HAMSTER TOYS

The hamster dance song started its humble days as a Canadian art student named Deidre LaCarte created a website in August 1998 as a competition between her sister, a friend and herself to see who could generate the most web traffic. The website consisted of animated hamsters in a loop, dancing to a speeded up version of Roger Miller’s “Whistle Stop”. The animations were styled on LaCarte’s hamster called “Hampton Hamster”. The website had slow beginnings and received approximately four visitors per day, until in January 1999, when the site received on average 15,000 hits per day. T-Shirts, bumper stickers and imitation websites sprang up and this viral spread of the website made the Hamster Dance Song extremely popular. Email was becoming popular as well and this helped with the spread of the site’s existence.

The “official” Hamster Dance Song was released in Canada in 2001 and it’s video received the cheesiest or worse video award that year. It remained in the Canadian Top 40 for two weeks, reaching a high of number 38 on the charts. The song was also released in Australia in 2001 and fared much better there with higher chart rankings. The songs were credited to Hampton the Hamster. Various spin-offs were produced as well, and as the website’s popularity went viral, the song became more popular.

The Hamster Dance song has also featured in various movies, such as in the 2001 movie “See Spot Run”, as well as the 2005 movie “Are we There Yet?” The 2009 movie “Hannah Montana: The Movie” , Miley has a similar ringtone based on the Hamster Dance tune.

The original website song consisted of a 9 second loop of electronic, speeded up music and was instantly appealing to young and old of all ages. The simplistic lyrics appealed to many people and we could all enjoy a good laugh at something that was relatively new to the internet. The technology to embed songs in websites was also rather new, and many websites used this new technology to embed their own songs in it. The website was originally hosted on the Geocities free website servers, and as the news of the website spread, and the daily hits increased, Geocities would often make the page unavailable to save on bandwidth. The site was eventually located on a paid server and its bandwidth issues were resolved.

When the original website was expanded, three other hamsters were named and they became known as Hampton, Dixie, Hado, and Fuzzy. Spoof versions of the song appeared on the internet, often featuring politicians such as Dan Quayle. CD’s and DVD’s were produced as well in 3D CGI.

The Hamster Dance song is just an example of home popular an item or website can become if it goes viral and spreads throughout the internet. Many sites were offering the version of the Hamster Dance song, and even the, then, illegal file sharing giant Napster reported in its first month of existence in June 1999 that the Hamster Dance song was in the Top 5 of all requested downloads.