While today's internet culture thrives on the likes of dancing baby Yoda or even dancing baby Groot, the late 1990s to early 2000s cherished the oddity that was simply a gif of a dancing baby to Blue Swede's tune "Hooked on a Feeling." Originally devised all the way back in 1996, the Dancing Baby meme no sooner evolved into an internet sensation, spreading like wildfire across the net through email, until falling into the recesses of time, never to be seen again.
That is, until now. Minted via the likes of HFA-Studio in Vienna, through help from some of the gif's original creators, the Dancing Baby animation lives on in a collection of NFTs. To some, they may look like hideous mockups of a bygone era, while others will see the beauty of the past as represented in the modern art form.
"More than 25 years after the Dancing Baby first went viral we will release a digitally restored, smooth high definition 1/1 artwork by the Original Creators as NFT, so the Dancing Baby can shake its hips forever," reads HFA-Studio's press release.
Within the press kit, HFA-Studio shares some of the gif's incredibly long history, proving not only its worth but overall value as a minted digital asset for internet historians and NFT collectors alike. Much of the sole information surrounding the Dancing Baby gif comes from the likes of internet phenomena documentation site Know Your Meme, which pits the origins of the animation "as part of product source files included in Character Studio, a 3D character animation software by Kinetix/Autodesk."
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The meme gained traction through avid editing and subsequent emails via the likes of Ron Lussier, who in 1996 was working for LucasArts. He even voiced words of his contribution to the meme's outward fame, stating that not long after first sharing the gif, "I heard from fellow employees that the animation was traveling through the company via email." The email chain within LucasArts expanded into a global internet phenomenon, which is still widely considered today as among the first of its kind.
Michael Girard, the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the original Dancing Baby file code from 3DS Max software's Character Studio, claims that the acclaim can more readily be traced to 1997's Ally McBeal, specifically episode 12 of its first season. This could very well have been due to the mass popularity already driving it into the mainstream via Lussier, but it's clear that despite such infantile limbs, the Dancing Baby meme certainly had (and still has) long legs.
The Dancing Baby Collection will feature seven total varied iterations of the longtime Dancing Baby gif, all of which will be designed by a range of different artists. HFA-Studio describes these additional digital assets as remixes of the original gif form, akin as it relates to the Nyan Cat gif-turned-NFT via the likes of its own creator, Chris Torres, who also shared an interpretation of the Dancing Baby animation.
The NFT art house creators write in closing, "Memes and NFTs are the art form of our generation. By owning the digitally restored loop by the original creators, you own part of internet history."
The drop, which doesn't have a specific auction date or set a price point for the pieces, comes on the eve of an NFT market collapse, wherein according to Twitter user Jesse Felder, a 92% decline is driving the digital asset realm into uncertainty. Although it still has its many believers, main among them living within the Web3, metaverse, and cryptocurrency ecosystems, it's clear that the NFT hype that has surged over the past year is slowly diminishing.
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