7 min read · Jun 5, 2023
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What, exactly, is the Hampsterdance? If you were online around the turn of the millennium, you probably think you know the answer to this question. I did, anyway. And the first, seemingly obvious definition is that it’s a website. It’s the kind of website you probably haven’t seen in a decade, at least — lost to the pixels of time along with stuff like Zombo.com and the emo rants you used to publish on LiveJournal. But it’s a website, just the same. One page with one purpose: deliver 392 animated GIFs of dancing rodents and the most infuriating .wav file ever uploaded — a sound that, way back when, threatened to blast out of your speakers every time you checked your email.
It’s weird to think about now — weirder than a website devoted to hundreds of cartoon rodents. But 20 years ago, the Hampsterdance was revolutionary, an example of “going viral” before anyone was even using the phrase. Want to make someone LOL? Send them the Hampsterdance. Want to prank your boss? Teacher? Roommate? Get everyone to load the page at the same time. It infiltrated the culture, both online and off, even popping up in a TV ad for Earthlink. And it made its conquest before iPhones, before social media — spreading through email and old-timey word of mouth.
When you consider all that, it’s fair to call it the world’s first online meme — or one of the first, depending on your source. And that’s the beginning of where things get tricky, because getting a handle on what a meme actually means can be strange business. It’s a thing — an image, a video, a concept, a website, some cultural object — that spreads wildly, mutating and evolving as it’s passed along. So when it comes to memes, we’re all authors, and we’re all the audience. Keep that in mind. It’s what makes this whole “Hampsterdance” question difficult. What is it — who made it — if we’ve all had a paw in there somewhere?
What you’re about to read is an oral history of the Hampsterdance, as told by some of the people whose lives were tangled up in its tale.
Yes, the Hampsterdance was a website — one built by Deidre LaCarte, a then 37-year-old martial arts instructor and art student from Nanaimo, B.C.
The Hampsterdance is a song. (Or songs, really.) And that “dedodedo” tune you used to hear on the old website wasn’t original. It first appeared in Disney’s Robin Hood.
The Hampsterdance is a paycheque — or at least it is to a few characters in this story. And for those who’ve earned a cut of “Hampster” cash, some are convinced it’s nowhere near enough.
And it’s also a trademark, one that could’ve been slapped on a hit TV show and a line of toys, before Angry Birds or Grumpy Cat or even emojis were making box-office bank. (Don’t mistake it for Hamtaro or Zhu Zhu Pets, please and thanks.)
“Hampsterdance — who made it — if we’ve all had a paw in there somewhere?”
Sure as there are more oral histories online than you could ever read or retweet, people love nostalgia, and just like the Hampsterdance, this story started as a laugh. It was just supposed to be a quick assignment — a hit of kitschy Y2K memories for anyone who remembered a weird website or a goofy novelty song or even just some gag from Are We There Yet?
But with every person who agreed to be interviewed, the Hampsterdance turned into one more thing: a hairy beast of a saga.
It’s the centre of so many schemes and unresolved disputes that its history is more complicated than a super-sized Habitrail. For a website that more or less started as an inside joke, the Hampsterdance became some kind of digital Zelig.
It was there for the dot-com boom. It was a major player in the primordial muck of personal websites that wound up pre-dating social media. It was in the middle of copyright squabbles when the internet was even more of a free-for-all than it is today. It even do-si-do’d with Disney and Hallmark Cards and — if you believe the rumours — Britney Spears and a Gallagher brother. And for the people who had any stake in it at the time, arguments over who was responsible for any of that have festered so long that 10 generations of real-life Hamptons could have come and gone by now.
It’s a chapter of pop culture history that could only have started in 1998, a time when more people than ever before were making sense of the internet for the first time. And that includes the folks you’re about to hear from.
Why did anyone build a website in 1998? There was no Facebook, no MySpace — not even Friendster. The closest thing to social media was having your own website, and if you didn’t have the skills or inclination to do differently, you could sign up with something like Geocities, a free web-hosting service that doubled as a community of personal webpages. Easy to use, the service — and its contemporaries like Angelfire and Tripod — made it simple for countless people (and their Empire Records fansites) to get online in no time, and by June of 1998, Deidre LaCarte had a Geocities account and was copy/pasting the code that would become the Hampsterdance.
Design-wise, the site had plenty of the same busted hallmarks as other pages from the era. Loads of retina-searing animated clip-art, albeit a few hundred more of those GIFs than usual. There was a guestbook where visitors could leave comments, a web counter graphic to log every visit to the page.
But for anyone who doesn’t remember losing a weekend translating the unauthorized biography of Leonardo DiCaprio to HTML, posting something online arguably meant something different back then. Now, everything we do has a potential audience. We don’t take photos for ourselves, for example — we take them to share them, and unless your privacy settings are on lockdown, we’re potentially broadcasting to however many millions of people are on your social platform of choice. But people didn’t build Geocities pages thinking that they were going to reach the entire world. They weren’t dreaming of retiring early off banner ad revenue, or branding themselves as influencers, spinning Angelfire poetry pages into book deals. If you posted something online, it was probably just meant for your friends.
Deidre was studying art at Malaspina University-College back then (now Vancouver Island University), same as her friend Hazel Steenman, then 44. The two would later marry.
As for the website, it all began as a bit of fun — just a goofy competition.
The music is more important, I think, than the actual graphical images. It catches. You’re hearing a cute little ditty and it makes people happy. So if it wasn’t for the music, that website wouldn’t have gone [viral].
Let’s just say they had a winner, because when it comes to that surge of Hampsterdance traffic, the exact numbers are different depending which source you check. Back in 1999, some news outlets reported Deidre witnessing an explosion of 30,000 hits in four days; others said it was twice as much. But even if Deidre’s web counter was spinning around like a freshly greased hamster wheel, by today’s standards, the stats wouldn’t come close to breaking the internet.
It raises a couple of points that are peculiar to the era. By 1999, the internet was becoming an ordinary part of everyday life, but hardly everyone was online. You’d find a regular internet user in less than half than Canadian households that year. Still, online culture was familiar enough that the local paper, TV news and even Martha Stewart were actually talking about a silly website that was suddenly the best reason to have an email account. And in a pre-Facebook world, that sort of old school media coverage wound up turning the Hampsterdance into a phenomenon.
By the middle of 1999, the Hampsterdance was internet famous — a bona fide meme. Spoof sites were proliferating like IRL rodents, and it was being remixed, copied and parodied, becoming one more ingredient in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that is online culture.
Like Deidre said, sometimes things took an R-rated turn. One of the most viral parodies would probably be Joe Cartoon’s “Gerbil in a Microwave,” an interactive flash cartoon that let viewers nuke a dancing rodent by clicking the screen. (According to the Guardian, roughly 10 million people emailed the link between June and November of 1999.) But that was more sophisticated than most of the spoofs and tributes. Copycat sites were way more common, and Deidre’s clip-art hampsters were substituted with just about anything you can GIF.
A 1999 article about “Hamsterdance Fever” [sic] includes a list of some of the more creative examples: dancing cheeseburgers, AOL CDs, Dick Van Dyke. David Cassel wrote that story for www.gettingit.com. Still covering tech in the Bay Area, he reported on the Hampsterdance for a variety of outlets while the meme was in its heyday.
