Bright purple and orange title card for an explainer on the Tralalero Tralala meme

Published July 24, 2026 · The Rotino Team · fact-checked against the sources below

Every list of Italian brainrot characters puts tralalero tralala first, and every list tells the story slightly wrong. The usual version is that someone invented a phrase, attached it to an AI shark, and a genre was born in one upload. The real sequence has an extra step, and the extra step is the interesting part.

Tralalero tralala is a three-legged AI-generated shark wearing Nike sneakers, widely credited as the first Italian brainrot character. The audio is generally credited to the account @eZburger401, which posted in January 2025 and was banned shortly after, and the character spread through reposts rather than through the original. The name is Italian-sounding nonsense, closer to humming than to words.

The phrase came before the shark

Back in October 2023, more than a year before any of this, internet users were making edits of Dwayne Johnson rhyming about absurd things. In one of those edits the Johnson character uses the nonsense phrase “tralalero tralala,” which he then rhymes with a crude Italian line. Vulture traced this in its explainer of the trend, and it is the earliest documented appearance of the phrase.

That is the missing step. The words were already circulating as a joke sound, with an Italian rhyme attached, before anybody drew a shark. When the character showed up in 2025, it was not naming itself from scratch. It was inheriting a phrase that had already been floating around for over a year.

This matters for understanding the whole genre. Italian brainrot is not built on Italian words. It is built on the shape of Italian words: the vowel endings, the sing-song rhythm, the way “tralalero tralala” scans like a nursery-rhyme filler. Once you hear it that way, the naming convention across every character makes sense. Our what is Italian brainrot explainer covers how that pattern spread.

What happened in January 2025

The documented timeline is short and messier than the tidy version.

A TikTok user going by @eZburger401 is generally credited with posting the first video featuring the character, reportedly in January 2025. The account was banned soon after. Reporting suggests this was likely down to the audio, which contains Italian profanity and a blasphemous line, rather than the image itself.

So the origin post was gone almost immediately. What carried the character was the repost chain. Another user, @elchino1246, put the Tralalero Tralala audio over a different image, a shark mixed with a pigeon. On 13 January 2025, @amoamimandy.1a posted a now-deleted clip using the same audio over an AI-generated shark wearing shoes, and that one reportedly reached 7 million views, as the Daily Dot documented.

Notice the pattern: three accounts, three different images, one piece of audio. The audio was the meme. The shark was a costume the audio happened to be wearing when it went big.

The character itself

The design that stuck is a shark with three legs, standing upright, wearing Nike sneakers. Not two legs, not four. Three, which is exactly the kind of detail that makes an AI image feel wrong in a way people find funny rather than unsettling.

Descriptions of the character emphasise athleticism: superhuman running speed, big jumps. That framing comes from the narration in the videos, not from any official source, and it is worth flagging what that means. There is no rulebook. There is no studio. The “canon” is whatever enough people repeated.

One thing worth knowing before you repeat the audio: the original Italian narration is not clean. It contains profanity, and it includes a line about God that some Muslim users objected to, as CBC Kids News and others reported. Some Italian speakers pointed out that this kind of language functions as casual filler in Italian and that no anti-religious intent was likely meant. Both things can be true, and if you are sharing the sound in a classroom or a family group chat, it is fair to know what it says. The character is fine. The original audio is not really all-ages.

Why tralalero tralala gets called the origin point

Tralalero Tralala is not necessarily the first AI-generated absurd animal on the internet. The exact origin of Italian brainrot is genuinely unclear, and Wikipedia says so plainly. What Tralalero Tralala did was set the template that every later character copied:

  • An AI-generated hybrid: real animal, wrong details, incongruous human object (the sneakers).
  • A reduplicated, Italian-flavoured nonsense name.
  • A synthetic Italian voiceover telling absurd mock-lore over the image.
  • Audio you could reuse, so anyone could make their own version in minutes.

That last one is the engine. Because the audio travelled independently of the image, thousands of people made their own character on the same sound, and the format spread faster than any single video could. Every character that followed, from the drumming log to the coffee-cup ballerina, is running that same playbook. Chimpanzini bananini is a clean example: one real animal, one wrong object, fused into a single AI image and wrapped in a reduplicated, made-up diminutive name. If you want the Indonesian counter-example that arrived a month later from a completely different tradition, read Tung Tung Tung Sahur: what it means and where it came from.

Documented fact versus wiki lore

Worth separating, because search results blur the two constantly.

Reasonably documented: the October 2023 Dwayne Johnson edits containing the phrase; the widely reported @eZburger401 attribution and the ban (the original post is gone, so this rests on reporting rather than on the post itself); the @elchino1246 and @amoamimandy.1a reposts and the 13 January 2025 date; the character’s design; the objections to the audio’s content; its status as the trend’s usual starting point.

Fan-written lore: the powers, the personality, the rivalries, the alliances, the entire extended universe of who is whose enemy and who married whom. Character wikis present all of it in a flat encyclopedic voice, which makes invented storylines look identical to sourced facts. They are not the same thing, and nobody has authority over the storylines anyway.

The coffee-cup ballerina is the cleanest example of how far that goes. One line of her original narration really does call her the wife of Cappuccino Assassino, and everything after it, including a love triangle that drags this shark into it, is community fiction. We separated the documented part from the invented part in Ballerina Cappuccina, explained.

There is even a live argument about ownership. El Pais covered the trademark question in November 2025, and as of July 2026 it remains unresolved: when a character starts as an AI-generated image with no clear author, working out who holds any rights to it is a real legal problem rather than a fandom debate.

The takeaway

The shark did not invent the phrase. It inherited it, wore it well, and handed the format to everyone else. That is a more useful origin story than “one video started a genre,” because it shows the actual mechanism: a sound worth reusing, plus an image loose enough that anyone could swap in their own. The same gap between what a character was documented as and what fans later added to it turns up again in Lirili Larila, the cactus elephant whose famous time powers were never in the original at all.

That is the same reason making your own character is fun. Rotino takes any two things you type, like shark and skateboard, and merges them into one Italian brainrot cartoon you can save to a gallery and share.

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