The Hampster Dance or Hampsterdance is a song by Hampton the Hampster. It was released in July 2000, as a single. It was produced by The Boomtang Boys, recreating the Roger Miller hook and adding additional rap-style lyrics.

The single, whose commercially released version featured a sound-a-like sample (the band having failed to gain permission to use the original), along with a number of other short voice samples from classic B-movies forming an abstract vocal line in lieu of a regular lyric, peaked at number 4 on the Christmas 1999 UK singles chart. This version was named "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia" and performed by The Cuban Boys. In 2005, CNET named the Hampster Dance the number-one Web fad.

It is one of the earliest examples of an Internet meme. Created by Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte for a Geocities page, the dance features rows of animated hamsters and other rodents dancing in various ways to a sped-up sample from the song "Whistle Stop" by Roger Miller.

Voiceover artist Erin Andres performed the rap lyrics, though remaining uncredited, even in her subsequent appearances as the voice of Hampton the Hamster.

Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte (of Nanaimo, British Columbia) was in a competition with her best friend and sister to generate the most Web traffic when she created the Hampster Dance page in August 1998. She named the site Hampton's Hamster House in to her pet hamster, "Hampton Hamster," who on the page declared his intent to become a "Web star."

The Hampster Dance site originally consisted of a single page with just four hamster (and other rodent) animated GIFs, repeated in rows by the dozens, and with an infectious background tune that looped endlessly. At the time the page was created, embedding background music in HTML pages was a fairly novel browser feature. The clip, a 9-second looped WAV file, was a sped-up sample of Roger Miller's "Whistle Stop", a song written for the opening credits of the 1973 Disney animated feature film Robin Hood. The site later expanded, revealing all four characters' names (Hampton, Dixie, Hado, and Fuzzy) and offering themed versions for birthdays, graduation, holidays, etc.

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