Probably most people who had ever surfed the internet, or had at least watched Ally McBeal series, saw animation of "The Dancing Baby" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAKmAqyiJq8). In one of our last classes, we were supposed to find out a video that became popular among web-users and came up with "Baby Givin the Evil Look!" video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQOds0kCgOk). The question appeard immediatelly: Why are baby videos so popular? Is it just because they are more funny than adults? Is it the cuteness? The child's innocence?
Janelle Brown, culture writer for Wired News, made a good point about "The Dancing Baby" animation. As she argues, "these kinds of funny animations and jokes and little projects have always proliferated on the Web, and they've always been very much a Web thing". She calls the dancing baby a "meme"! (According what we have read in Richard Dawkins' article The Selfish Gene: Memes, The New Replicators, "memes" are cultural ideas, practices or symbols that are passed from one person to another via process called imitation.)
Brown's idea and more information on "the-dancing-baby-phenomenon" can be found in CNN's article Dancing Baby cha-chas from the Internet to the networks, written by Greg Lefevre:
By the way, is seems that - sooner or later - every popular YouTube video needs to be remixed:) Here are some expamles of another "Evil Baby":
