Dancing Baby, one of the earliest viral videos in internet history, is getting a new look

If you were born in the late 20th century, you may be aware of the Dancing Baby, also known as ‘the Oogachacka Baby’ – famous 3D-rendered animation of a baby dancing. Created by Michael Girard, Robert Lurye and John Chadwick in 1996, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon and is believed to be one of the first viral videos in internet history, long before the world defined such pictures and videos as ‘memes’.

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And now, more than two decades after it first got popular, HFA-Studio will release a digitally restored, smooth high definition 1/1 artwork by the original creators as NFT, “so the Dancing Baby can shake its hips forever”, the Vienna-based studio stated in a press release.

 

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To give a makeover to the Dancing Baby, they “invited contemporary 3D artists and animators of another generation to ‘remix‘ the dancing baby. Artists and creators of the beginning of the = web3 re-imagine the loop with their tools, like the original creators did at the beginning of the idea of the web2″.

 

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Attributing the popularity of the animation to “bizarre merged with innocence“, it added, “The original dancing baby recalls the initial excitement, optimism and playful creativity that gave birth to the web. It was a weird time for imagining hopeful visions of what the internet might become.”

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While the e-mail chains and websites made the Dancing Baby animation spread like wildfire, its advent into the mainstream media had turned it into a cultural phenomenon in the late 90s. It appeared on TV shows like Ally McBeal and Simpsons, commercials for Blockbuster Video and Delta Airlines, Video Games like EA Sports’ FIFA 99 and Silent Hill 4 and even in Charli XCX’s and Troye Sivan’s 2018 music video for ‘1999‘.

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