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Dancing Baby not cool with everyone

By Paul McNamara
Network World, 6/16/97

He is known as "The Dancing Baby," a hilarious yet oddly disturbing 3-D video character who is sweeping the World Wide Web with all the momentum of a macrovirus.

Love him or hate him -- and some do both -- it is tough to take your eyes off this gyrating diaper-clad dynamo, which may explain why he has become such a fixture on home pages, screen savers and bookmark lists.

Not to mention one hit list.

Cool Site of the Day, an advertiser-supported Web page devoted to combing the 'Net for hip little nuggets, recently pointed a less-than-flattering finger at The Dancing Baby.

"Help us find the sick mind responsible for this evil baby," plead the site editors. "Strangely enough, the Internet has embraced this twisted computer-generated baby and even given [it] various popular tunes to dance to. If you know what evil genius created this baby, write us at cool@infi.net."

While Cool Site sniffs, others are of a more generous spirit toward The Baby, which has been circulating via Web downloads and email attachments for about a year.

"When I first saw The Baby, I thought it was kind of gross," said Rob Sheridan, a 17-year-old Washington state high schooler who built a Web page dedicated solely to the clip. "But then I started watching it again and said, 'Gee, this is kind of funny.' "

Hypnotic is a word you will hear.

"So far, everybody I've shown this thing to has been amazed and de-lighted," said Will Irace, a Web site designer from Los Angeles.

There is a Dancing Baby contest -- customize your own version to the music you deem most appropriate or, for that matter, inappropriate.

And there is even a genuine Dancing Baby mystery, in that no one seems to know who fathered or mothered the original clip before setting it loose on the Internet.

Although we may not know who made The Baby and pushed him out onto the Web, we do know what tools were used.

"The baby was created using [content-creation software called] 3D Studio Max and a plug-in called Character Studio, which is a product that we distribute," said Melisa Bell, a spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Kinetix, a division of Autodesk Inc. "[The product] was created for us by an outside group called Unreal Pictures."

"I don't know much about the cult following that this baby has, but it's out there," she said.

Sheridan knows plenty. The Bellevue High School junior had posted the The Baby file to his "dinky little home page" months ago only to take it down "because I [wanted to conserve my] server space and didn't think anyone really cared" about The Baby file, he said.

Sheridan may have been right to worry about server capacity -- versions of The Baby range from 1M to 6M bytes. But he was wrong in thinking no one would miss his posting.

"I left a little message [on the home page] saying, 'Email me if you'd like the file,' and I started getting tons of email," he said. "Tons" in teen-speak being a couple a day.

In an effort to stem that flow, Sheridan put up The Original Unofficial Homepage of the Amazing Dancing Baby at www.nwlink.com/~xott/baby.htm, which has received more than 11,000 hits since its April 5 debut. He is also compiling a list of The Baby's fans who want Sheridan to email them new versions as they materialize.

That list keeps growing, too, all but assuring that the dancing tyke will be around long after other dance crazes, like the Macarena, have been forgotten.