Hulagirl.txt

Have you seen this woman?

Perhaps enough time has passed that she is merely an inconsequential sighting to the average webuser, a rarity of a signal overlooked in the noise. There was once a time that she danced her way across webpages all over geocities and brought a small injection of joy and energy to whatever page she graced. Early on, she was a known quantity but the passage of time and memory made her mysterious. Stayed mysterious for a long while since, honestly, who really cares about the provenance of a free-to-use gif that is barely 5kB?

Olia Lialina is one such person. An artist, archivist, and connoisseur of everything digital, Lialina recalls first encountering Hulagirl in 1998 where she utilized her for the landing page for rhizome.org (where you can still see her twisting away between trails of copyright logos). Lialina imprinted upon this little dancing figure and decided to herself become a model for animated gifs.

It wasn't until 2009 that the wheels of Hulagirl research started really turning. Yahoo announced the closure of its free-to-use website platform Geocities which triggered a response from The Internet Archive to scrape as much data as they possibly could to rescue the information contained in this digital Library of Alexandria. It was this archive that Lialina and her colleague Dragan Espenschied started exploring for their project at The Geocities Institute Blog: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. Jumping two years ahead, on March 21st, 2011 the two internet anthropologists uncovered something new. On a website that collected animated gifs (GifWelt), there was a Hulagirl that still had an author listed in the metadata: Chuck Poynter.

Let's take a step backward.

OToKA determined, based on their research, that it's likely Poynter made Hulagirl in September 1996 which gives us an age of 30 for the little dancing lady. As for her debut into the wider web, there was a book published in 1998 called Netscape Communicator (a text for aspiring website creators) which featured a chapter on animated graphics. Right at the top is a screenshot of Poynter's gif collection website and right on the page is none other than Hulagirl. Since this text directly led to her, it only made sense that she would start appearing on more and more personal websites. It also makes sense that Lialina would encounter the dancer the same year Hulagirl was published in a book about webdev.

So that's the answer then. Charles Poynter, retired member of the US Air Force, born in 1937, a man who returned from the war and engaged in his passion of making little animated images. Archive of his collection for your perusal

Well... Let's take another step back.

In 1984, a team of developers form the company Macromind and, in 1985, release Macromind VideoWorks. Four names: Marc Canter, Dan Sadowski, Mark Pierce, and Jamie Faye Fenton (that's right! A transgender woman is in this story!). If you dig through the prepackaged demo files, you'll see something interesting: many of Poynter's gifs appear in here.

In particular, on March 30th, 2011 Lialina and Espenschied received a tip that dancing girl appeared in this software and, as you can see, that user was absolutely correct.

With this monumental discovery, the investigation once again entered stasis. Someone on the Macromind team created Hulagirl as an example piece and it was one of these four names but attempts to get the information were not fruitful until a full six years later on January 3rd, 2017.

A different tumblr user uploaded a gif showing Hulagirl, the one from VideoWorks, doing her thing (as usual). When contacted, ulan-bator directed the team to an archive of old PCX (a graphical format) files that were bundled on the "So Much Shareware" CD-Rom from 1994. It became clear very quickly that these were in fact the source images that Chuck Poynter was using as you will see in the examples under the dropdown here. Hulagirl herself? A spritesheet featuring all the dancers from VideoWorks with a name and date at the bottom. MSP '85. Mark S Pierce of Macromind. This is, in my mind, the surest connection we have to show that Mark Pierce is the original author of this animation.

We have the Father and the Stepfather of Hulagirl locked in. The case is closed.... ....right?

Everything I have shared up to this point has been the research and efforts of the Geocities Institute and followers of the project. Now is where I can step in and share the things that I personally have to contribute to the story.

September 7th, 2026, I am browsing the geocities archives on Restorativland and posting about them on tumblr. I scroll down on my dashboard a little bit and see this post from grooveland. Within half a second, I recognize that frame of animation displayed on the one labeled TWIST. I immediately start my research and within a day, I'm already drowning in information.

Perhaps we should take another step back, if you'd be willing to follow me.

