![]() “As soon as I saw it, I asked, ‘How do we get it into show?’” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. And then, it made its way into Ally creator Kelley’s office after his assistant showed it to him. “It was symbolically part of the birth of the internet, the birth of memes, the birth of YouTube,” says Lurye. It was sent as email attachments, used as screensavers and, according to another Times story, evoked parodies like “Psycho Baby, Rasta Baby, Car Crash Baby and even Drunken Baby, which shows the corrupted digital infant smoking, drinking beer and urinating.” The Dancing Baby became the industry meme to know even if the word meme wasn’t yet part of common vernacular. More nips and tucks were made by other users, including the addition of the famous opening “Ooga Chaka Ooga Chaka” lines from Blue Swede’s version of “Hooked on a Feeling.” Eventually, Ron Lussier, another animator, got the file and provided his own tweaks to the design before uploading it to a CompuServe forum, calling it Baby Cha. ![]() They demoed their work at the Siggraph computer graphics conference, after which Girard discarded it, later telling the New York Times that “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.” That article also provides a crucial detail: The Biped file name for the baby was chacha.bip. That one looked so good that Lurye called his next-door neighbor, a co-worker at Rhythm & Hues, over to look at it because “it was spooky and cool.” He says everyone who saw it “got chills.” Lurye created “five or ten” examples including “a weird purple alien,” a chicken, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a model of Demi Moore, and a baby. ![]() Girard had already created a demo of a human skeleton that could move and dance, but they needed samples of various skins that could be mapped on top of that image. Robert Lurye was working as an animator for VFX house Rhythm & Hues Studios when his friends from The Ohio State University, John Chadwick and Michael Girard, asked if he’d like to work on a freelance assignment for their new animation project, Biped. The Dancing Baby - who will also answer to Baby Cha or the Oogachaka Baby, given its proclivity for the musical stylings of Björn Skifs - was not born on a Hollywood backlot but from the minds of Silicon Valley creatives. ‘It Was Kind of the Birth of the Internet’ But where do dancing babies come from? The creative team behind it explains how it was born. It was this scene, from the season-one episode “Cro-Magnon,” that catapulted the show from cult hit to an office water-cooler sensation. How would Ally’s concerns about her biological clock metaphorize? As an animated diaper-clad baby who runs in front of her and dares her to take notice until they dance it out in her bedroom to Blue Swede’s cover of “Hooked on a Feeling.” How nervous was Ally about giving a eulogy at her college professor’s funeral, especially since they’d had an affair? Like she might put a giant foot in her mouth. How does Ally feel when she learns her ex-boyfriend, Billy (Gil Bellows) - the one she never really got over - not only works at her new law firm but is now happily married? Like she’s been hit with multiple arrows through the heart. What made her so relatable was the way the show used imagery as a sort of fast-paced shorthand to explain her neuroses. Kelley’s Fox dramedy, Ally McBeal, appeared on TV screens in the fall of 1997 as a nervous, overly educated-yet-still-unsure-of-herself mess. Before Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rebecca Bunch used song-and-dance numbers to interpret her inner monologues, and before Jane the Virgin’s Jane Villanueva saw telenovela tropes everywhere she turned, there was Ally.Ĭalista Flockhart’s titular 20-something attorney from David E.
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