Another dancing baby phenomenon is sweeping this country. This time it’s not the internet – though the babies are certainly getting a lot of attention there, too – it’s television. Bottled water purveyor Evian’s roller-skating, hip-hop dancing babies are all the rage – and what could possibly make you want a nice, refreshing bottle of water more than diapered babies?

Is it creepy or is it cool?

Either way, the Evian roller babies commercial is a YouTube sensation. Already, millions of people have watched the video. In fact, in the past week alone, the video has been watched 3.8 million times on YouTube.

The ad features babies on roller skates dancing and doing stunts. The babies do backflips, jumps and walk on their hands. The background music is Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight.

The goal: To show people how Evian affects on the body. Evian claims its water “supports the body’s youth.”

Evian’s worldwide brand director told the Telegraph that the commercials were meant to sell consumers “a dream.”

“Consumers expect more from a big brand – emotion, dream. This is what we want to achieve – hence this breakaway and back to roots campaign,” Michael Aidan, Evian’s worldwide brand director, told the paper.

The commercial closes with the Evian logo and the tagline “Live Young.”

[From the Daily News]

So everyone thinks this is adorable. And I’m going to get kicked in the face in the comments, but it just doesn’t do it for me. First off, it is trying way too hard to be cute. And this is all about my own grumpiness, I understand it doesn’t apply to the general possibly Evian drinking masses on the whole. But as much as I love babies in real life, baby stuff doesn’t really do it for me. A talking dog, I’m there. Ridiculously fluffy cat doing something crazy? I am all over it. But do just about anything with a baby and all I can do is groan.

There’s also this thing called the “Uncanny Valley” that I learned about thanks to 30 Rock. According to Wikipedia, “The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The ‘valley’ in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.” Tom Hanks’ CGI image in The Polar Express is the example they gave on 30 Rock. The roller skating babies made me dip into that valley. I know they’re supposed to be cute so I’m trying to talk myself into liking them – I mean who wants to be the person that doesn’t like a baby? – yet my instantaneous reaction is revulsion. I can’t even explain it, it just is what it is.

I felt nothing like this to the original internet Dancing Baby, a la 1996. He’s cute without threatening my perception of reality. Stick with the classics folks.