ^[5]

On November 12th, 2017, YouTube user qhoto_nao posted a different video of Nyango Star playing heavy-metal drums along to the theme song of Soreike! Anpanman, gaining over 1.5 million views (shown below).

[This video has been removed]

On October 2nd, 2018, music publicist Eric Alper tweeted the video with the caption "When you're overqualified for the job," gaining over 36,000 retweets and 83,000 likes.^[2] This led to coverage of Nyango Cat by The Daily Dot.^[3]