This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
The "Dancing Baby", also called "Baby Cha-Cha" or "the Oogachacka Baby", is an internet meme of a 3D-rendered animation of a baby performing a cha-cha type dance. It quickly became a media phenomenon in the United States and one of the first viral videos in the mid-late 1990s.
Michael Girard, who has worked on Rugrats and The Simpsons , [1] travelled from Holland, Netherlands, to California, United States, in 1993 with his wife Susan Amkraut. [2] There, the couple started the company Unreal Pictures Inc. [2] and the team began the "Biped" animation project by developing sample 3D animated files. [3] The samples would be released in Character Studio, a plug-in for the Autodesk 3ds Max application (known as "3D Studio Max" at the time) from a division of Autodesk, Kinetix. [2] [4]
Robert Lurye, who was animating at Rhythm and Hues Studios, was hired by the company and was told to make more samples. Lurye started changing the choreography of a dancing adult skeleton that had been made by the team (the "chacha.bip" file). [2] [3] He added more dance moves, such as making it "play air guitar for a second and bend over and shake its shoulders." [2] For the visuals, Unreal Pictures Inc. had multiple renderings of creatures that could be animated, including an alien, a dinosaur and a baby. [3] The baby, made by modeler Tony Morrill, had been bought from a Viewpoint DataLabs listing. [5] [2] Team member John Chadwick, by using the Physique software, made the baby model perform the skeleton's dance. He stated that it was his idea to load the dancing animation on the baby. [1] Vulture, a pop culture website owned by New York magazine, reports that the animation was also developed by Paul Bloemink, John Hutchinson and Adam Felt. [6]
The result was a file with the name "sk_baby.max". [6] Kinetix exhibited a demo of the Dancing Baby in the 1995 SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. Character Studio was released in August 1996. According to The New York Times , Girard had discarded the Dancing Baby, opining it was "disturbing" for its realistic nature, in contrast to Disney animations at the time. [2]
LucasArts animator and Autodesk customer Ron Lussier recovered the Dancing Baby by recombining the chacha.bip file with the baby model (which was commercially available), made some minor changes and posted it on a CompuServe Internet forum as an .avi format. [2] [3] [7] He also reportedly sent the Dancing Baby to his colleagues by e-mail. [8] [9] Although Girard credits Lussier as being responsible for the meme's spread, [7] news website Vox reports that the meme became viral after it was converted and posted as an animated GIF by developer John Woodell. [10]
Users and animators were able to render their own video clips of the 'original' animated dancing baby (sk_baby.max) and circulate these via the Compuserve (Internet) forums, World Wide Web (commercial and private websites), and in print ads and unrestricted e-mail. Such activity proliferated most significantly from mainstream (Windows users) royalty-free access to and user renderings of the 3D dancing baby source file for use on the Internet and in broadcast television via several news editorials, advertisements, and even comic programming in local, national (U.S.), and various international markets. Woodell's animated GIF then proliferated to numerous other websites, and later proceeded to show up in a broad array of mainstream media, including television dramas (such as Ally McBeal ), commercial advertisements, and music videos between 1997 and 1998.
Variations to the original animation were later produced by numerous animators by modifying the sk_baby.max sample file's animation or the baby model itself, including a "drunken baby", a "rasta baby", a "samurai baby", and others. However, none of these became as popular on the Internet as the original file, and most popular uses of Dancing Baby are virtually unchanged from the original character mesh and animation.
In February 2020, Twitter user @JArmstrongArty not only rediscovered the original Dancing Baby file, but also converted the original animation into high definition. [11]
In June 2022, the original creator Team Michael Girard, Robert Lurye and John Chadwick teamed up with Viennese design boutique HFA-Studio to release a digitally restored, high definition version of the Original Dancing Baby as a non-fungible token (NFT). [12] To set the original creation in perspective, they invited contemporary 3D artists and animators like Chris Torres (creator of the famous "Nyan Cat") and Serwah Attafuah (aka Kid Eight) to "remix" the dancing baby. [13] The project appeared on various media outlets like CNN and gained a lot of attraction in the crypto scene. [7]
The Dancing Baby animation spread quickly on popular web forums, individual websites, international e-mail, demo videos, commercials, and eventually mainstream television. Awareness of the baby most significantly increased when it was featured on CBS, CNN, and Fox's comic drama series Ally McBeal. The animation was shown on several episodes of Ally McBeal as a recurring hallucination, suggesting a metaphor for the ticking of Ally's biological clock. [14] On the show, it was accompanied by Blue Swede's cover of the B. J. Thomas song "Hooked on a Feeling". Various commercial advertisements presented the Dancing Baby animation to international markets continuing the mainstream media attention. This particular manifestation of the video, bound to the song, is widely distributed and referred to as the "Ugachaka Baby" (or "Oogachaka Baby").
More examples of the Dancing Baby used in mainstream media are below.
The Dancing Baby made constant appearances in trade shows, worldwide marketing media, and in mainstream media such as television, music videos, and later in film too:
Several video games have included references to the Dancing Baby.
The Dancing Baby is sometimes referenced as a symbol of 1990s culture, or as part of a tradition dating back to the time of its popularity.
Animation is a filmmaking technique by which still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets (cels) to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animation has been recognized as an artistic medium, specifically within the entertainment industry. Many animations are computer animations made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Stop motion animation, in particular claymation, has continued to exist alongside these other forms.
Ally McBeal is an American legal comedy drama television series created by David E. Kelley and produced by David E. Kelley Productions and 20th Century Fox for Fox. David E. Kelley and Bill D'Elia were executive producers.
Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating animations. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to moving images. Modern computer animation usually uses 3D computer graphics. The animation's target is sometimes the computer itself, while other times it is film.
The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on June 15, 1987.
Arthur is an animated television series for children ages 4 to 8, developed by Kathy Waugh for PBS and produced by WGBH. The show is set in the fictional U.S. city of Elwood City and revolves around the lives of Arthur Read, an anthropomorphic aardvark, his friends and family, and their daily interactions with each other.
Rugrats is an American animated television series created by Arlene Klasky, Gábor Csupó, and Paul Germain for Nickelodeon. The series focuses on a group of toddlers, most prominently—Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, and Lil and their day-to-day lives, usually involving life experiences that become much greater adventures in the imaginations of the main characters.
The Hampster Dance is one of the earliest Internet memes. Created in 1998 by Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte as a GeoCities page, the dance features rows of animated GIFs of hamsters and other rodents dancing in various ways to a sped-up sample from the song "Whistle-Stop", written and performed by Roger Miller for the 1973 Walt Disney Productions film Robin Hood. In 2005, CNET named the Hampster Dance the number-one Web fad.
Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, commonly known by the shortened title Muppet Babies, is an American animated television series produced by Marvel Productions and Henson Associates. The show portrays toddler versions of the Muppets living together in a nursery under the care of a woman known as Nanny, involving the concepts of the power of imagination and creative problem-solving. The show's main target group is for children aged 2–5. The idea of presenting the Muppets as children appeared in a dream sequence in The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), released two months before Muppet Babies debuted. The idea was a success, and it transformed into a spin-off.
Frederator Studios is an American animation television production studio founded by Fred Seibert, which is a division of Frederator Networks, Inc. It was formally launched by Seibert in 1998, with its initial formation in January of the prior year. Seibert remained at the company until founding FredFilms, its successor company in February 2021. The studio has been credited with producing various media projects, predominantly in children's animation. Their slogan is "Original Cartoons since 1998." The studio has locations in New York City, where Frederator Digital is based, and Burbank, California.
Adobe Flash animation is an animation that is created with the Adobe Animate platform or similar animation software and often distributed in the SWF file format. The term Adobe Flash animation refers to both the file format and the medium in which the animation is produced. Adobe Flash animation has enjoyed mainstream popularity since the mid-2000s, with many Adobe Flash-animated television series, television commercials, and award-winning online shorts being produced since then.
Gotham Girls is an American Flash animated web series focusing on several of the female characters of Gotham City, produced jointly by Warner Bros. Animation and Noodle Soup Productions. The series, which ran from 2000 to 2002, starred Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Batgirl, Catwoman, Renee Montoya and Zatanna in short stories of varying length about the daily lives of the characters. It takes place in the DC Animated Universe, with Arleen Sorkin, Diane Pershing, Adrienne Barbeau, Tara Strong, and Bob Hastings reprising their roles from Batman the Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures.
Michael M. Wartella is an American underground cartoonist, animator, writer and director based in New York City, generally publishing under the name M. Wartella or just Wartella. He is best known for his work in The Village Voice and on Cartoon Network's MAD.
A viral video is a video that becomes popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email. For a video to be shareable or spreadable, it must focus on the social logics and cultural practices that have enabled and popularized these new platforms.
Loituma Girl is a Flash animation set to a scat singing section of the Finnish song "Ievan polkka," sung by the Finnish quartet Loituma on their 1995 debut album Things of Beauty. It appeared on the Internet in late April 2006 and quickly became popular. The animation consists of four frames showing the Bleach anime character Orihime Inoue twirling a leek, set to a 27-second loop from the song. The part of the song which is included in the meme is improvisation by Hanni-Mari Autere which are totally random.
Martell Robinson, known by the stage name Jasmine Diane Masters, best known simply as Jasmine Masters, is an American drag queen, internet celebrity, YouTuber, and stand-up comedian. He is best known for competing on the seventh season of RuPaul's Drag Race and the fourth season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. Robinson is responsible for several viral videos, many of which have become memes, most notably And I Oop! which was the most used gif of 2019.
Frinkiac is a website for users to search for words or phrases from episodes of the American animated sitcom The Simpsons. It returns screenshots related to the search terms, from which it generates memes and animated GIFs. Created by Paul Kehrer, Sean Schulte and Allie Young, the site is named after a computer built by one of the show's recurring characters, Professor Frink. The site was critically acclaimed upon its launch, and Newsweek wrote that it "may be the greatest feat of Internet engineering we've ever seen". As of May 2016, screenshots from the first seventeen seasons of The Simpsons are in Frinkiac's database.
"Mother's Day", also known as the "Rugrats Mother's Day Special" or "Rugrats Mother's Day", is the second episode of the fourth season of the American animated television series Rugrats and the show's 67th episode overall. It revolves around the holiday from the perspective of a group of babies—Tommy Pickles, Chuckie Finster, and Phil and Lil Deville. Tommy, Phil, and Lil attempt to find the perfect mother for Chuckie while sharing their favorite memories about their moms. At the end of the episode, Chuckie's mother is revealed to have died of a terminal illness. It concludes with Chuckie and Chas looking through a box of her belongings, including a poem she had written for her son. Meanwhile, Didi Pickles tries to plan the perfect Mother's Day with her mom Minka, while Betty DeVille helps Stu Pickles with his invention to help mothers.
Bongo Cat is an Internet meme that originated when a Twitter user created and tweeted a GIF of a white cat-like blob smacking a table with its two paws. The tweet was then replied to by another Twitter user with an edited version of the GIF including bongos hit to the tune of a Super Mario World track. The reply went viral and caused the GIF to be edited to many other songs.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)