‘Ooga Chaka’: How Dancing ‘Baby Cha’ (Briefly) Took Over the ’90s

David E. Kelley was mesmerized. The television writer-producer (The Practice, L.A. Law) was in his office sometime in 1997 when his assistant called him in to look at her computer. On the screen was a 10-second 3D animation of an infant—a dancing, somewhat crudely rendered diapered baby that lacked any facial expression. It was profoundly bizarre but also weirdly compelling.

“As soon as I saw it, I asked, ‘How do we get it into the show?’” he recalled in 2017.

Kelley wasn’t the only person to find the animation hypnotic: Millions of others did too. The dancing baby, sometimes known as Baby Cha, was being passed around as an email attachment and uploaded to the nascent world of the internet. Come January 1998, the baby would surface on Kelley’s new Fox series, Ally McBeal. It was likely the very first time that web culture had influenced a medium as large as TV, becoming a meme before the concept was widely understood.

But while it might have amused viewers and early internet adopters, one of the baby’s creators found it charmless and even somewhat repulsive.

Immaculate Conception

There can be no easily summarized origin story of the dancing baby. Many people had a hand in its creation, with plenty of credit—and perhaps blame—to spread around.

Michael Girard is the name that most often comes up in association with the animation. In 1993, Girard, his wife, Susan Amkraut, and partner John Chadwick formed Unreal Pictures, a software development firm based in Palo Alto, California. In 1996, they began working on a plug-in they dubbed Character Studio—which sold for roughly $1500—that was capable of helping users of Kinetix’s 3D Studio Max software render three-dimensional models for their own projects.

Girard developed a “biped” system in which an animated skeleton moved and gyrated, movements that would endure throughout the baby’s various life stages. “The cha-cha motion and the basic arm motion—the way the hand flips over the head—go way back to very first prototype,” Girard said in 1997. “It was always one of the better examples of what you could do in terms of the rhythm of the steps.”

The team at Unreal wanted some pre-loaded models bundled with the software. For help, they turned to Robert Lurye, a freelance designer who was then working for Rhythm & Hues Studios, a special effects company. Lurye used Girard’s skeleton animation, then overlaid “skins” of an alien, woman, and baby supplied by Unreal while adding what Girard termed “more attitude [and] more expression.” Lurye dubbed it “the thing” and had it playing air guitar.

The model for the baby, however, was not unique to Unreal. It was sourced from a design by Tony Morrill at Viewpoint DataLabs: Morrill took a plastic baby doll and overlaid it with a grid for three-dimensional mapping. The geometric model was made available to anyone. Lurye then added movement—in this case, the infant boogying.  

Unreal demonstrated the baby animation at a 1996 software conference. But Girard wasn’t keen on it. “At the time, I remember how disturbing it was and not really understanding why until I realized that the structure of a baby has a lot of baggage that comes with it about how we expect babies to move,” Girard said in 1997. “If you look at Disney animations, the babies sometimes do very grown-up things. When it's not photo-realistic, it's easy to brush it off as being an expression of an adult’s imagination. But when you see it in a three-dimensional form, it takes on more of an external reality.”

In other words, this was a creepy baby.

That should have been the end of the line for the infant. But despite Girard’s distaste for it, the baby still wound up as part of the Character Studio software. That’s how Ron Lussier, an employee of the LucasArts gaming company, came across it. Lussier modified the animation further, adding more dance moves and refining some of the baby’s look. He called it “Baby Cha.”

Lussier sent it to a friend, figuring the animated baby’s silly gyrating might amuse others. At this point, no fewer than six people had contributed to the end result, which was a kind of uncanny valley dance performance. The team at Unreal regarded it as little more than an example for software users to build upon; Lussier considered it a private joke. It would have been impossible for them to anticipate what came next.

Bringing Up Baby

Lussier’s email with the baby attached set off a kind of chain reaction online. In 1997, an estimated 19 percent of U.S. households had an internet connection. Given the size of the user base, the dancing baby was able to spread quickly.

Initially, there was no sound attached to the animation. But when someone—possibly Lussier—posted it as an .avi file on the CompuServe internet forum, it soon got a soundtrack, the most popular of which was a sample from “Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede. (Specifically, “ooga chaka, ooga chaka.”) Someone else adapted it into the .gif format, which shrunk the brief video clip down to a shareable file size. That meant the dancing baby could be quickly disseminated across web pages and as email attachments. As a result, the bizarre tot was seemingly everywhere, able to populate basic websites with only minimal effort required.

