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Appreciation post: I keep seeing people call the dancing baby a 2000s meme, but it was all over our 1996 AOL homepage.
The 3D model was from 1996, and it spread through email chains and sites like Angelfire way before YouTube existed, which matters because it shows how pre-social media virality worked.
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terry_park7mo ago
Okay but calling it a 90s icon like @jackson.sage did feels off to me. The peak of everyone knowing about it was absolutely in the early 2000s. That's when it was on Ally McBeal and in all those email forwards your aunt sent. The 3D file might be older, but a meme is about the shared cultural moment, not the file date. Its real fame happened when more people got online later.
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hernandez.jordan5mo ago
Right, and @jackson.sage is just digging in like a tick on a dog at this point, isn't he? I mean, sure, the file's from the 90s, but no one was meme-ing it until we all got broadband and started forwarding the "dance" animation to everyone in our AIM buddy list. Maybe he's still stuck on dial-up or something.
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