I’m now addicted to a new flash video/song: LEEKSPIN DOT COM (from Decathanerd). The song is mesmerizing and has a light joyous hint to it. I’ve set up a mirror in my gallery.
Click to start the animation or view it in the gallery.
The character you see spinning the leek is a female character from Bleach (the anime) named Orihime. She’s a bit of a klutz, but pretty cute:
After searching online for awhile, it turns out this song is called Ievan Polkka. This version was performed by Loituma in 1995. Both Wikipedia entries were started after this flash animation started spreading around (5/8/2006 and 4/27/2006 respectively). From Wikipedia:
The song is sung in Savo, the eastern dialect of the Finnish language, making it even more comical for Finns.
The intermezzo, which was used in the Flash movie, is just phonetically inspired gibberish with some Finnish words in it. It is not the part of the original song by Eino Kettunen, but rather is introduced by Loituma.
—This song is best known from an a cappella performance by the Finnish quartet Loituma, first released in their album “Loituma” in 1995, re-released in album “Things of Beauty” in 1998.
The song, popular in Finland but previously unknown to the rest of the world, became better-known on the Internet since April/May 2006 because of a Flash cartoon.
—
A flash animation including this song has gained popularity on the internet. The cartoon consists of a 4-frame animation of an anime character twirling a leek to a 26-second loop from the song. Like many other such cartoons, it is set to loop continuously. Due to the infinity, the nonsensical sound of the singing, the simple energizing melody, the girl’s cheerful facial expression and the absurdity of spinning a leek the cartoon is considered very funny and has been spread by quite a number of people. Within a few days, tens of thousands of pages directed to the possible origin or had the file uploaded on their own webspace.
The “leekspin girl” is the BLEACH character Orihime Inoue, she spins the leek because she is telling her friend what she is planning to cook (usually something weird).
For the cartoon the second half of the fifth stanza (four lines) and the complete sixth stanza (eight lines) have been used; apparently they have no meaning and are therefore not included in the official lyrics. This is overlooked in most cases by the users who post the lyrics, often causing confusion.
It was originally made by an anonymous user of the image board 4chan and posted on the site’s flash board.
By now there are multiple videos and remixes of the song which have been inspired by the flash cartoon.
You can get the song in Loituma’s Things of Beauty album. You can listen to a preview of Ievan Polkka/Ieva’s Polka at Amazon.com.
Here you can view a video of Loituma Live (from Decathanerd) performing Ievan Polkka (Ieva’s Polka). An awesome thing about this group is they perform as a capella which always has this cool aspect to it. Here’s a mirror in case the original ever goes down.
