Hampsterdance

» see geocities.com/hampsterdance as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the first time i saw the hamsters was on a friend's machine in an internet cafe in turkey, probably 1999 or 2000. somebody had pasted a link in msn. the page loaded slowly over the cafe's leased line and started looping the disney sample. eight or twelve rows of cartoon hamsters wiggling in time. nobody knew yet that it was made by a canadian art student on geocities. it was just a page that existed.

deidre lacarte built it in august 1997 in nanaimo, british columbia. she was an art student at malaspina university-college and a martial arts instructor on the side. the geocities page was a competition with her sister and a friend to see who could get the most hits. she stuck a row of dancing hamster gifs on a black background, looped a sped-up sample of roger miller's 'whistle stop' from the 1973 disney robin hood, and submitted it to the geocities address she had registered.

the page got about eight hundred visits between august 1997 and march 1999. nothing. then in february 1999 the link started circulating in email forwards, slashdot posted it, and the curve flipped. lacarte logged sixty thousand views in four days. by the time the story hit mainstream press she had already lost control of the brand. the boomtang boys cut 'the hampsterdance song' with koch entertainment in june 2000 and the single went number one on the canadian singles chart.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

lacarte never registered hampsterdance.com. somebody else did, and ran a competing version that pulled more traffic than the geocities original at the peak. that is the kind of mistake you only make once on the internet, and you only get to make it before the domain-squatter industry has formed properly. the original geocities url with the slash and the username kept running, but the canonical destination by 2000 was the dot-com mirror that lacarte did not own.

the sample itself was an unlicensed lift of roger miller's whistle stop from the disney robin hood soundtrack. disney never sued, in part because the koch entertainment release in 2000 cleared the rights through a different licensing path. the original geocities page just kept looping the rip.

~ what it influenced ~

hampsterdance was the proof that a single-purpose page with no content other than a loop could be its own destination. the model showed up everywhere through the late 90s and early 2000s. allyourbase and badgerbadgerbadger and every two-second loop with a goofy gif grid traced back to the hamsters. youtube did not exist yet, the medium of the looping micro-page was the closest thing the early web had to a viral video.

the meme also outlived the page. lacarte built out hampton the hampster as a brand, with merchandising and a children's video that went into print runs in the early 2000s. the cartoon hamster on a black background became one of the small set of late-90s web objects that everyone over a certain age recognizes.

~ the long tail ~

yahoo shut geocities on 26 october 2009. lacarte's original page went down with the rest of the personal-publishing platform that day. the archive team had grabbed snapshots of the entire geocities corpus in the weeks before, including the hampsterdance directory, so the source files survive on the internet archive.

hampsterdance.com the brand kept going for a while afterward through lacarte and her successors, with anniversary versions and a phone app at some point. none of it had the cultural pull of the original geocities page during its short march-to-may 1999 window. that moment lives in screenshots now, and in the hamster gifs that get reposted on twitter every couple of years as nostalgia bait.

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