The Dancing Baby Was a Software Demo Before It Was a Meme

Look at the object first. It is a toddler in a diaper, rendered in smooth grey-pink 3D, doing a cha-cha. It wiggles its hips, bends over, shakes its shoulders, and at one point plays a second of air guitar. The file that holds this was called sk_baby.max, and it began as a sample: a thing bundled with a piece of animation software to show buyers what the software could do [1].

My thesis, with the scope I can defend: the Dancing Baby was a marketing sample before it was a meme, and the standard origin story, which treats the 1998 Ally McBeal appearance as the moment it arrived, puts the last step first. The people who moved the file out of a software package and into strangers' inboxes are missing from most credit lines. I started with a bigger claim, that the software vendor profited before anyone else. I can't support that, and I say below what I found instead. I also started with "CD-ROM demo", and no source I read says how the sample was physically distributed, so that phrase is gone.

A sample with five authors

Character Studio was a 3D character animation package built by Unreal Pictures, founded by Michael Girard, John Chadwick and Susan Amkraut, and sold under the Kinetix name, an Autodesk division. It was released in August 1996 [1]. Its samples included a dancing skeleton in a file called chacha.bip. Robert Lurye, a freelancer, was hired to make more samples, and he changed the skeleton's choreography with extra moves [4]. The baby itself was someone else's work: Tony Morrill at Viewpoint DataLabs made the model from a scan of a plastic doll, and it was commercially available [1]. Chadwick applied the animation to it with Physique software [1].

So before any internet, the object already had a model-maker, a motion designer, a software engineer and a company. Wikipedia also says Kinetix showed a baby demo at the 1995 SIGGRAPH conference, but that sentence leans on a 1997 newspaper article I did not read, so I hold it loosely [1]. Know Your Meme dates the sample file to autumn 1996 [2].

Girard's own first reaction is a nice detail. Wikipedia reports that he initially discarded the baby as "disturbing" for being too realistic [1]. The founder of the studio that made the thing nearly threw it away. Hold that thought, because it tells you who the audience was supposed to be: customers evaluating a tool, not a crowd looking for a joke.

The forward

The turn from sample to meme was small. Ron Lussier, who worked at LucasArts, took the motion file, put it back on the commercial baby model, made minor changes and rendered it [1]. He told Know Your Meme: "I showed it to a few people and one of them asked me to forward it to them in e-mail" [2]. Wikipedia adds that he posted an .avi to CompuServe forums [1]. Mental Floss says he renamed it "Baby Cha" and that the Blue Swede "Hooked on a Feeling" soundtrack came with the CompuServe stage [4].

Then a second hand. In late 1996, web developer John Woodell turned the movie into a compressed animated GIF, as a demonstration of the conversion process [2]. A GIF plays without a player, in a browser or a webpage, and that is a format change, not a detail. An .avi needed software and a download. A GIF needed a page. Wikipedia credits Woodell's GIF as important to the baby going viral, and says Rob Sheridan, then running "The Unofficial Dancing Baby Homepage", collected user variations [1]. Girard calls Sheridan a 16-year-old named Rob whose site "played a major role" [3]. (Wikipedia describes him as a Nine Inch Nails art director, which is a later job. I read the two as the same person but have not confirmed it.)

Dates here are shaky and I want to be plain about it. Mental Floss places the spread in 1997 [4]. Know Your Meme puts the GIF in late 1996 [2]. The University of Luxembourg's summary says email chains ran through 1996 and 1997 [8]. I can't give you one date for "went viral", and I distrust anyone who does.

Where Ally McBeal fits

Ally McBeal aired the episode "Cro-Magnon" on 5 January 1998, with the baby as a hallucination while Ally worries about her biological clock [5]. Mental Floss says creator David E. Kelley found the animation in 1997 and put it in, with effects supervisor Richard Kerrigan making the baby translucent to sit in live-action footage [4]. That is the part everybody remembers, so the origin story fixes on it.

Here is the order of events, as far as these sources let me build it:

| Step | Who | When |\n|---|---|---|\n| Skeleton dance and baby sample file | Unreal Pictures, Lurye, Chadwick, Morrill's model | Autumn 1996 [1][2] |\n| Remix, email forward, CompuServe .avi | Lussier | Late 1996 to 1997, sources differ [1][2][4] |\n| Animated GIF | Woodell | Late 1996 [2] |\n| Fan homepage with variations | Sheridan | Date not given in sources I read |\n| Television | Kelley and Fox | 5 January 1998 [5] |\n| Toy | Kinetix | 1998 [7] |

Television is the fifth row, not the first. It is a copy of something email had already made popular. That is the same shape I argued in the cringe post: when a platform gets the credit for a form, check what the form was doing before it arrived. I extend that argument here from a word to an image. It is the same mistake, with a bigger audience.

Who gained, and what I can't prove

Who profits? Here the evidence gets thinner, and I'd rather say so than flatter my thesis. Girard says the phones at Autodesk "were ringing off the hook" after the Ally McBeal appearance, and that it reached the front page of USA Today [3]. That is a vendor benefiting, but from television, which is the step I am saying was late. Mental Floss reports more than 350,000 baby T-shirts sold, with merchandise revenue falling by late 1998 [4]. A Kinetix-branded toy existed in 1998; I know that only from a marketplace listing [7]. A search-result summary of a CNN article says Unreal Pictures and Autodesk shared the copyright until 2004 and split merchandise profits, until Autodesk bought Unreal outright. I could not open that article, so I treat the claim as unconfirmed [6]. Girard does say Autodesk acquired his company in 2004 [3].

What I did not find: any source saying Lussier, Woodell or Sheridan were paid, or that they were not. Know Your Meme says outright that its Girard interview does not discuss who received compensation [3]. I can't claim they got nothing. My claim is narrower. The vendor and its creators held rights and a product to sell, and the intermediaries who did the distribution work held, as far as any document shows, a credit line at best.

The strongest objection

The best objection is that the baby was a meme only because of television, so my ordering is a technicality. Girard himself says the TV spot was "a very big deal" as live-action context [3]. And a sample file nobody forwarded is just a sample file; the forward is real, but millions of people met the baby through the sitcom, so "TV made it famous" is true.

I accept the second half. Fame and origin are different questions, and the TV story answers fame. What I reject is the slide from one to the other. If Ally McBeal is the origin, then the baby has one author, a showrunner with a good eye. If the sample file is the origin, it has a software company, a motion designer, a model-maker, an email forwarder and a GIF-maker, and a show picked it up from a culture that already had it. The order of events changes who the story thanks. Also, Kelley found the baby in 1997 [4], which means it was circulating widely enough to be found. The show reads like evidence of a spread, not its cause.

What follows if I am right

If the order is right, then "who invented it" is the wrong question for any viral form. The better one is who carried it across each format boundary: from a software bundle to a movie file, to email, to a GIF, to a sitcom, to a toy. Each crossing had an author and a beneficiary, and they were rarely the same person. I put the chance that Lussier, Woodell and Sheridan were paid for the baby's 1998 merchandise at low, but that is a guess, not a forecast, and a reader with a contract or a letter could prove me wrong. So here is a test for your own memory of a meme history: take the origin you were told, and find the earliest dated copy you can. Was it the first one, or only the first one a famous medium noticed?