![]() ![]() Fans of the site created variations on the original theme, using politicians such as Dan Quayle and Cynthia McKinney, as well as household objects such as Pez dispensers. A common office prank at that time was to set a co-worker's browser homepage to the Hampster Dance Web site, which led to televised news reports that furthered its notoriety to an international level. Soon the site was even featured on bumper stickers and in a television commercial for Internet service provider EarthLink. By March, the site gathered approximately 60,000 views in four days. In February 1999, word of the website spread by e-mail and early blogs. įrom its creation in August 1998 to March 1999, the Hampster Dance site only recorded about 800 total visits (roughly four per day). The clip, a nine-second looped WAV file, was a sped-up sample of Roger Miller's "Whistle Stop", a song written for the opening credits of the 1973 Disney animated feature film Robin Hood. At the time the page was created, embedding background music in HTML pages was a fairly novel browser feature. These images were repeated in rows by the dozens and were paired with an infectious, continuously looping background tune. The Hampster Dance site originally consisted of a single page with just four unique animated GIFs of cartoon hamsters. She named the site "Hampton Hampster's Hamster House" in homage to her pet hamster, "Hampton Hampster", who on the page declared his intent to become a " Web star." LaCarte noted that the misspelling of "hamster" as "hampster" in both her pet's name and the Hampster Dance page was intentional. Screen capture of the original Hampster DanceĬanadian art student Deidre LaCarte (of Nanaimo, British Columbia) was in a competition with her best friend and sister to generate the most Web traffic when she created the Hampster Dance page with the free Geocities web service in August 1998.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |