The History Of Dank Memes

In the Mid 1990s, before there was Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, forums, or anything that we recognize under the realm of social networking today, there was something called Usenet. Because I was born in 1994, right at the cusp of the millennium, I had not previously heard of Usenet, and it is difficult to conceptualize what Usenet actually was/is, using our modern understanding of social media as a frame of reference, but I am going to try.

Essentially, Usenet was an online bulletin board that allowed people to chat, post on discussion forums, and share content, like video clips and images. Usenet was initially developed in 1979 as an alternative to the US military controlled Arpanet system, which eventually evolved into the Internet we are familiar with today. Usenet was basically social media before social media, or even the world wide web, was a thing. Usenet is still around today, although it has undoubtedly been overshadowed by contemporary social media sites, and most Internet users are probably unfamiliar with it today.

1996: The First Memes Dancing Baby

Many think that the first Internet meme was the Dancing Baby. The Dancing baby, otherwise known as Baby Cha-Cha or Oogachacka Baby, was created in 1996 by Michael Girard and Robert Lurye. Essentially one of the earliest gifs, it’s a 3D image of a baby dancing to the intro of “Hooked on a Feeling” by the Swedish rock band Blue Suede. It was originally released in the fall of 1996 as a product sample source file in the 3D character animation software Character Studio, by Kinetix/Autodesk.

Ron Lussier, an employee of LucasArt at the time, tweaked the original file and began sending it to his coworkers via email, thus initiating the Dancing Baby’s viral spread. Then, in late 1996, John Woodell created an animated gif from the original video, as part of a demo to show the process of converting a movie to a gif, which continued the spread of the Dancing Baby. In 1997, artist Rob Sheridan found the .avi file in a newsgroup, and shared it to his homepage under a section entitled “Funny Stuff”. Sheridan says he was then bombarded by emails asking him to share the file, which prompted him to make “The Unofficial Dancing Baby Home Page”, which included the Dancing Baby, as well as several remixes of the original.

In 1998 Sheridan was interviewed by K5 News in Seattle, where he discussed making the homepage. In the two years since its original creation in 1996, the Dancing Baby had taken on several defining qualities of an Internet meme: it spread rapidly, and began to evolve, mutate, and take on new forms as remixes were made. The modified editions of the Dancing Baby began to stream in steadily from fans, including “Kung Fu baby”, “Rasta baby” and “Samurai baby.” In 1998, the baby even made the leap from Internet screen to TV screen, appearing on the popular TV series Ally McBeal as a recurring hallucination. One of the earliest Internet memes had officially gone viral.

The Dancing Baby had some staying power, which is another characteristic that defines viral Internet memes. 10 years after its conception, on January 15th, 2006, the original Dancing Baby video was uploaded to Youtube, which was a platform still in its infancy, having been created the year prior in 2005. The Dancing Baby would go on to amass more than 3 million views, and 1300 comments in the following 11 years. On February 7th, 2020, the baby, now 14 years old, resurfaced on Twitter when user @JArmstrongArty shared an HD remaster of the dancing baby recreated from the original video, and received over 5,400 likes and 2,200 retweets in less than a week. Tribute sites to the baby still exist, such as megababy.com.