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The Hampster Dance or Hampsterdance is a song by Hampton the Hampster. It was released in July 2000, as a single. It was produced by The Boomtang Boys, recreating the Roger Miller hook and adding additional rap-style lyrics. The single, whose commercially released version featured a sound-a-like sample (the band having failed to gain permission to use the original), along with a number of other short voice samples from classic B-movies forming an abstract vocal line in lieu of a regular lyric, peaked at number 4 on the Christmas 1999 UK singles chart.〔BBC: (Festive Fifty 1999 )〕 This version was named "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia" and performed by The Cuban Boys. In 2005, CNET named the Hampster Dance the number-one web fad.〔(Top 10 Web fads ) - from CNET〕 It is one of the earliest examples of an Internet meme. Created by Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte for a Geocities page, the dance features rows of animated hamsters and other rodents dancing in various ways to a sped-up sample from the song "Whistle Stop" by Roger Miller. ==Background== Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte from Nanaimo, British Columbia, who was competing with her best friend and sister to see who could generate the most traffic, designed the Hampster Dance in August 1998 as homage to her pet hamster, named "Hampton Hamster."〔(Hamsters, You've Got Mail! ) Sun Sentinel〕〔 Using four simple animated GIFs of hamsters and other rodents, repeated dozens of times each, and a loop of background music embedded in the HTML, at the time a fairly new browser feature, she named the site ''Hampton's Hamster House'' and had Hampton declare his intent to become a "web star". Initially, the website consisted of a single page with four hamsters and other rodents, later redesigned and dubbed Hampton, Dixie, Hado, and Fuzzy. Over the next few years, alternate versions of the Hampsterdance appeared, such as for birthdays, where the hamsters are slightly modified to hold presents. The clip, a 9-second looped WAV file, was taken from a sped-up recording of Roger Miller's "Whistle Stop", a song written for the 1973 Disney animated feature film ''Robin Hood''. Until January 1999, only 800 visits were recorded (about 4 per day), but without warning, the number jumped to 15,000 per day. The web site spread by e-mail, early blogs, and bumper stickers, and was eventually even featured in a television commercial for Internet service provider EarthLink. It became a common office prank to set a co-worker's browser homepage to the website, which led to televised news reports furthering popularity to an international level. The continued popularity of the site led LaCarte to a professional redesign, and the addition of an online store for T-shirts and CDs of "Hamster" music. LaCarte failed to register the Hampsterdance name, and for some time the ''hamsterdance.com'' domain was owned by humor business Nutty Sites. Initially, ''hampsterdance.com'' was used, and later ''hamsterdance2.com''. Fans of the site created variations on the original dance, using politicians such as Dan Quayle and Cynthia McKinney as well as household objects such as Pez dispensers and lung X-rays. Notably, the song was featured in rapper Ice Cube's 2005 family comedy film ''Are We There Yet?''. In addition to this, it was also used in the theatrical trailer and several TV spots. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hampster Dance」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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