The Hampster Dance

The Hampster Dance — the misspelling is part of the brand — was created in August 1997 by Deidre LaCarte, a Canadian art student and martial-arts instructor from Nanaimo, British Columbia, as a GeoCities-hosted page ("Hampton Hampster's Hamster House") in tribute to her pet hamster Hampton. She was competing with her sister and her best friend over who could generate the most web traffic. The page was nothing but four unique animated hamster GIFs repeated in rows by the dozens, plus a maddeningly catchy nine-second looping WAV: a sped-up sample of "Whistle-Stop," written and performed by Roger Miller for Disney's 1973 animated Robin Hood.

For over a year it puttered along almost unseen — roughly 800 total visits by early 1999. Then it exploded through email forwards and early blogs in February and March 1999, at one point pulling about 60,000 views in four days. The traffic contest was over, and so was the era when the internet's weirdness stayed on the internet: the dancing rodents got merchandise, ringtones, and radio coverage, and the site became shorthand for the web at its most gloriously pointless.

The tune escaped the browser entirely. The Cuban Boys' soundalike-sampling "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia" hit number 4 on the UK singles chart at Christmas 1999, and LaCarte's official "The Hampsterdance Song" — produced with the Boomtang Boys, released in June 2000 and credited to Hampton the Hampster — went to number 1 on the Canadian singles chart. Not bad for four GIFs and a nine-second loop; no early-internet retrospective since has managed to leave it out.