Nerding Day: How the Hampsters Saved Winter (Patreon)

Getting old sneaks up on you. It's a state of mind that takes hold bit by bit with every contemptuous dismissal of the new, every retreat to the familiar. I saw the middlingest minds of my generation destroyed by Tung Tung Tung Sahur, malding hysterical red-faced, dragging themselves through the timelines at dawn looking for The Office memes.

But nothing is truly new. Our blessed internet fads were no more sophisticated than their barbaric brainrot. Really, the only difference between then and now is shelf life. In the Old Times, one sufficiently amusing website could provide months of fodder for radio hosts, bored students in school libraries, and chain emails. And none of these early sites was bigger than Hampster Dance.

You remember Hampster Dance, right? It was a 1997 Geocities page created by a woman named Deirdre LaCarte that played a sped-up version of nine seconds from a song originating in the Disney Robin Hood movie while four different tiled GIFs of hamsters danced endlessly for our amusement. And we were amused, indeed. People lost their fucking minds over this shit. Embedded looping audio on a static web page was everything we wanted from the internet. There was a whole website dedicated to just that one concept! And to be fair to our little baby brains, what else were you supposed to do in 1997? Read the phone book? Hang out at the drainage ditch? Fantasize about in-his-prime Jeffrey Combs on Deep Space 9?

Hampster Dance achieved what media executives would later call "virality" through "organic shares" in the "blogosphere." We used to have a blogosphere! Everyone made fun of bloggers back then, but now the idea of people having their own little websites where they share their thoughts instead of just spewing their brain contents 24/7 onto a platform that's populated by users innovating new strains of racism seems like a quaint dream. In March 1999, Hampster Dance got 60,000 views in four days. There were so few people online in the '90s that 15,000 daily views used to be considered good. Today, entire media ecosystems are obliterated for merely getting hundreds of thousands eyeballs on site, and the average American teenager has over six million views on their TikTok account in any given week.

There were Hampster Dance parodies. The creator started an online store. In 2000, they put Hampster Dance on TV in a commercial for Earthlink. In other words, they used it to advertise the internet. That's how big Hampster Dance was.

Of course, that meant everybody wanted a piece of the action. A UK group called the Cuban Boys produced a track titled "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia" that used a similar sped-up sample and marketed it as "the Hampster Dance song." Deirdre didn't get a cut, so she partnered with the Canadian Boomtang Boys to produce her own track, giving names to the four hamster GIFs on the original site: Hampton, Fuzzy, Hado, and Dizie. "The Hampsterdance Song" was the number one single in Canada for a month, only dethroned by The Moffatts (Canadian Hanson). It became Radio Disney's all-time most played track. And at the peak of its success, LaCarte sold the rights to a company called Abatis International, who tried their damndest to find a way, any way, to make money off this thing.

They pitched a cartoon series to Canadian animation studio Nelvana, but the deal fell through. They shopped it around to Disney and Sony, and they passed. And finally, they decided, fuck it, we'll do it ourselves the old-fashioned way: pay some clowns in Jersey to make a twenty minute, straight-to-DVD holiday special.

How the Hampsters Saved Winter was originally scheduled for release in 2005. Now, culture moved more slowly twenty years ago, but that was still a full eight years after Hampster Dance first appeared. The truly fucked up thing, though, is that the DVDs weren't actually sold until 2009. Two thousand and fucking nine. Children who grew up with Hampsterdance were long dead by then. YouTube had been in operation for nearly a half decade. As you can imagine, the Hampsterdance debut animated film did not set the world on fire. Instead, it slipped into obscurity, until it caught the attention of the lost media community years later.

Hey, can we talk about that for a second? I admire the archivist spirit in whatever form it takes, but digging up a late, pointless cash-in on an early internet meme feels… I don't know, like the kind of thing that the Unabomber would use as evidence of the hollowness of modern society. Maybe we never should have invented agriculture, man. Ever since they found where that weird German pop song came from, lost media has become the exclusive domain of perverts and children who desperately search for meaning in the cultural detritus that was created before they were born. But hey, if it weren't for them, I wouldn't be writing about this. What does that make me? This is the second one of these I've done in a month. I'm a content parasite. Vampire if you're thinking sexy, tongue-eating louse if you're thinking extra sexy.

Anyway, let's eat this thing's tongue.

You thought this was going to be a Christmas movie, didn't you? It isn't. It has nothing to do with any holiday. This is an objectively insane decision. Imagine if Home Alone was set in March. Macaulay Culkin would be a normal adult with parents who had to work to support him rather than the other way around. Maybe the producers thought "winter" was a safer choice than Christmas because they were angling for sales in the Chinese market.

The hampsters all live together in a reused asset of Bagg End from The Hobbit. They spend their time watching their own music videos and flipping out so hard they knock over furniture.

And decades before Leo Pointing, Hampton pointed at himself on the TV screen, performing a song named "Calling All Kids." The actual Hampsterdance track only appears in the opening to the film.

