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The Hampster Dance is one of the earliest
Internet meme An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...
s. Created in 1998 by Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte as a
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page, the dance features rows of animated
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s of
hamster Hamsters are rodents (order Rodentia) belonging to the subfamily Cricetinae, which contains 19 species classified in seven genera.Fox, Sue. 2006. ''Hamsters''. T.F.H. Publications Inc. They have become established as popular small pets. The b ...
s and other rodents
dancing Dance is a performing art form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoire ...
in various ways to a sped-up
sample Sample or samples may refer to: Base meaning * Sample (statistics), a subset of a population – complete data set * Sample (signal), a digital discrete sample of a continuous analog signal * Sample (material), a specimen or small quantity of s ...
from the song "
Whistle-Stop In public transport, a request stop, flag stop, or whistle stop is a bus stop, stop or train station, station at which buses or trains, respectively, stop only on request; that is, only if there are passengers or freight to be picked up or drop ...
", written and performed by
Roger Miller Roger Dean Miller Sr. (January 2, 1936 – October 25, 1992) was an American singer-songwriter, widely known for his honky-tonk-influenced novelty songs and his chart-topping Country music, country and pop hits "King of the Road (song), Ki ...
for the 1973
Walt Disney Productions The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...
film ''
Robin Hood Robin Hood is a legendary heroic outlaw originally depicted in English folklore and subsequently featured in literature and film. According to legend, he was a highly skilled archer and swordsman. In some versions of the legend, he is depic ...
''. In 2005,
CNET ''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...
named the Hampster Dance the number-one
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fad.


Background

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...
art student Deidre LaCarte (of
Nanaimo, British Columbia Nanaimo ( ) is a city on the east coast of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada. As of the 2021 census, it had a population of 99,863, and it is known as "The Harbour City." The city was previously known as the "Hub City," which was ...
) was in a competition with her best friend and sister to generate the most Web traffic when she created the Hampster Dance page with the free
Geocities Yahoo! GeoCities was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and w ...
web service in August 1998. She named the site Hampton's Hamster House in homage to her pet hamster, "Hampton Hamster", who on the page declared his intent to become a "
Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
star."Hamsters, You've Got Mail!
Sun Sentinel
The Hampster Dance site originally consisted of a single page with just four hamsters
animated Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anim ...
GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...
s, repeated in rows by the dozens and with an infectious background tune that looped endlessly. At the time the page was created, embedding background music in
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
pages was a fairly novel browser feature. The clip, a nine-second looped
WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Win ...
file, was a sped-up
sample Sample or samples may refer to: Base meaning * Sample (statistics), a subset of a population – complete data set * Sample (signal), a digital discrete sample of a continuous analog signal * Sample (material), a specimen or small quantity of s ...
of
Roger Miller Roger Dean Miller Sr. (January 2, 1936 – October 25, 1992) was an American singer-songwriter, widely known for his honky-tonk-influenced novelty songs and his chart-topping Country music, country and pop hits "King of the Road (song), Ki ...
's "Whistle Stop", a song written for the opening credits of the 1973
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animated feature film ''
Robin Hood Robin Hood is a legendary heroic outlaw originally depicted in English folklore and subsequently featured in literature and film. According to legend, he was a highly skilled archer and swordsman. In some versions of the legend, he is depic ...
''. From its creation in August 1998 to March 1999, the Hampster Dance site only recorded about 800 total visits (roughly four per day). In February 1999, word of the website spread by e-mail and early
blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
s. By March, the site gathered approximately 60,000 views in four days. Soon the site was even featured on bumper stickers and in a television commercial for
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. A common office prank at that time was to set a co-worker's browser homepage to the Hampster Dance Web site, which led to televised news reports that furthered its notoriety to an international level. Fans of the site created variations on the original theme, using politicians such as
Dan Quayle James Danforth Quayle (; born February 4, 1947) is an American politician who served as the 44th vice president of the United States from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republic ...
and
Cynthia McKinney Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is an American politician, academic, and conspiracy theorist. As a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms in the United States House of Representatives. She was the first African American ...
, as well as household objects such as
Pez dispenser Pez (, ; stylised as PEZ) is the brand name of an Austrian candy and associated manual candy dispensers. The candy is a pressed, dry, straight-edged, curved-corner block 15 mm ( inch) long, 8 mm ( inch) wide and 5 mm ...
s. The original website was hosted on Geocities, and LaCarte failed to register the ''hampsterdance.com'' domain. With the continued popularity of the original site, an unauthorized duplicate website was hosted on ''hampsterdance.com''. LaCarte thus used the domains ''hamsterdance.com'', ''hamsterdance2.com'', and ''hampsterdance2.com''. In early 2000, the domain was transferred to humor business Nutty Sites for undisclosed reasons. In late 2001, LaCarte sold the "Hampster Dance" rights to Abatis International, who managed to acquire the original domain. The site later expanded, revealing the names of all four characters (Hampton, Dixie, Hado, and Fuzzy) and offering themed versions for
birthday A birthday is the anniversary of the birth of a person, or figuratively of an institution. Birthdays of people are celebrated in numerous cultures, often with birthday gifts, birthday cards, a birthday party, or a rite of passage. Many relig ...
s, graduation, holidays, etc. The original website is no longer functional, but other sites inspired by the original still exist.


