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Nathaniel on Yo Gabba GabbaCelebrity chef Anthony Bourdain's recent appearance on Nick Jr.'s 'Yo Gabba Gabba!' got us thinking: What is it about this kids' show that brings the hip celebrities? Elijah Wood, Jack Black, The Shins: the show is basically a 20-something's wet dream. But that's not what marked 'Yo Gabba Gabba!' on the internet cultural map. It all started with one tiny boy named Nathaniel and his awesome moves.
Created by two "cool dads" Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz, the concept of the show was always to combine entertaining kid's programming with pop-culture relevance. (Which is not a new concept: Jim Henson's 'Sesame Street' and 'The Muppet Show' have both followed the same formula of "tune in for your kids, stay for your favorite celebrities.") So yes, you'll see MGMT, The Ting Tings, and Sarah Silverman making the rounds on a show meant for 8-year olds.

But it was really E!'s 'The Soup' that gave the show a place in TV history when it highlighted one of the dancers, a young boy named Nathaniel, and his kickin' moves. 'The Soup' brought Nathaniel's precocious dancing style to the forefront of America's consciousness by using it as recurring B-roll, mashing up his groove to T-Pain and Britney Spears, and eventually bringing the young Asian boy onto the set for a cameo appearance, officially cementing his star potential.







Whether or not Joel McHale was picking up on a cultural zeitgeist or created one is a little unclear, since around the same time Nathaniel began popping up all over the internet with his love of dance. His most popular video (with 1,213,850 YouTube hits) combines the boy's booty-shaking with everything from nu-metal to Daft Punk to Imogen Heap.

Then video DJ's realized that much like the "Lazy Town"/Lil Jon' mashup, basically any hip-hop song synced up awesomely to Yo Gabba Gabba's dance routines:


It's hard to place exactly where YGG! fits into our internet subculture of Meme-age, especially since it's designed specifically to get picked up and circulated. So while definitely being self-aware, Gabba Gabba may have undermined itself by being too cool: after all, we spend all our time watching this one little kid dance to our favorite songs instead of the cameos from Amy Sedaris and Jack McBrayer.