The "Dancing Baby", also called "Baby Cha-Cha" or "the Oogachacka Baby", is a 3D-rendered animation of a baby performing a cha-cha type dance. It quickly became a media phenomenon in the United States and one of the first viral videos in the mid-late 1990s. Origin Michael Girard, who has worked on Rugrats and The Simpsons, travelled from Holland, Netherlands, to California, United States, in 1993 with his wife Susan Amkraut. There, the couple started the company Unreal Pictures Inc. and the team began the "Biped" animation project by developing sample 3D animated files. The samples would be released in Character Studio, a plug-in for the Autodesk 3ds Max application (known as "3D Studio Max" at the time) from a division of Autodesk, Kinetix. Robert Lurye, who was animating at Rhythm and Hues Studios, was hired by the company and was told to make more samples. Lurye started changing the choreography of a dancing adult skeleton that had been made by the team (the "chacha.bip" file). He added more dance moves, such as making it "play air guitar for a second and bend over and shake its shoulders." For the visuals, Unreal Pictures Inc. had multiple renderings of creatures that could be animated, including an alien, a dinosaur and a baby. The baby, made by modeler Tony Morrill, had been bought from a Viewpoint DataLabs listing. Team member John Chadwick, by using the Physique software, made the baby model perform the skeleton's dance. He stated that it was his idea to load the dancing animation on the baby. Vulture, a pop culture website owned by New York magazine, reports that the animation was also developed by Paul Bloemink, John Hutchinson and Adam Felt. The result was a file with the name "sk_baby.max". Kinetix exhibited a demo of the Dancing Baby in the 1995 SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. Character Studio was released in August 1996. According to The New York Times, Girard had discarded the Dancing Baby, opining it was "disturbing" for its realistic nature, in contrast to Disney animations at the time. Spread LucasArts animator and Autodesk customer Ron Lussier recovered the Dancing Baby by recombining the chacha.bip file with the baby model (which was commercially available), made some minor changes and posted it on a CompuServe Internet forum as an .avi format. He also reportedly sent the Dancing Baby to his colleagues by e-mail. Although Girard credits Lussier as being