This looks rough for 2005. That's the same year Madagascar came out, and while sure, this had a smaller budget, it seems like they spent 90% of it on giving the hampsters realistic fur rather than making sure they didn't look like dead-eyed baby cenobites in motion.

You can tell the girl hampsters because they have eyelashes. These are Dixie and Hado, whose personalities are "southern" and "Hawaiian, maybe?" There's also Fuzzy, who is Australian to the point of caricature. If it were possible to hate crime white Australians, this Oakleys and shark tooth-wearing hampster would be a wildly successful influencer on Twitter.

That last guy is Frank, who the credits introduce as "Frank as the Ferret." He's from Brooklyn, because broad accent work = comedy and I'm pretty sure the cast on this was just the people who animated and produced it.

So the band is supposed to go to Montreal to put on a show, but there's going to be a big snowstorm! They get a call from their manager, Hy Strung, and man, they really did blow all their money on that fur. Check this shit out.

That's crisp. I'll forgive the "Hy Strung as himself" in the credits on account of the crispness of that fur. I hope whatever animator got a paycheque out of this went on to work for Pixar. It would have to have been under an assumed name, though; because nobody involved in this seems to have done anything before or since, unless you count director Pat Corbitt's work on films like Ravager (Yancy Butler!), Raptor Island (Lorenzo Lamas!) and Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 (Michael York! Michael Biehn! Michael Paul Chan! Goddamn I gotta see this movie.)

The hampsters set out for Montreal, but their shitty van can't handle the snowstorm. Frank makes Fuzzy climb up onto the roof and snowboard behind the back of it to stop them from careening off the side of a mountain in a plan I can only describe as an insane, Robitussin-induced, attempt to kill Fuzzy.

They're saved from certain death, but Frank has overdosed on cough syrup and slipped into a twilight state between waking life and oblivion.

Luckily, the crew discover a nearby resort where they can weather the storm.

The Edge of Powder sounds like it's supposed to be a pun, but the only thing I can find that it might be riffing on is a 1989 Australian film called The Edge of Power. It can't be that, right? Hell, I guess it could be. As far as I can tell this movie was produced by five lunatics working with no oversight or external direction. Maybe this was for the imaginary adults in the imaginary audience. Maybe this was their shot at a Tiny Toons Citizen Kane moment.

Speaking of hideous animated children, this!

Nobody made them put human beings in the Hampsterdance movie. It could have just been about talking animals and nobody would have cared.

The human beings in this movie make the characters in The Polar Express look friendly and lifelike by comparison. They tower over the hampsters and seem briefly shocked to encounter talking rodents who walk on their hind legs, but quickly recognize them as the world famous talking, walking rodents who are always on the radio. The shock of this experience ages the father by decades in a span of minutes.

It turns out that this ski resort isn't doing so hot. The hampsters decide they need to intervene to save this struggling family — but how? While they're trying to figure it out, Hado gets an email from a group of hampster fans stuck in the mountains on a tour bus.

Frank, recovered from dextromethorphan poisoning, rigs a snowplow to clear the road to the inn.

They make their way to the bus, and off steps a man that they greet by name. "Ken" has never been mentioned before in the special, but presumably they have a history with him.

In fact, this is actual human being Kenny Curtis, a veteran kids' radio host who ran a show called The Animal Farm on Sirius XM and presumably had to play Hampton and the Hampsters tracks until his ears bled.

Why is he in the movie? I have no idea. This appearance is not listed on his IMDB page, which includes only a single credit: a bit part in Cry-Baby (1990).

The hampsters realize they're not going to make it to their show. But Kenny's conveniently brought a satellite uplink with him, and there's already a busload of fans sheltering at the Edge of Powder, so the band decides to put on a show right there.

We're treated to a music video that features Hampton breaking his leg in a skiing accident.

The show is so successful that it saves the resort — and by extension, the concept of winter.

Samantha is sad to see her friends go, but, like Frosty the Snowman, they pledge to return again next year. Not like Frosty the Snowman, they instantly morph from stapler size to half the height of a human child in order to properly embrace her.

How the Hampsters Saved Winter was the sad end result of a million dollar deal for the rights to Hampsterdance. Crucially, the deal wasn't for the music (which was, again, from a Disney movie), the domain (someone else was squatting on it), or the character designs (which were just clipart). Bill Porfido, who was president of Abatis International, said "We were basically paying them for nothing, to tell you the truth." These were the sorts of insane deals that happened in the early days of the web, when nobody knew what anything was worth. As you can imagine, it didn't work out great for Bill.

But the Hampsterdance story has something of a happy ending. While Bill and Abatis International failed to cash in, Deidre, her business partner Jeffery Lane, and the Boomtang Boys have all continued to get royalties whenever their song is used.

Yes Virginia, sometimes the people who come up with an insane, stupid idea that happens to become insanely popular do prosper, and sometimes, just sometimes, the vultures who swoop in to try and make a quick buck off their dumb luck are left holding the bag containing four dead hamsters. Merry Winter, and a Hampster New Year.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: KNM, which is pretty close to KEN now that we think about it. A little suspicious, don't you think? A little too suspicious.

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