Historic 'Dancing Baby' Meme Set To Be Auctioned Off This Week As An NFT From Its Original Creators

May 10th, 2022 - 1:49 PM EDT by Zach Sweat

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Dancing baby meme original.

The true “first internet meme” is a title widely debated online, but if you asked many, Dancing Baby is likely the one you’d hear the most as it’s undeniably one of the earliest examples of internet phenomena to go viral back in the 1990s.

Back in 1996, Michael Girard, Robert Lurye and John Chadwick created the original "cha-cha baby" dance file and released it into the world as part of product sample source files included in Character Studio, a 3D character animation software by Kinetix/Autodesk.

(Michael Girard, Robert Lurye and John Chadwick, original creators of Dancing Baby, in 1996.)


“At the time it was little more than ‘wouldn't it be a hoot to see this baby doll model dancing to that cha-cha animation,’” Chadwick told us. “I remember trying to fix a bug with the enveloping software, the rigging of the digitized baby doll model to the articulated biped skeleton cha-cha dance. We were under the gun to get the software out the door.”

From there, Ron Lussier, who was working for LucasArts at the time, then tweaked the original file and shared it with coworkers via email, sparking the baby's internet travels and subsequently birthing one of the internet’s first true memes as it was widely shared around the globe.


“I didn’t think it would become famous or historic,” Lurye said. “But did it feel somehow special for you? Yes, the first time I saw the animation rigged onto the Baby geometric model I felt it was super special. I showed it to my next-door neighbor Nancy, who is now an animator at Pixar, to share the moment of awe and laughed a lot.”

Nearly three decades later, Dancing Baby is embarking on another internet venture — this time as an NFT. We caught up with the original creators this week to learn more about the crypto art project and what inspired them to create their own.

“We learned about crypto art from the international media. Since the Dancing Baby played an important historical role as the first internet meme, we decided to make it available as an NFT,” they told us. “We made a digitally restored version of our 1996 original work using state-of-the-art 3D rendering so that everyone could appreciate the original Dancing Baby's appearance and motion with significantly more clarity.”

Kicking off this Wednesday, May 11th at 3 p.m. EST, the Dancing Baby and its full NFT collection is set to be auctioned off via Foundation with a starting price of 0.96 ETH on each piece and a 24-hour countdown timer (and the usual 15-minute bump if new bids come in near the end).


As the originators behind such a historic meme, we asked them what the digital art movement means to the trio as it’s exploded since the beginning of last year, particularly since they themselves have long since worked in the space.

“Ever since we met as graduate students in the late 1980s at Ohio State University's Computer Graphics Research Group, we have imagined that digital art technology might someday empower independent digital artists,” they said. “The technologies for creating and distributing high-quality digital art have been democratized, and now, the NFT market has provided a technical solution for artists to be remunerated for their efforts. Where it goes from here is anybody's guess.”


As for now, the Dancing Baby NFT and collaboration pieces with other artists are a one-time thing, so anyone looking to get their hands on a classic piece of internet history can visit the Foundation listing to learn more about the project ahead of tomorrow’s auction.



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