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Great Balls of Fur
Look who's dancing now
By ERIC ELLIS
November 30, 1999
Web posted at 9 a.m. Hong Kong time, 8 p.m. EDT
The Pokémon craze getting you down? Got Furby-fatigue?
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I've got news for you. The Internet is going to make it worse. Go to www.hampsterdance.com and you'll see why. You'll also see how easy it is to make money on the Net.
Hampsterdance.com has been one of the year's most popular websites. It's also been one of the year's most bizarre e-commerce opportunities. Some 20 million pairs of eyeballs have glommed on to the site this year, and logged off with the hamster song rattling away in their brain like a bad Boney M song.
And a good few, presumably with Junior by their side or with Daddy's credit card details on hand, have clicked through to the e-commerce website link, the cleverly named Hampstore.com, where you can buy hamster mugs, key chains, bumper stickers. It's like a little club, although at 20 million hits a rather large little club. And it exists only on the Web. The people behind Hampsterdance.com say they can't keep up with the orders generated by the site.
It's yet another Net craze. Hundreds of the cute little critters (GIF files for you techies) are programmed to wriggle and wiggle to a catchy tune. And they have naturally sprouted offspring.
There's a Jesusdance; a Hampsterdance song variation that is a spiritual ode to the traveling Jesus motifs that adorn middle American dashboards; a dancing Beatles site ; dancing fish; and my personal favorite, inasmuch as I'll admit to having one, the Steel Curtain Polkateers and the dancing beer cans from Pittsburgh.
But the Hampsterdance is the granddaddy of them all, the Yahoo! of the dancing GIF world, the one everyone else want to emulate. It emerged in January this year and has been growing in strength ever since. Not bad for an overnight trend. The site probably took an hour to build and from there it snowballed by word-of-mouth, or more correctly word-of-e-mail. I've been sent the URL six times and naturally I sent in on to friends with kids. This kind of instant advertising cost Tilted Media, the Illinois company that registered the site, nothing.
All of which makes the infrastructure surrounding Pokémon and his mates seem elaborate by comparison. And when you are bored (and believe me you soon will be) by that hamster ditty there's even a site to make it go away. My advice for Christmas sanity is to get there before your kids start looking for the dancing hamsters.
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