So what is this Hullabaloo Twist? It's a "lenticular flicker," a type of image with a lenticular lens affixed to the front which causes different areas of the image to be visible at different angles. This means that successive images along the angle of change can create the illusion of motion. Early versions were used to make static images appear to be three dimensional without the use of special glasses for the viewer. These Auto-Stereo-Graphic images are quite convincing if you have ever seen one in person and sort of hard to capture on camera. Most people have seen these before without knowing anything about the terms Lenticular and Autostereographic (lord knows I didn't until last week). These objects are quite popular as collectors items because there aren't many companies that find them worthwhile to produce anymore. On these flickers, there is information on the back directing the viewer to the Vari-Vue company. Upon exploration, I found that these were commissioned as promotional items for the musical variety television show Hullabaloo wherein popular acts of the day (1965) would perform alongside a group of studio Go-go dancers. The idea is that you'd find one of these little dancer cards and then go watch the show to see if you could spot the dance being performed by the gals on stage. Or, if you watched the show first, get a little commemorative token of your favorite dance. You can see that this card shows the exact same motion as Hulagirl with the same proportions and some of the same dressings. You even have an exact match of one of the background dancers on the card to the Right Guy in the VideoWorks Dance Fever.

This would be the end if not for the fact we still don't have solid physical, documented connections from the 60s to the 80s. So I kept digging. I wanted to see if I could connect Mark Pierce to these cards in some real way.

So lets take one more step back (and I promise this is the last one).

There's a lot to be explored in the history of animation but I want to keep us focused here so you can read more about that nonsense at this link: 4000 years of Implied Motion

In 1908 (What? I did a lot of legwork. Let me be a little indulgent), a physicist named Gabriel Lippmann develops a process he calls integral photography which involves taking an photograph through a special lens constructed like a fly's eye. Then the same kind of lens is affixed to the resulting image to create a strong autostereographic effect. This act of attaching the lens array directly to the image sparks a fever of research that extends into the 20s with Herbert Ives (of half-tone color printing fame) combining the integral idea with a lenticular lens instead of the fly-eye style. By the 1930s, the lenticular lens style was expanded (at least where documentation has been found) in Britain, France, Germany, and the USA.

(Side Note: Remember Chuck Poynter? Born in 1937. A year after the first patent to call the linear lens array "Lenticular." How fun!)

For our purposes, we now focus on one guy: Victor Anderson. (special thanks to Twin Peaks Blog for doing some of this legwork for me already.) In 1948, he returns from the war and engages with his passion: making little animated pictures. Just like Chuck! See, the military had been working with linear camera arrays for their training processes and Anderson brought that knowledge home with him. He founds the company Pictorial Pictures Inc. and starts producing commercial 'flickers', as he calls them. In 1952, he is commissioned by Dwight D. Eisenhower to make a truly icon piece of campaign memorabilia history: The Lenticular "We Like Ike/I like Ike/Win With Ike" button that flickers between the slogan and the man's face. This causes the popularity of the flickers to explode into the public consciousness. This spurs Anderson to file for a patent on his process for assembling the images in 1952. He also reincorporates from Pictorial Pictures to Vari-Vue. After patent approval in 1957, Vari-vue becomes the primary dominating force in the market of lenticular flickers. This is when, in 1965, Hullabaloo shells out for the novelty marketing images of their Go-go dancers.

Let's take a look at the Twist dancer again. Take careful note of her appearance versus that of Hulagirl. See how even her shadow differs from the VideoWorks dancer.

Enter my best friend Chloe who tracked down an eBay listing showing this right here:

Let's see it overlaid, shall we?

The shadows are the same shapes (even if attached to different "frames")

Ladies, that's her. That's Hulagirl. She has the same shirt, the same skirt, the same hair.

On the back of this card, Vari-Vue is credited. This means that she was born sometime between 1957 (patent approval, since the print doesn't say 'pending') and 1965 (Hullabaloo commission). Hulagirl is 61-69 years old and she still looks great and she still got the moves. Grandma has been bringing delight to people for ages!

When I say I was losing my mind, that I was blowing up people's inboxes, when I was literally welling up with tears at this discovery, I mean it. It was so exciting that I was spurred into writing this very document in a mania fueled week and a half of frantic research which of course ended with me acquiring a handful of Hulagirls to hold my my hulahands.

I had to buy her, right? I have seven of these flicker dancers and the 6 Hullabaloo girls in my possession now. I had to get them. Once I figure out the best way to capture their individual 'frames,' I'm going to make animations of them to put alongside Hulagirl. You just have to know how much warmth I get from holding these stinky (have I mentioned that yet?) little cards. I cried a little when I first beheld her in person, in the flesh.

But we aren't through yet!!

I said I wanted to connect this somehow to the fine folks at Macromind, yes? So let's keep pushing, there is more to uncover.

