Interest
Japan Sets Twitter Record During Laputa Film's 13th Airing (Updated)
posted on by Crystalyn Hodgkins
Japanese Twitter users set a world record for tweets per second during Friday's re-airing of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's 1986 anime film Laputa: Castle in the Sky.
A Nico Nico Douga server developer had challenged Japanese viewers of the film to try to crash the Nico Nico Douga website during the moment that the main characters Pazu and Sheeta say the spell word "balse" at the climax of the film (Nico Nico Douga simultaneously streamed the film as it was airing in Japan). Fans across Japan used social websites to say the spell together with the two characters. During that moment in the film, Japanese Twitter posters set a world record of 11,349 tweets per second.
Laputa: Castle in the Sky re-aired on December 9, and it earned an average rating of 15.9% in Tokyo's Kanto region. This was the 13th airing of the film since 1988. Saturday's airing featured the first broadcast of Laputa's newly remastered version.
Source: Japan Trends, Nico Nico News
Update: Twitter now says that 25,088 tweets per second were sent — nearly three times the previous record set by singer Beyoncé's announcement of her pregnancy (8,868 Tweets per second). Source: Tech Crunch
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