The ease of sharing was one thing. But why did people feel the need to share it in the first place?

“For people to identify with a dancing baby indicates some deep, deep trauma,” academic and social critic Camille Paglia told The New York Times. “Young people want care-taking. They want someone to make rules, to monitor their sex life; they want daddies. The Dancing Baby is a self-portrait of American youth.”

The body mechanics made the dancing baby at odds with itself. The dancing skeleton was that of an adult, making its movements incongruous for an infant. Closer inspection revealed the baby’s face didn’t move, nor did its fingers wiggle. It was strangely emotionless despite its tiny frame grooving to music. It was, in essence, the perfect kind of weird for a growing internet that trafficked in weirdness.

Enfant Terrible

If the dancing baby had merely been confined to the internet, it might have been ignored by the public at large—at that point, some 80 percent of the U.S. population. But then David E. Kelley saw the baby.

For Kelley, the child was a perfect antagonist for the title character on his new series Ally McBeal, about a lawyer (Calista Flockhart) who attempts to juggle her personal and professional relationships. In the show’s first season, Ally worries that her biological window to have a kid is closing. In the midst of her concern, she experiences a kind of hallucination—the dancing baby.

“It may have been terrifying and hypnotic but it was also perfect for Ally,” Kelley said. “It tapped in to her internal war. She knew that on paper, a woman her age was supposed to be married with a child, but that wasn’t how she felt she wanted to be. The Dancing Baby represented that feeling.”

The baby—which moved to “Hooked on a Feeling” and appeared in other episodes—was further tweaked by Richard Kerrigan, the show’s effects supervisor, who was sure that a fully-rendered baby would prove too jarring for viewers when plunked down in live-action. Instead, he made the baby translucent. He also rigged up a doll baby on broomsticks to help pre-visualize the sequence.

“At one point, David wanted it really solid,” Kerrigan said. “And I wrote a memo back saying it’ll look fake if it’s solid. It’s got to be partially transparent in order to blend it in.”

Ally McBeal deepened the baby’s tiny-fisted grasp on popular culture. He became pervasive as a screen saver and in commercials for Blockbuster Video; he even came pre-loaded on some new computers. CNN reported the bediapered phenom was an example of a meme, which most people had little familiarity with. Kinetix and Unreal held a joint copyright on this particular iteration and struck deals with a number of licensees to merchandise the baby. There were mugs, notepads, and more. Over 350,000 dancing baby shirts were reportedly sold. (There was even talk of a dancing baby pinata, but cooler heads prevailed.)

There was also backlash. Because the animation could be customized—indeed, that was the entire point of the software suite—people who found the baby obnoxious took out their frustrations in a variety of ways. The baby was altered so it appeared to be stumbling drunk, smoking, or urinating. In a particularly morbid choice, someone inserted a speeding car to put a permanent end to the baby; another depicted the grooving tyke getting blown up.

It wasn’t long before merchandise sales slowed. By the end of 1998, the internet was on to another fad: an animation of dancing hamsters. Baby Cha was relegated to the trash pile.

For some time afterward, Girard was reluctant to address the dancing baby phenomenon, which he considered an anomaly in his career. A CNN profile in 2022 described the originators as having “mostly avoided the spotlight.”

In 2018, Girard told Popular Science that “I think it spread because the file was a GIF you could easily attach to emails, and the baby seemed carefree and optimistic. But mostly, and kind of disturbingly, people enjoyed ridiculing it. I wanted my work to be taken seriously: I’d previously studied human motion with top choreographers. This baby was far less graceful and artistic; it was just a little uncanny-valley GIF. As its popularity eclipsed our software’s, I got cynical. I didn’t want to be associated with the animation, even though the exposure was great for my company.”

Today, Baby Cha is probably best preserved as an early experiment in the kind of confusion and repulsion that greets AI renderings. Girard seemed to understand this back in 1997. “To some extent, that’s what our software is all about: to transform any biped into any other biped,” he said. “That's where the interesting psychological aspects come out because you're separating the motion from the structure. The baby is a good example of what can happen.”

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