Babies Video

Evian bottled water took it to the next level in 1998 with “Water Babies,” a spectacular takeoff on a Busby Berkeley-Esther Williams water ballet.

E*TRADE resurrected the concept with its snarky and ubiquitous e-trading baby dude with his faithful cell-phone sidekick.

Now there are some new digitally manipulated kids on the block who have just raised the cuteness bar — and then leaped over it.

High rollers
The piece is called “Skating Babies,” an online ad for Evian bottled water that’s rung up nearly 5 million hits internationally on YouTube in little more than a week. Among those myriad viewers is TODAY’s Natalie Morales, who has two young children, including a son who’s nearly a year old. Her oldest son loved the ad, she told co-host Matt Lauer, who also admitted to having watched it with amusement.

The spot is beyond cute: a posse of bright-eyed, beaming, chubby babies who should barely be able to walk tearing up a playground on little four-wheeled roller skates — all to the big beat of a remix of the 1979 Sugarhill Gang single “Rapper’s Delight.”

They leap over obstacles; charge a fence and hang from it like monkeys; do backflips; leap over long rows of prone babies; engage in some old-school break dancing; weave through a slalom course of Evian bottles, and walk upside down on their elbows, completely unhampered by the diapers bulging beneath their matching onesies.

Evian made the video as a commercial, but decided to post it on YouTube to see if anyone would watch before buying air time on television. It’s part of the same campaign as “Water Babies” — “Live Young.”

You can see Skating Babies Video in the web.