By today’s iStandards, as I’m sure they’ll soon be referenced, the early Internet would have seemed dreadfully slow... and that would be a fair assessment. Frankly, there wasn’t much to “do” on the Web back then. Having an email account was the first big feather for the subscriber’s cap, but finding others with one was sometimes a challenge. Lurking around the the BB’s was awesome for meeting others out in cyberspace, and a few proto-multi-player games managed to get a wider following, and some persistent notoriety.
And computers weren’t anything like we have now, in the early 2000’s. Looking back, they were practically more like fancy word processors, a cool way to store recipes or sports statistics, and a great way to keep budgets stright. Thrilling, no? No. Earliest to the rescue were CD-based games that began really flexing the computer’s processing power—some have a following to this very day. But, as tended to happen around every eighteen months, these wonders would be eclipsed by the next revolution in the development of all human kind. This one was known as: Online Video.
Now, if your service provider had enough throughput to handle the load, and your modem could manage the stream, and if your video card could crunch through the data, you too could watch video right from your desktop. It was, as I suspect many office managers from then would say, the death of staying on task. In those first few years, offices were some of the only places many people saw online video, as companies could better afford the rather spendy privilege (with LOTS of help from Uncle Sam, btw).
Much of the content was rather forgettable. But, like those fondly followed CD games, some of those first “viral” videos still have, for whatever reason, a mass of loyal fans. One early time-waster was a short video featuring a page of looped images of dancing hamsters in ordered rows entitled, ironically enough, The Hamster Dance. How many offices around the world sounded like preschools as this aural and video assault rampantly spread? Who can know. And what the hell were those hamsters saying, anyway?
Surfing the net today, you’ll find 20+ remixes of the old classic— most of them campy at best. Few have the lyrics, and fewer still offer anything but nonsensical, childish translations. Well, Behind The Patina doesn’t settle for nonsense and half-tries... the readers deserve better.
I offer you the lyrics to The Hamster Dance:
Dit ditee dot dee det doe doe,
Dee ba didat doe.
Dee dadoopy oop deydoon
Dayoo duhdoo,
Dayoh-dayoh,
Dedoodelay doong.
Yeha hahaha.