RECORD TO CAPITALIZE ON DANCING-BABY BOOM

from the BUSINESS section of the New York Post

By Mary Huhn

Peter Pan Records, a division of PPI Entertainment, has been granted a license to create and market audio and video products built around "Baby Cha Cha," the character created on the Internet and made famous on "Ally McBeal." Next week, the Newark, N.J.-based company will release a single with four mixes of Blue Suede's '70s hit "Hooked on a Feeling" (with the hook "ooga, chaka"), which the baby dances to when he appears to lawyer Ally McBeal.

Peter Pan Records, a children's record label, will then release an album on May 26 with songs from the '60s and '70s, "updated for the '90s," said Howard Podolnick, an associate producer on the project, who added the album should appeal to both baby-boomers and children.

"We're going to recreate classic, Top 40 - I hate to call it bubble gum - tracks that appeal to people in their 30s and 40s, and kids," he said. Songs will include remakes of the Archies' "Sugar Sugar" and Tommy Roe's "Dizzy." The cover will have a 3-D photo of Baby Cha Cha.

While the first album will be based on old hits remastered in studios using session musicians, the next one could include more popular musicians and perhaps even be an enhanced CD, which means it would be playable in a CD-ROM drive and have the dancing baby video included.

Sony Music will release a soundtrack album featuring Vonda Shepard, the singer who frequently appears on the "Ally McBeal" show.

San Francisco-based Kinetix (www.ktx.com), a software development company, created the baby to demonstrate its Character Studio animation program.

Last month the baby appeared in a commercial for Blockbuster Video that aired during the Oscars.

One of the unofficial Baby Cha Cha sites (http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/clapton/63/baby.htm) held a contest asking surfers to find a song that matched one of the Baby Cha Cha dances. The two songs which were deemed most fitting were Prodigy's "Breath" and Yello's "Oh Yeah."