Deidre LaCarte and the Hampster Dance: A Sibling Bet Gone Viral

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In 1997 Deidre LaCarte was an art student at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, teaching martial arts on the side, when she bet her sister and her best friend over who could draw the most traffic to a personal web page. Her entry, a GeoCities tribute to her pet hamster Hampton, offered rows of four low resolution dancing rodent GIFs and a sped up nine second loop of Roger Miller's Whistle Stop from Disney's 1973 Robin Hood.

This episode follows what happened when that page finally caught fire. For 19 months it logged about 800 visits. Then email chains and weblogs found it, and in March 1999 it drew 60,000 views in four days. LaCarte watched squatters grab the dot com address and a British group take the tune up the UK charts, then fought back by turning her joke into a legally clean pop single, a cast of characters, and a merchandise line before selling the rights in late 2001.

• LaCarte spelled hamster with an extra P in the site's title, which accidentally gave her page a unique searchable keyword long before search optimization was an industry.
• Because the page lived on free GeoCities space, she never owned the main domain. Opportunists registered it and hosted copies of her site to siphon off the traffic.
• The Cuban Boys built a dance track around the loop that peaked at number four on the UK Christmas singles chart, and LaCarte publicly accused them of stealing her concept.
• Working with Canadian producers the Boomtang Boys in summer 2000, she recreated the melody as a soundalike to avoid the Disney master recording. The Hampster Dance Song hit number one in Canada and went gold in Australia.
• The single became the most played track in the history of Radio Disney, and later owners issued more albums, including a 2008 Christmas record, and a direct to video film called How the Hamsters Saved Winter.