“Ugachaka, ugachaka.” Do you know this baby?
He was a superstar.
“He's the amazing dancing baby.
Now everyone's going gaga over baby cha cha.” “And oh, baby, can it dance.” “That
baby cracks us up.” In 1997, this baby known as Baby Cha,
the ooga chaka baby, the dancing baby, he started circulating on message boards and websites.
And by 1998, screens were “bouncing to dancing
baby’s beat.” And he was on T-shirts, news reports, national television.
He was everywhere.
“More people have played with this newborn than any other infant in history.”
“The cyber tot obsession” took over the world and became the first real Internet meme in the process.
For a while, “our collective id fancied dancing babies” for real.
But how did this really happen?
How did a dancing baby take over the world?
Because I kind of think the complete story hasn't been told yet.
“That is just a sick little baby.” “I think it’s bizarre.” This is the dancing baby
we know., this a baby in a low resolution routine
usually dancing to Blue Swede's version of Hooked on a Feeling.
This is how it happened.
I'm going to start off with the classic “great man” theory of the dancing baby
before I get to a more structure-based approach.
“To infinity and beyond.”
In 1995, computer animation, it was genuinely new.
The idea of 3-D, incredibly well animated animation— in the mid-nineties, it was pretty unusual.
So this guy was a little mind blowing and a little creepy, too, even at the time.
The dancing baby was actually bundled with a plug-in called Character Studio.
“Character Studio is a unique set of plug-in components for 3D Studio Max.”
It had different included character samples like Alien, a Chimp and Baby Max.
Then you could use preset animations and plop those onto the characters like a plie, a flip, and a cha-cha.
That could go on any of the characters.
In this vintage demo, you can actually see all of these characters
doing the Dancing Baby dance because somebody has put the cha-cha animation on them.
This is the original dancing baby file right here.
You can see it now.
I did have some issues converting from P.C.
to my Mac, so I couldn't get the full dancing baby experience.
Yeah, let's.
I hope you appreciate that.
I've invited this image to haunt your dreamscape.
The point is, the dancing baby was a genuinely novel thing to have inside your house.
So the people who made this, they do deserve credit.
This picture comes from their dancing baby NFT page.
Yeah, that's...I mean, it's still out there.
The NFT threat is real.
So is that how it happened?
A small team made this scene, and then it became famous?
“The dancing baby is the brainchild of computer animators, including
Michael Gerrard, who wanted to show off some new software.” Oh, that's.
That's just the beginning.
We only know about the dancing baby because it wasn't a singular creation.
“Fertile imaginations have given birth to all sorts of variations of the same nameless micro kid.”
The thing that makes it the first meme
is that it was a remix from conception to international glory.
To start with, the character studio people bought their baby from a modeling site
called Viewpoint that made tons of characters like...that is very graphic, 1995.
That dancing baby model that viewpoint made, he was actually modeled on a toy baby,
according to the designer Tony Morrill, who was quoted in an old New York Times article.
After the animation rolled out in Character Studio, a guy named Ron
Lussier says that he tweaked the animation and changed some of the shoulder movements in the lighting a bit.
So the creation of the baby was a remix, but, crucially, so was the distribution.
People quickly started searching for Babycha on old newsgroups
and people started adapting that file really quickly.
GIF maker Chuck Poynter, who made this, and this, and this, also made this, but that was just the beginning.
The baby got further recontextualized and edited.
Some of that happened on the places where the baby lived...that sentence will make sense in a second.
Artist Rob Sheridan reminisced about it on his Patreon page,
because he made one of the top dancing baby websites.
It is glorious.
“As you can see, you'll find all kinds of demented things that the dancing pages doing.”
“In fact, some of Babycha’s evil Internet manifesto versions are downright grown up.”
From the beginning, the idea was to create different dancing babies out of Babycha.
They put them on different backgrounds.
They had them doing different animations, and they put the dancing baby dance over different types of music.
This was even a contest to find out which music worked best with the dancing baby.
Then they found the perfect song: Hooked on a Feeling.
And that song itself is a remix.
It started with BJ Thomas's Hooked on a Feeling.
“I can't stop
feeling...” The chants from this song: (Chants I will get canceled for if I type them out.) Both
were added to Jonathan King's cover.
“Ugachaka, ugachaka.. I can't stop..”.
And then Blue Swede leapt in with a classic that worked perfectly with the dancing baby.
“Ugachaka, ugachaka.
I can't stop this feeling.” Only then was a phenomenon born where
newsmagazines cooed, they found the baby's evil twin, and eventually the legal rom-com.
Ally McBeal incorporated yet another version of the baby,
made by a pro VFX team from the Character Studio files and put them in the show.
They didn't just plop on, Babycha.avi, they effectively remixed it by working from Character Studio.
They changed the angle, as you can see here,
and they changed the opacity of the babies so that he could really be a part of Ally McBeal’s world.
In true meme fashion, this idea was flexible enough to go from Blockbuster
commercial to national TV, and it became the first meme.
So if you've seen Kirby Ferguson's work about remixes, you know that
this video is basically an homage, a remix, pale imitation, rip off, whatever you want to call it.
I think that there are two things going on here.
First, the ability to be remixed.
It served as an evolutionary engine to create something that was irresistible.
But then you also have that remixability as an engine behind the viral growth of the baby.
This baby invites your creativity.
That is why it went viral.
People passed around because they had great ideas for how to use him next.
That's what kept him alive and that's what kept him going.
Great memes aren't just the work of one person or a team.
They're the work of a bunch of people coming together to try to make it even bigger.
“Ugachaka, ugachaka,
ugachaka.” “I can’t stop this feeling, deep inside of me.”
Ha ha.
“I’m hooking on a feeling.” “I’m high
on believing...that you’re
in love with me.”
All right, That's it for this video.
Thank you for watching.
If you haven't been on this channel before, I post personal videos, history videos, stuff like that.
And I also have a special announcement.
I am starting a Patreon...gulp.
I guess the link is down below.
Let me tell you the reason why.
You know, there's never been a good dancing baby video.
And I think the reason is that people know that if they include any of that Blue Swede song,
they'll get demonetized by YouTube.
And that's totally fine. Blue Swede should get all the money from this video.
I love that song, but I want to make sure that I'm making the best videos possible
and not being influenced by whether or not I'll get good YouTube ads off of it.
This channel is fully supported and funded by this channel
and so I want to make sure that I continue to think about what's best for the videos in the future.
And Patreon is a way to do that.
It's a way for you to also support this channel and hopefully become part of what will be like a
a little mini-community.
I don't really know yet. I don't know how it's going to work. I'm learning too.
The first thing I'm going to do is push up my glasses.
The second that I'm going to do is there is a reaction video, director's commentary, video up there right now.
You can check it out and learn a bit of the research that I left behind.
That was something
that was starting to really bother me about videos, is that I wasn't including all my research.
So now I have a place to put more of the nuggets that I couldn't include in the video proper.
Hopefully I'll figure out more stuff to do in the future and maybe I'll see you there.
Until then,
have a good one and
hold your babies tight, whether they're real or low resolution digital files.
Okay, bye.