A Star is Born on the Internet

A star is born on the Internet. I'm Fred Fishkin with Bootcamp, a report on computers and technology. The Dancing Baby is stepping from computer screens to TV screens....and now to toy stores. A company called Toy Works Plus has licensed the character...and says chairman Michael Planit, will soon have a variety of Dancing Babies on the market...

"We've developed an actual Dancying Baby. It's a three dimensional, eight inch high vinyl baby that sits on a pedestal. The pedestal is molded to look like a mouse from a computer. You click on that mouse and the baby actually dances to the song Hooked on a Feeling, which is the song that made the baby famous from Ally McBeal, and goes into its whole dance. In addition to that, we have several other items from a car window dancer, which is a baby with a suction cup that gets hooked onto the car window and with the movement of the car shakes back and forth, to many other clip-ons and wind-ups and magnets, etcetera."

Not bad for a computer generated animation that was designed to show off the capabilities of a software package called Character Studio from the Kinetix division of AutoDesk. The Dancing Baby made the email rounds on the net a year or more ago. Now, there are variations out there, some humorous, some not. However you look at it, the Internet culture has created its first star. There's even talk of a TV show. How much ooga-chaka can you take?