Dancing Baby: The First Viral Internet Meme (1996)

In 1996, software company Kinetix released a sample 3D rendering of a cha-cha-dancing baby as part of a demo for their Character Studio animation software. An employee at LucasArts emailed it to friends, and within weeks the “Dancing Baby” was rippling through email forwards, the primitive social network of the 1990s. By 1997, it had appeared on Ally McBeal as a recurring hallucination.

The Dancing Baby is widely considered the first viral internet meme. It proved that a weird, context-free piece of content could replicate itself across the internet through pure oddity. Every meme that followed — from LOLcats to Doge — was born in the shadow of that creepy cha-cha baby.