Ally Mcbeal Dancing Baby

Seven iconic internet memes of all time: Dancing baby to Chuck Norris

The internet has been called many things, from “democracy’s greatest tool” to the “greatest place for free speech”. However, when you Google “internet’s greatest” and it auto-completes to “invention of all time”, netizens know what the internet is truly great at — it’s also a great waster of time.

While social networks, celebrity gossip sites or — if you feel yourself to be a little more cerebrally gifted — news parody sites are arguably the greatest sources of countless man-hours lost to web activity, the truth is that memes take up a fair amount of our time.

The meaning of meme on refers to memes as “…cultural ideas, symbols or practices transmitted from one mind to another…”

Below are seven memes that captured our imagination in this era of great procrastination.

The Dancing Baby Known as “Baby Cha-Cha”, “Oogachaka baby” or far more simply as “The Dancing Baby”, years before most of us found our way on the web — we had seen this. Released as a sample of what a 3D rendering product could do in 1996, The Dancing Baby enchanted and entranced us, and was remixed into various other versions with other songs. For lovers of pop culture, The Dancing Baby will always be connected to mid-90s hit TV show “Ally McBeal”, where the baby would appear and dance before the main character as a reminder of her ticking biological clock. This could be classified as the first internet meme.

This is a classic example of “engrish” or a bad translation from Japanese to English. “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” was taken from the opening sequence of the European version of the Sony MegaDrive game “Zero Wing”. In no way was “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” the only engrish in the game. Along with this iconic phrase, there were other priceless examples such as “somebody set up us the bomb”, and “tke off every Zig for great justice”. However, what turned “all your base are belong to us” into “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” was part-time deejay Jeffrey Ray Roberts, who turned the phrase into a brilliant or annoying (so watch the video at your own risk) dance song. From there, what had been a little joke exploded beyond the web into the rest of pop culture, with other remixes, T shirts and use as a general catchphrase.

Artsy Muffin: A Life: Ally McBeal's dancing baby

When I was in college [and for a year or so after I graduated], the tv show Ally McBeal was the hottest thing on television. If you were one of those people who watched it, you may remember a dancing baby - I guess it was supposed to represent Ally's biological clock. The dancing baby would show up at inopportune times, beckoning Ms. McBeal to dance. Eventually, she gave in and danced with him, to the song, "Hooked on a Feeling." And I have my own dancing baby. He doesn't dance. He just shows up in my dreams occasionally. Seriously. He showed up a year or so back. He has blonde hair [straight, which is weird, since both Patrick and I have wavy/curly hair!] and bright blue eyes. The first time he showed up in my dreams, he was about 8-9 months old and we were in the grocery store trying to teach him baby-sign. He just giggled and showed absolutely no interest in learning the signs for the various offerings of the produce department.

Beautiful TV, the art and argument of Ally McBeal

Billboard

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