We jump forward 20 years to 1984 and the founding of Macromind. Development starts as Jamie Faye Fenton works on the codebase while Mark Pierce works on the art direction of these demos. Not much of a connection to the lenticular stuff, right? I think I can provide enough information to at least make it believable beyond reasonable doubt (as if the visual comparison wasn't enough). You tell me if it is convincing:

In 1986, Vari-Vue holds an auction to offload their excess stock as they are going under. The company shuts down and all of their cameras and remaining flickers are pawned off to collectors and businessmen. (Ronald Globus Interview \\ Frank Didik purchasing Vari-Vue history.(also, I spoke directly to the man on the phone about some of this. Didik is still kickin'!)).

A note on Frank X. Didik

He published a LOT of the Vari-vue history and hundreds of examples of flickers on a CD-Rom titled "History and Guide Book To Lenticular Technology." When I spoke to him on the phone, he did not have any copies of this CD left in his possession. There's a chance I can access this through a library loan but I would like to have one I can. Have. Also that doesn't run the chance of being denied as a loan. I really really want to get my hands on a copy so if anyone who reads this has any leads, Let Me Know Please. At any of my links in the sidebar (on desktop) or the follow button up top (on mobile). I think it'd be really fun to establish this deal in letterboxd comments under my reviews.

In 1996, the artists at Depthology are interviewed for Glo Magazine where we learn they used some of these collector's collections as inspiration for one of their art installations. In the interview, Robert Munn recounts a moment in 1990 when he was talking to a "computer guy" named Oppenheimer and mentions that some of the collections referenced were also used by the team that developed Macromedia Shockwave. And who exactly is that team? None other than the folks at Macromind, who renamed themselves as their creations gained more traction just like Pictorial Pictures did way back when. After developing their software in 1984 using lenticular references, it makes sense they would still be in contact with collectors after the Vari-Vue auctions.

So what do you think? Did we finally crack as much information as we can outta this one?

It's unfortunate that we will likely never learn who the artist for the original Hulagirl is unless we can find Vari-Vue's business records somewheres, unless someone finds this particular essay and cares enough to go digging for information after me. That 8 year range on the patent for Vari-Vue and the Hullabaloo commission certainly makes the field more narrow at least! I can only hope someone with more gumption that I have can carry it the rest of the way. Is it not intersting, though, to see how people have been playing with these short and sweet little animations for at least the past 120 years? How the concept of animating artwork has been tumbling around for about 200, maybe even 400 years?

Wellll.... Maybe I lied earlier when I said it was the final time I would take a step backward.

Maaaaybeeee I have one more step, a leap actually. And it isn't 200 years. Or 400 years. Or even 4000 years.

Take my hand one last time as I go back twenty-two thousand years, to paleolithic era France, to the deep recesses of the long, crooked caves where no sunlight reaches at Lascaux. Where humans with naught but firelight, stone, and pigment were drawing.

You remember how lenticular optics work. The lines that run perpindicular to the motion of the light source or the viewer. Take note of the lines that divide this image here. For the past few decades, archaeologists and anthropologists have been developing the theory that these odd images were the very first examples of humans creating animations^[X][Y]. The firelight dances and causes the images behind those vertical lines to flicker, to catch the light in different ways that cause the subjects raise and lower their heads, to swing their dangerous tusks. To come alive in the light.

~22,000 years.

It seems to be the case that humans have been producing little dancing images for as long as we have been producing art. It might just be the at the animated gif, the blinky, the flicker, the flipbook, daedalum, and the dancing firelight figures are a fundamental part of human nature. We have always made them and it looks like we always will.

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A huge thanks to the people who already did a huge load of the reaserch I presented here. The only thing I really did was consolidate all the information into one location. Of course, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied at The Geocities Institute.
Steven Miller over at Twin Peaks Blog.
And the actual published academic paper that helped me fill in gaps with the History of Lenticular Technology, David E. Roberts
And Frank Didik who straight up purchased a huge chunk of Vari-Vue history and made a whole website for it.
And all the links I lunked up there in the write-up.

Let's Celebrate!!!

(--- rapid flashing)

UPDATE:

So I got replicas of the lenticular cards of the Hullabaloo dancers. And I have been working on recreating them digitally so that Hulagirl can be reunited online with her sisters. That the whole cast of dancers can be here together after 60 years apart. And I have done the first pass on them (Even trying to replicate the Poynter style of saturated primary mono-colors). I still need to get hands on the originals because there ARE missing frames in these replicas and I want the Swim in particular to be smoother. Regardless:

Aren't they lovely?