Do you remember… the Dancing Baby?

A 3D baby in a nappy, doing a cha-cha. That was it. That was the whole thing, and for a while in the late nineties it was everywhere.

The baby started life in 1996 as a sample animation for Character Studio, a piece of 3D software, put together to show what the program could do. Someone tweaked it and sent it round by email, then everybody did, and it became one of the first things to go viral before anyone called it that. People set it to music, gave it costumes and pasted it into anything that would hold still.

Then it got a television career. In Ally McBeal, the baby kept appearing to Ally as her biological clock, dancing to “Hooked on a Feeling” and its relentless “ooga-chaka” chant. Once you’ve seen it with that soundtrack, you can’t unsee it. It might be in your dreams tonight. Sorry about that.