Dancing Baby

~ the obit ~

The body came from a catalog. Viewpoint DataLabs sold 3D models by number, and the baby was model 5653, Toddler with Diaper. The dance came from somewhere else entirely: Michael Girard and Robert Lurye at Unreal Pictures had built a cha-cha for a skeleton, and John Chadwick used the Physique tool to stick the one onto the other. Girard reportedly found the result unpleasant and threw it out.

It survived because it was useful. Character Studio, the animation package Kinetix shipped in august 1996 for 3D Studio Max, needed sample files that proved the software could put convincing weight and motion into a body. The baby was that proof. It went out on the disc, with the software, as documentation.

Ron Lussier, working at LucasArts, found the file, adjusted it, called it Baby Cha and emailed it to somebody as a joke. That is the whole origin event. He put it on CompuServe as an.avi, and John Woodell converted it into an animated GIF, which is the version everybody actually saw, because a GIF would open in a browser without asking permission from anything.

I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k line, and the baby is one of the first things I remember arriving as an attachment. That is the part worth being precise about. In America it was a character on a television show with a name and a running joke attached. Where I was, it was a small file with no context at all, forwarded by people who had no idea where it came from. Nobody I knew could have told you it was software documentation. It looked like something the internet had generated on its own.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it spread ~

The technical reason it traveled is worth stating plainly: it was small. An animated GIF of a few hundred kilobytes went through a mail server, down a modem and into a browser without anyone needing to install anything or understand anything. Every viral artifact before broadband had to pass that test, and most did not.

In april 1997 a seventeen year old named Rob Sheridan found the.avi in a newsgroup, put it on his personal site, and was buried under requests for the file. He built The Unofficial Dancing Baby Home Page to collect the variants people were making. Sheridan was later hired by Trent Reznor to run the Nine Inch Nails website, which is a career that starts in an unlikely place. Around the same time somebody set the loop to the opening of Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling", and the ooga chaka version became the definitive one.

~ the television job ~

David E. Kelley put it on Fox. The baby's first appearance was in "Cro-Magnon", the twelfth episode of Ally McBeal, on 5 january 1998, where it turned up as a hallucination standing in for the main character's anxiety about having children. Effects supervisor Richard Kerrigan rendered it semi-transparent so it would sit inside the live action. Kelley's explanation was that it tapped into her internal war.

That is the moment a forwarded file became an intellectual property. Kinetix and Unreal held the copyright jointly and licensed it hard. More than 350,000 shirts were sold. It went into Blockbuster Video commercials and screensavers and came preloaded on some computers, and by december 1998 an online retailer was selling mugs with it. The Simpsons parodied it in december 2000, which is usually the sign that a joke has finished.

~ the day it died ~

As an internet phenomenon the baby was already over by late 1998. The Hampster Dance took the attention and the same audience, and the pattern of a thing being everywhere for eleven months and then being embarrassing has held for every meme since.

But it had a contract, and the contract outlasted the joke by nearly four years. So the honest death date is the one where the last screen it was booked on went dark: 20 may 2002, when Ally McBeal finished its fifth season and was done. That is an editorial call and it is worth saying so out loud. What it marks is real, though. After that there was nowhere the baby was scheduled to appear.

~ the long tail ~

Michael Girard has never made peace with it. He had studied human motion seriously and wanted the software judged on that, and instead the thing that made his company famous was a file he had thrown in the bin, which he described in 2018 as a small uncanny-valley GIF that people mostly enjoyed ridiculing. Asked whether he regretted making it, he said yes, one hundred percent.

He came back to it anyway. In march 2021 a Vienna studio called HFA approached the original animators, and in february 2022 they re-rendered the baby in a current version of 3ds Max. The result was minted as NFTs in may 2022, twenty-six years after a demo file walked out of a software box. The first thing the internet ever passed around hand to hand for free came back as a numbered asset with an owner, which is either funny or exactly what you would have predicted.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »