Above: Tim Welbourn and James Hitchcock with dancing Yorkatt

Below:Eric and Yorkatt do their dance

Chart success could soon be on the way for the Evening Press - thanks to two catchy Internet tunes we're launching on our website today.

Inspired by the international success of the fabled Hamsterdance website - which features dozens of animated rodents dancing to a tune made into a hit by The Cuban Boys - we've brought our cartoon strip character Yorkatt to life.

Yorkatt's creator, Wolf, drew a series of frames for our New Media department to animate on our This is York website.

And we enlisted the help of two clever composers to pen the jingles to suit Yorkatt and his cheeky sidekick, Eric.

The creator of Eric's Tune is 16-year-old sixth-former James Hitchcock, whose mum Susan helped him capture the essence of Eric's hitherto unheard miaow. James, from Leeds, said: "I wanted to use my real cat, Spike, but he was ill and had lost his voice, so I had to get my mum to practise a decent cat noise." Yorkatt's Tune has a stronger dance feel than Eric's comedy tune and was composed by Damian Murphy, a music technology lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University. When he had all the elements, our Internet whizzkid Tim Welbourn pulled them together in the animation.

To interact with the new Yorkatt experience, click here

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.