Hampton and the Hampsters

The popularity of the website led to the creation of a full song called "
The Hampsterdance Song "The Hampsterdance Song" is a novelty song by Hampton the Hampster. The song's hook is based on a sped-up sample of "Whistle-Stop", a song from the 1973 Disney film ''Robin Hood''. This sample was originally used for a 1998 web page called the H ...
", which was produced by
the Boomtang Boys The Boomtang Boys are Canadian dance-remix musicians and music producers. They are known for both their remix work and pop-dance music, in particular their singles " Squeeze Toy" and "Movin' On", which both topped the Canadian Singles Chart. ...
and released on July 4, 2000. Disney did not allow the use of the actual "Whistle Stop" clip, so the Boomtang Boys created a sound-alike rerecording. The liner notes for the single include the statement "Includes elements of 'Whistle Stop' by Roger Miller."''Hampsterdance'' liner notes - "Includes elements of 'Whistle Stop' by Roger Miller" Koch Records. (2000) A cartoon video was produced for the single that introduced a cartoon "band" of four hamsters; though the song was solely credited to "Hampton the Hampster", the band was later dubbed "Hampton and the Hampsters." The song reached number one on the
Canadian Singles Chart The Canadian Singles Chart was a chart compiled by the American-based music sales tracking company, Nielsen SoundScan, which began publication in November 1996. It was published every Wednesday and also published on Thursday by '' Jam!''/Canoe. I ...
while peaking at number 32 on the ''
RPM Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or with the notation min−1) is a unit of rotational speed or rotational frequency for rotating machines. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 defines a unit of rotation as the dimensionl ...
'' charts. In Australia, "The Hampsterdance Song" was released in 2001 and reached number five on the
ARIA Singles Chart The ARIA Charts are the main Australian music sales charts, issued weekly by the Australian Recording Industry Association. The charts are a record of the highest selling songs and albums in various genres in Australia. ARIA became the offici ...
. The song proved to be very successful on
Radio Disney Radio Disney was an American radio network operated by the Disney Radio Networks unit of Disney Branded Television within the Disney General Entertainment Content, headquartered in Burbank, California. The network broadcast music programming ...
, where it became the station's all-time most played song and was later included on the compilation album '' Radio Disney Ultimate Jams''. LaCarte created an online store offering T-shirts and
CDs The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in Octo ...
of the fictional group's music. An
Flash Flash, flashes, or FLASH may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional aliases * Flash (DC Comics character), several DC Comics superheroes with super speed: ** Flash (Barry Allen) ** Flash (Jay Garrick) ** Wally West, the first Kid ...
-animated series was planned by
Nelvana Nelvana Enterprises, Inc. (; previously known as Nelvana Limited, sometimes known as Nelvana Animation and simply Nelvana or Nelvana Communications) is a Canadian animation studio and entertainment company owned by Corus Entertainment. Founded ...
, but never made it past the planning process. Prior to the release of "The Hampsterdance Song", a similar song featuring an unofficial sound-alike rendition of "Whistle Stop" was released as " Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia" and performed by
the Cuban Boys The Cuban Boys are an English electronic group and production team, currently composed of Skreen B and Ricardo Autobahn; the band formerly also included B.L. Underwood ("Blu") and Jenny McLaren (Autobahn's sister). Their music is characterised ...
. This version peaked at number 4 on the Christmas 1999 UK singles chart.BBC
Festive Fifty 1999
/ref> Following the relative success of "The Hampsterdance Song" single, an entire album featuring the fictional band titled ''Hampsterdance: The Album'' was released in 2000. Some follow-up singles from this album were moderately successful in Australia, such as "
Thank God I'm a Country Boy "Thank God I'm a Country Boy", also known as "Country Boy", is a song written by John Martin Sommers and recorded by American singer/songwriter John Denver. The song was originally included on Denver's 1974 album '' Back Home Again''. A version rec ...
" (a cover of the
John Denver Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. (December 31, 1943 – October 12, 1997), known professionally as John Denver, was an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, actor, activist, and humanitarian whose greatest commercial success was as a solo singe ...
song, reaching number 12) and "Hampster Party" (reaching number 44). ''Hampsterdance: The Album'' was reissued with a shorter tracklist as ''The Hampster Dance Party'' in 2002. Later album releases were ''Happy Times Ten'' (2002), the compilation ''Hampsterdance Hits'' (2004), and ''A Very Hampsterdance Christmas'' (2008).


Discography


Albums


Reissues


Compilations


Singles


Promotional singles


Direct-to-video film

The direct-to-video animated film ''How the Hampsters Saved Winter'' was produced by Abatis International LLC and animated by Unreal Productions, located in New Jersey. The DVD was first released for sale on the Hampster Dance website on April 2, 2009, and was purchasable to as late as 2012. Bill Porfido, the owner of the franchise confirmed in an article that 2000 copies of the film were sold. After the film became unavailable for purchase on the website, the film was thought to be
lost Lost may refer to getting lost, or to: Geography *Lost, Aberdeenshire, a hamlet in Scotland * Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail, or LOST, a hiking and cycling trail in Florida, US History *Abbreviation of lost work, any work which is known to have bee ...
as no copies were made available elsewhere. However, four screenshots were featured via a game on the website called Hamster Hijinks. In 2022, the film was archived on the
Lost Media Wiki Lost media are pieces of media that are nonexistent, missing, or unavailable to the general public. The term ''lost media'' primarily encompasses visual, audio, or audiovisual media such as films, television and radio broadcasts, music, and video g ...
and uploaded onto Youtube.


Notes


References


External links

*
Hampster dancing into other venues

Hamster Dance modified to work correctly in modern web browsers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hampster Dance, The Viral videos Internet memes introduced in the 1990s 1998 introductions Fictional hamsters