cate's blog

If you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, I'm referring to this GIF. I've been a fan of the animation for a few years now. I consider myself a connoisseur of sorts when it comes to cat GIFs, and as an avid music listener the sub genre of cats dancing is something I'm very, very familiar with. In my circles, this specific GIF is called "it's fuck everything Friday." The cat has a carefree attitude we can only strive for in our lives. And I've seen several GIFs of this specific cat dancing, though it never really bothered me to look into it. For some reason, my first and only belief was that the cat came from the MMORPG Final Fantasy XVI. I'm not really sure why I thought this, it just made sense to me. But that's not the case at all. The only cat that appears to be in the game in a similar style to our funky feline over here is the Gaelicat enemy.

So... dead end. Earlier today my partner was musing on the Daft Punk song Around the World and its fruity little tambourine. As expected, to properly express their feelings for this tambourine, they supplied this cat dancing GIF. It's our friend. The funky feline themself. But doing some different moves from the animation above.

They then posed the question to me... who is this cat?

I had to know and I got to Googling. Searching "funny cat dance" isn't a great idea for finding something specific on the internet. You'll find some great images, but if you're looking for something specific you're shit out of luck. Fortunately my follow up query of "3d model cat dancing" brought me luck in the form of a suggested similar query.

What is Rofa cat? I googled that immediately after and was led to MMD models of the cat, green screen recreations, modifications of the model where Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid is the funny little dancing cat. Luckily too I found a Twitter thread from a user name Zeebrongis, captioned "jesus christ is here" with a high definition photo of the cat.

Below, they mention that their friend group had found it through an obscure Korean dance program that not many people had access to at the time, and found further that the cat was based on a kitten named Sara belonging to Korean pop artist BoA.

The song was interesting, the first minute or so starts shockingly experimental before fading into some more run of the mill early 2000s pop fare. It's a cute track though, with BoA repeating the name "Sara" over video of her holding a small white kitten.

Though really useful information I moved on and soon found a very vaguely titled KnowYourMeme page, "Dancing Cat GIF." Submitted 3 years ago, it gives us an integral key in its origin paragraph.

"This GIF is very old, the oldest known source of this GIF is on the D-PLAYER website, D-PLAYER was a Korean dance training software. The cat herself, named Safa, is based on a real life cat that appeared in the music video 'BoA 보아 'Sara' MV'. The video only has around 300,000 views on YouTube"

D-PLAYER. I instantly search for the software and find it on a sketchy adware distributor. I quickly download the file and open it up to about three dozen ActiveX errors. Unfortunately, this program ran largely on a web server to host songs and models; meaning almost twenty years on it's pretty much unusable. However, a default posse of four dancers begin when you press play. I recognize them for some reason, but I'm really not sure why. They may have been in another dancing gif I've seen over the years.

Despite this setback, I go back. My next query is "D-Player BoA" and the top hit gives me an Internet Archive listing for the D-Player software with the Sara and BoA models included. Jackpot.

Unfortunately downloading it doesn't lead me very far either, even though I have the files now the player remains in its unusable ActiveX error'd state. However, the description on the Internet Archive mentions that it had not tried the included 2.0 player. It also included a source page.

The source page is absolutely phenomenal. It belongs to a Korean BoA fan named Yeseule. Sadly, it doesn't appear to have been updated since 2010. It's filled to the brim with that early 2000s web charm. Thankfully too, the page about BoA's D-Player collaboration is in English. Yeseule writes...

"We BoA fans can learn BoA dance with this player!!! Program is free. but we gotta pay for each songs. There are many K-pop, Pop music dance files. also BoA! Amazing Kiss, Kimochiwa Tsutawaru, LISTEN TO MY HEART, NO.1, My sweetie, VALENTI, 기적! and there are various characters we can choose to dance. Yeseule likes RinRin who has long legs. (^ㅁ^) and Ami is also cute with mini skirt! and amazing news! There is also BoA character as you see on the left picture! Plus SARA character. (Oh my god~ so cute) You guys know SARA is BoA's white cat. There is SARA character + BoA with SARA!"

From the site are download links to D-Player and each model. Not being hosted on Yeseule's site, I had to trudge back to the Wayback Machine to get the download links working. But they did. And I was now in possession of a working, non-ActiveX dependent version of D-Player as well as a download of the Sara cat model.

Below are uploads of the files you need and recordings of the included dances in the software. I'm curious if you can use convert the model to newer formats, MMD recreations exist but I believe they are just that; recreations...

D-Player 1.7

SARA (Extract and run Update.exe, ignore the broken error window)