The Weekly Meme Roundup: A Tale Of Two Internets
For much of the late-90s and the early-2000s, the Dancing Baby was the de facto Internet meme. It's hard to imagine now when so many memes are forgotten almost as soon as they go viral, but this absurd, computer-generated infant was a cultural icon, an avatar for what the internet was and could be. And again, it was just a simple animation of a baby in a diaper dancing to Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling."
In the 20 or so years since its appearance on Ally McBeal, the Dancing Baby has largely fallen out of favor, despite the fact that Snapchat blatantly ripped off the baby for their viral Dancing Hot Dog two years ago. The Baby, for all its grace and showmanship, is an artifact of another, simpler time.
Or so we thought.
Apparently, all it took to revive the baby was a Twitter artist with a couple of hours to kill. In a recent thread by an 18-year-old artist named Jack (@JArmstrongArt), the baby has been cleaned up for the modern age, remastered from the original model.
HOW I RE-DISCOVERED THE MODEL FOR 'THE DANCING BABY', RE-RENDERED THE ORIGINAL MEME IN HD, AND PORTED IT TO GMOD: A THREAD (1/11)
(Mod: https://t.co/aE6Wse2tWN , YT: https://t.co/6fOjisXXMz) pic.twitter.com/J0ASNxncdB— JArmstrongArt (@JArmstrongArty) February 7, 2020
Apparently, a friend had asked Jack to put the Dancing Baby, or as they call it "The Oogachaka Baby," on the development tool "Garry's Mod" (GMod). With a free night ahead of him, Jack went to work, scouring the internet for the original file. After several false starts, he came across "an ancient looking abandonware site named http://VETUSWARE.COM," where he discovered the original model under the file name "SK_BABY.MAX," which, truth be told, always should've been the GIF's legal name.
an ancient looking abandonware site named https://t.co/tqXj7eMWVy . The download was listed as 'charactere studio . zip', which combined with the site CSS or lack thereof, seemed very sketchy, so I skimmed it with MalwareBytes but it came up clean, so I (5/11) pic.twitter.com/yrJWL94tAx
— JArmstrongArt (@JArmstrongArty) February 7, 2020
the file structure a bit, and eventually find it, 'SK_BABY.MAX'. At this point, it had been hours of searching, I was so excited to open it. It crashed Max a few times, as I expected, but then, not ONLY did it open, but I was delighted to find it came WITH the (7/11) pic.twitter.com/vyjUWHAcOX
— JArmstrongArt (@JArmstrongArty) February 7, 2020
All that hard work paid off because, later that night, the Dancing Baby had been restored to its former glory, looking better than ever in 1080p. According to Jack, the baby didn't even need to be re-mapped, "the model was exactly as it was in 1996."
Great work, Jack, and thank you for your service.
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