Hampton, the Hampster

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Chart positions
Explanation of the data
Singles
The Hampsterdance Song
  DE 60 11/06/2000 (9 weeks)
  AU 5 
gold
gold
02/11/2001 (10 weeks)
  CA 1Template: Infobox chart placements / maintenance / NR1 link 02.09.2000 (34 weeks)

Hampton, the Hampster is an animated music project that grew out of an internet hype.

background

The website

In 1998, Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte designed a website for a competition with her sister and best friend to see who would attract the most visitors. For this she created four different Gif animations with hamsters who danced distributed over the whole side in rows and dropped to a pitched version of a sample from the Whistle Stop by Roger Miller as a .wav file in country style play. The song was the opening music of the Disney cartoon Robin Hood . The hamsters were modeled after their own pet, a hamster named Hampton, and the site was called Hampton's Hampster House .

After not much had happened initially, the news from the site suddenly spread rapidly on the Internet and the website, which was innovative for the time, recorded up to 250,000 hits per day. After seven months after the launch, little had happened, and in the three months that followed, Internet users had visited the site 17 million times. However, LaCarte had used one of the cheap GeoCities sites and failed to secure the address "hampsterdance.com" in good time, which a company had then reserved and which took advantage of the advertising effect. While dozens of similar sites with animated cows, lizards and others were already being created on the internet, she began to build up the site "hampsterdance2.com". Different variants of their four rodents emerged.

Musical success

As early as 1999, the Cuban Boys from England took the country melody and built a techno song from it with the title Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia . The song was played on BBC One and became the most requested song on John Peel's show since the 1970s. The single releases brought the Cuban Boys a fourth place in the British charts and sold over 200,000 records.

As a result, LaCarte also looked for professional partners. In the spring of 2000, LaCarte's song sample, which lasted just a few seconds, was mixed into a real single with a rap insert and The Hampsterdance Song was released in Canada under the artist name Hampton the Hampster . After it became the best-selling single there and was number 1 on the Canadian charts for 6 weeks, it was released worldwide. It then went into the charts in a number of countries and came to number 60 in Germany, number 5 in Australia and number 4 in the dance maxi charts in the USA. It was followed by an entire album and other single releases such as the country classic Thank God I'm a Country Boy , which was also quite successful in some countries.

In the 2001 comedies Spot and Are We There Yet? from 2005 with rapper Ice Cube the Hampsterdance was used as film music.

Other Projects

The original four hamsters had developed a lot. All four characters had been given names (Hampton, Hado, Fuzzy and Dixie) and had become real comic characters and even movie animations. The website had changed to the originally intended address and was selling various merchandising items. The rights and the company that Deidre LaCarte had founded had been taken over by Abatis International and in collaboration with the web designers from Unreal and the production company Nelvana, which made children's programs, they tried to continue marketing the Hampsters. Although the site is still in operation today (2008) and the forum is still visited, nothing is known about the outcome of the projects. The original LaCarte website can no longer be accessed, but numerous copies of the original representation exist on the Internet.

Discography

Albums

  • The Hampsterdance Album (2001)

Singles

  • The Hampsterdance Song (2000)
  • Thank God I'm a Country Boy (2001)
  • Hampster Party (2001)
  • Sing a Simple Song (2001)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Chart sources: DE AU CA
  2. ↑ Awards for music sales: AU
  3. ↑ Article in USA Today (English)
  4. ↑ Robin Hood's opening credits
  5. ↑ Singing hamsters threaten Sir Cliff. In: BBC News. December 8, 1999, accessed February 2, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Hamster Dance Enhanced by David Cassel ( Memento from September 7, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (December 3, 1999)
  7. ↑ Cuban Boys: "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia " in the Official UK Charts (English)
  8. ^ Film soundtrack from Spot in the Internet Movie Database
  9. ↑ Film soundtrack from Are we there yet? in the Internet Movie Database
  10. ↑ Janet Kornblum: Hampster dancing into other venues. In: USA Today . June 14, 2001, Retrieved February 2, 2017 .

Web links