Internet Nostalgia

Let’s Revisit the Dancing Baby

The world’s first meme, when memes needed much more than the internet

Welcome to part five of our Internet Nostalgia series, which looks back at phenomena that captured the imagination and attention of the internet for a fleeting moment and then vanished as everyone moved on to something else. This series looks back at those olden times, and what they told us about the internet, and ourselves. If you have a suggested topic, email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. Last week, we looked at the Harlem Shake. This week: the dancing baby.

Date: Fall 1996

The story: If you work in the world of computer animation, you surely know a program called Autodesk 3ds Max, the go-to graphics program for 3D images and animation. The program has been around for a long time. So long, in fact, that it was originally called Character Studio, an MS-DOS system operating on old Microsoft computers. Some animators were screwing around with Character Studio one day in the autumn of 1996 when they accidentally created a monster. They made a 3D video of a baby, in a diaper, dancing. They then unleashed it on an unsuspecting populace.

And, boy, did everyone lose their shit about it. I was 19 years old in 1996 and thought the dancing baby was the most mind-blowing thing I’d ever seen. Look, the baby is dancing to that song in Reservoir Dogs!

(That video goes on for an hour.)

There was something about it, I swear, that really did feel revolutionary. It was cutting-edge technology, it was irreverent, it was cute, it was harmless. It was… a meme. And we were not yet ready to handle memes. Suddenly, the dancing baby was everywhere.

Pop culture crossover: All told, the only way the Dancing Baby could really become a massive thing in 1996 was to cross over into popular entertainment. After all, not enough people had computers in 1996 to make anything an online-only phenomenon. The Dancing Baby…