Dancing Baby
You might remember it as Baby Cha-Cha, Oogachacka baby, Ally McBeal baby
The archive does not hold a copy of this image that it may show.
Most viral ever22 of 32
1996·Early web, before YouTube·skill
The first thing the pre-social web passed hand to hand until network television picked it up.
At a glanceThe facts
- Spread in
- 1996
- Format
- GIF
- Taken from
- A sample file, sk_baby.max, shipped with the 3D animation plug-in Character Studio
- Made by
- A model by Viewpoint Datalab, animated by Robert Lurye and John Chadwick
- Also known as
- The Oogachaka Baby, after a version set to Blue Swede’s Hooked on a Feeling
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
A gif classified under children, dance, described as skill.
Why it matteredWhat changed
It was made as a demonstration file for animation software and escaped. Posted to a forum and emailed between colleagues, it is one of the first things the web spread that everybody recognised, years before anything was called viral.
TimelineIn order
- Made
Kinetix demonstrates the dancing baby at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference.1
- Posted
Character Studio is released with the baby among its sample files.1
- Took off
Its spread peaks across 1997 and 1998, by which time it has appeared in television dramas, advertisements and music videos.1
- Came back
CNN reports that the animation is being remade at higher resolution.1
The version you rememberNot the same thing
A looping GIF, usually set to Hooked on a Feeling. The song was added by somebody along the way.1
A silent sample animation for professional software, showing that a dance could be applied to any 3D figure. An animator at LucasArts, Ron Lussier, posted it to a CompuServe forum and emailed it round; a developer, John Woodell, turned it into a GIF.1
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asIt was made as a joke to share.
ActuallyIt was a product demonstration. One of the people credited with it later threw his copy of the model away and called it disturbing.1
More from hereIn this collection
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · a moment that changed what the internet did next · copied, redrawn and reused until the original stopped mattering · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
This spread as an animated file passed from person to person, not as a video upload.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This spread as an animated file passed from person to person, not as a video upload.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
ConnectedFollow it further
- Spread by The GIFGIF · 1996
The animation spread once it had been converted from a 3D software file into an animated GIF that any browser could show.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things