Holy shit all those videos - where and when did the pre-Rico Dancing Baby model and animation come about anyway? I know there was a gif of it that was everywhere, and I've seen models that have the EXACT same dance as the original, so the rigging etc must still be available somewhere.

according to a reliable source the "cha-cha type dance" animation came default with an ancient version of what is now known as 3DS Max. it also came with a baby model, and you were able to use it as a "skin" for the "cha-cha type dance". as soon as the program was released i guess literally everyone thought it was funny at the same time and it was rendered and shown to everyone. what's interesting is that "Various commercial advertisements presented the Dancing Baby animation to international markets continuing the mainstream media attention."
 
that's really weird to think about. this one generic 3d baby model paired with a pre-loaded animation spawned two completely seperate cultural phenomena in two completely seperate environments. bebe rico was a (consciously or otherwise) re-appropriated dancing baby that had such a positive reaction from the people of congo that it mutated into something completely distinct to what the rest of the world was raving over. this generic 3d baby model became a sort of cultural icon, but not OUR cultural icon. a congoan baby lotion mascot. guess that explains why these vids have millions of views.
 
 

What would possess a person struggling to come up with ideas for baby videos to think "DORAEMON....... HULK..... FINGERS"????

so naive.........

so naive.........

 
Like yeah I know we already had the discussion about "baby-targeted videos are ambiguously computer-generated" but a bot or committee didn't decide on its own to put those concepts together - Some person actually had to have determined that Doraemon characters were adequate for their superhero-themed finger puppet generator videos. They know it's Doraemon and not just some nameless designs they were given because it says so in the title. The whole channel's videos are clearly automated but somebody gave it Doraemon pictures, and I think it's fucking hilarious, because what on earth does Doraemon have to do with spiderman and mickey mouse and frozen/inside out/whatever other popular thing these sorts of videos appropriate into one big blend? It doesn't have any cultural penetration except in Japan where he's enormous. It's transparent that someone decided which ones they'd be using based entirely off of some list of most popular/recognizable characters to maximize applicability/appeal but the result falls so far off the mark - makes less than zero sense - but I mean, babies don't care.
 
The Tale of sk_baby.max...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4xQlAvINfs lmao this is better than either individual game
 
The two great classics.... together at last

Lego's "biggest failure" was a 2002 line of toys called Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension. The distinctive gimmick was the characters' abilities to "glinch" - i.e. remotely copy or switch out limbs between people. I never even saw the brand in stores, but discovered it through a shockwave flash game on the main Galidor webpage. I really want to play it again - think I might've archive.org'd it a few years ago and managed to get it to run? But anyway, it was fun and unusual - a top-down adventure game where you could jump, up towards the camera. The only part I remember is running into the main village, which was full of strange and mysterious shit locked behind walls demanding objects I didn't recognize, and screwing around with the challenges and games there - some sort of red crystal you earned by throwing a ball into a hoop - it was called "quoran" or something. Anyway, I never grasped it enough to get out of the village or glinch even once, but it still made enough of an impact on me to float into my mind when I woke up this morning.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_053vJUrlug
 
I was unfamiliar with the show until I watched it today. It's awful of course (in turns pitifully or hilariously awful) (the super unlikable main character's last name is "Bluetooth" and the comparatively awesome girl sidekick is "Allegra Zane") but also very entertaining if you like bizarrely-shot early 00s techno-futuristic dumb-goggles gel-and-rubber CGI fuckery. It starts off with a dream sequence on an alien planet but then the unusual, claustrophobic camera angles persist after waking and through the rest of the show - unintentional but imo it works out in its favor, gives the whole show an unnatural frantic cast that makes it stick out from the other 00s kid sci-fi - as though it never stopped being a dream. The weird thing is how this line got a ton of funding - enough to make a TV show, GBA game (I haven't checked it out, it probably sucks), the web game, a shitload of toys with expensive gimmicks, possibly other things. Then it turned out nobody but a small handful of crazies liked anything about it and the whole thing was quietly dumped in a ditch for Lego to turn to the much more successful Bionicle. Now it stands as a sort of impossible object - a line of toys nobody liked that got enough funding to build an entire dead-end ecosystem. If you search up "Galidor" today you find maybe two sacks like me who enjoy its awkward aesthetic and then a ton of threads and blogs listing LEGOS BIGGEST EPIC FAILS!!!!! #1, GALIDOR. The main reason cited for its failure is always its incompatibility with other Lego sets - of course, I never knew it had anything to do with Lego, so I never had that expectation.
 
edit: Oh, okay - It was called Galidor Quest and it's actually still "perfectly playable"/has some modicum of fans remaining who are interested in seeing what they can do to repair the broken save functionality - unfortunately old Shockwave games are basically impossible to decompile, to this day, for some reason, and I don't actually have the best flash version to get it to run so I can't go back and update you all on what the red crystals were actually called. But it's quite good to know that arrogant site filled with flash games will always remain in some capacity for us humans to observe its doomed confidence, and maybe learn something from it.
 
 
edit2: Do you guys remember that freakish 90s show Ragnar or somebody posted with the unspeakable CGI effects of a teenage girl transforming into silver slime? The Secret World of Alex Mack? Both shows are executive produced/"created by" Tom Lynch of the Tom Lynch Company, who is apparently known for making successful tween television. I don't know how much was him, creatively, but these shows - along with The Journey of Allen Strange where an alien child abandoned on earth takes the form of a young black boy and befriends two other kids - all had rote yet weird premises that were very much "of their time".
 
edit 3: A. The overall opinion on Galidor is less negative than I thought - the majority of people dissing on it consider it to be a design betrayal on Lego's part. Otherwise the quality of the figures were often appreciated. There are enough fans of Galidor to leave YouTube comments sticking up for it:

ITS MY LIFE NOT CRAP U PIECCE OF SHIET

B. There was a game on the PS2 that got ported to PC. It's not good
C. "Bluetooth" is not a tech reference; it and "Gorm" the villain are both references to Danish royalty.

hahaha ohhh shiiiit
 

Long time no see. It provides me great comfort to know you're all out here doing the thing. How ya'll doing?
 
https://youtu.be/4BHmlLU5pKA?list=LLBNGzSrHscAeL_kVplqFpeg