The original is now only in our hearts, but we linked to a mirror so you can still  enjoy the best animated-gif-background-(completely-illegal)-song website known to the tubes. This here is straight from ‘98. It appears the hamsters went on vacation on June 13, 2000 and  never appeared again.

We all have to thank the pet hamster that brought the inspiration: Hampton Hamster. The page was created by now 46 year old Deidre LaCarte (read: 38 year-old hamster owner). Trying to cash in on the “FWD: FWD: FWD: RE: FWD: HAMPSTERS DANCING” popularity, Deidre  tried to tee up against the Chipmunks and sell strange hamster-related merchandise like CD’s and ornaments.

If you haven’t caught it by now, this fad was so popular that it didn’t even have to be spelled correctly…it went by Hampster Dance (yes, with a ‘p’). That’s a misspelling by a 38 year old Canadian who apparantly sucks at web design…not ours. But that wasn’t her biggest mistake - she failed to register the hampsterdance.com domain name when the original geocities site had 45 million visitors  & instead had to go with (you guessed it) hampsterdance2.com. I wonder just how many sales of CD’s with hamsters singing she left on the table.

Just for funsies I’m throwing some good ol’ fashioned blinking text in this post.