Today's internet is a churning sea of funny images, remixes of those images, parodies of those remixes of those images, and cat videos. But before there was the Y U NO Guy or the Ermagerd girl, there was an animation that would come to change the internet forever. It was called Baby Cha-Cha-Cha, also known as The Dancing Baby.
In 1996, Autodesk animator Michael Girard and his colleague Robert Lurye wanted to show that you could program and direct the same movement with different characters used computers. They designed an animation of a baby doing a series of complicated cha-cha dance moves. Autodesk soon sent the animation around to other development and animation companies as presumably to show off.
When it got to LucasArts, developer Ron Lussier made a few changes to the original file and turned it into an animated GIF, which he sent to a few coworkers ,who sent it to friends, who sent it to friends, and on and on. That GIF soon took the pop culture world by storm in no time, showing up in advertisements, on merchandise, and on TV shows, including a few infamous episodes of "Ally McBeal".
When it comes to internet memes, the evolution is key is it can't just be popular and it has to change. Variations on The Dancing Baby have appeared on "The Simpsons"danced to "Gangnam Style" and an endless array of products.
