The "Dancing Baby," also called "Baby Cha-Cha," is a 3D-rendered animation of a baby dancing. It spreads quickly on websites, emails, video games, music, commercials, forums to mainstream television. It was a media phenomenon, internet meme, and one of the first viral videos.
It originated as a collection of experimental testing data and files, released in Autumn of 1996 as a product sample source file (sk_baby.max) with the 3D character animation software product "Character Studio", used with 3D Studio Max. The source file was available for download so people were able to render their own video clips of the 'original' animated dancing. It wasn't long until web developer John Woodell created a highly compressed animated gif from the source file as part of a demo of the movie-to-gif process. Woodell later published the gif to his web page of the Internet company where he worked. After that, the animated gif then spreads like wildfire.