A staple of online content in the early days of the internet was animation-
and arguably a key point in the history of animation has been the Internet.
These two history lessons have run congruent- or at least they did for a time.
There was a very recent period in the history of YouTube, and arguably all online content, where animation just seemed to
disappear overnight and during this time most critters either entered the professional market or
Moved on to other unrelated jobs. In the next two episodes of Fallen Titans
I want to try and help you understand how an entire genre of online entertainment
can simply turn to dust. The story of animation online like most things in the 21st century begins with the creation of a website.
That website was of course
Newgrounds.com
Newgrounds was created in 1998 by Tom Fulp
to hosts his own animations and video games and in time
he opened the website to the public . Newgrounds was the preferred website for many amateur animators for a very simple reason
The quality was really good
Entirely because of new grounds many iconic early animations that existed online can still be enjoyed in 1080p as if they were created yesterday
YouTube meanwhile had a much lower quality and framerate a huge burden on the community
Metal gear awesome isn't on YouTube. Click that link on the right to go watch them how they were meant to be seen.
Crystal-clear without all this fuzzy compression bullshit. Newgrouns also had the added bonus of being very
Interactive meaning that animators and video game developers could really push the boundaries of the difference between those two genres
this also meant the Newgrounds animations were often very self-aware meta contextual and
inside jokey the unfortunate effect for those who uploaded to Newgrounds was that the site only held a fraction of the
popularity that YouTube had in the mid to late 2000s a lot of animations that went viral in this time period were
Uploaded to new grounds ripped by someone else and uploaded to an on related YouTube account. It's the classic creator conundrum
is it bad that someone has used their forum to post my content because they've basically
stolen my hard work or
Should I think that it's a good thing?
Because it's made me gain followers and if it wasn't for this I wouldn't be as big as I am right now
No matter what way you end up looking at it the inevitable conclusion
Is that you probably need to start posting your work to that forum
Yourself now about all of the pieces of animation that we're going to be discussing today
We're ever hosted on Newgrounds
But it's a very important piece of the puzzle
Because what we have to remember is that viral animation traces back years before the start of YouTube
I mean one of the first viral videos was this hilarious classic
a
Badger
mushroom
Okay, so it should be said finding any examples of viral clips from any point in the history of the Internet
Is sort of like finding a bookmark in a book where the words have faded
It's like finding a treasure map that dates back to the 1800s and it leads you to a 1940's
missile test site imagine that the Internet is the highway that you and your friends use to get to work and
imagine that every single day you get on this highway there's this
Billboard every single day you pass by this thing and every single day. It has something stupid on it
So you and your friends start making fun of it you reference the billboard randomly every day
There's something new on the billboard you make fun of something new every day
There's an entire circuit of inside jokes at your job entirely about this ugly
Billboard and that's all good and fun for people to use that highway or people that go to that one office
But eventually so much time is gonna pass that no one's gonna know what the hell you're talking about within six months
even you are not going to be able to remember what was on the billboard or why it was funny or
Why it was even there in the first place internet humor goes in a set of repetitive steps
Firstly someone makes a really unfunny joke and a lot of people see it
Then that joke is brought up. In other jokes, which makes people laugh because it reminds them of something else and references are funny
I guess and then eventually
Referencing the unfunny joke becomes an unfunny joke and then the cycle starts over case in point one of the very first things I ever
remember watching online
the laser collection
Pikachu
The laser collection was easily my first internet meme
I loved seeing fan edits putting the face into any places where it didn't belong I brought it up in public
Discussions like it was funny when it wasn't and any time the joke showed up and one of these skits
I laughed my ass off. It's pretty hard to talk about the laser collection without drawing comparisons to its bigger blood brother as
Diff movie as diff movie in the laser collection are very interesting to me because they both started off as nearly identical
Projects and their creators took them in completely different places
both feature black-and-white animated skits with mostly mundane situations
Which somehow end with something lowland random happening the laser collection?
It's almost always someone shooting a laser
but an as if movie there was a whole list of crazy wacky lul random things that could happen which might as well have been
Someone shooting a laser who parked their car on my sandwich. I
did
The laser collection could easily have just been like one of the running jokes in as diff movie that's how close the comedy is
So what's interesting to me is how these respective shows?
Responded to their audiences you get the idea that a lot of animators around at this time
Wanted to capture the sort of absurdist anti humor meta contextual kind of stuff
That would have been put on Adult Swim or something
A lot of the best jokes in this are based entirely around setting up an expectation and then prodding the audience
Teasing them with attention of what's going to happen next and then sometimes pulling a bait-and-switch
as diff movie is a great representation of internet humor in general because a lot of the jokes are built off of
Continuity and repetition at joking as devii one
Which isn't funny will then be referenced and made fun of in as diff movies two to ten but those jokes are mainly only funny
built off of the context of the first as diff movie
the billboard
anyways, most of the audience's love for these two shows came from a juvenile appreciation of lasers shooting out of things and
stegosauruses existing so even if the creators wanted to do sort of more
adult-oriented or intelligent humor
They often had to work through this blockade of fans that just wanted the dumb stupid memes
So, how did they deal with this? Well Tomsk honestly kind of ramped up the stupid stuff. He would do things like
Introducing a skit where a sheep is saying beep beep. I'm a sheep
And then the video ends with an ad for the t-shirt dom farah meanwhile
Became increasingly
Passive-aggressive at the suggestion that he should continue his series after
Episode 3 which told us semi-serious storyline about the son of dr. Octopus we got
this
Hello blue Jim hello, Jim blah
Hello, Peter Petrelli. My name is Sylar block spider-man. You will be wait
Spider-man you will be defeated block
What the here is song by?
Yes, I would like to hear a song got very quiet around here Doctor Octopus look at the time
I was kind of upset that Dom Ferrer worked so hard to undercut our expectations and insult us with these jokes
Which could have been good if you'd put actual work and time into the production?
But as an adult, I realized this is like the best one not only is this the best laser collection
I think this is the best as diff movie. It should be said that unlike a lot of people. I can't really bring myself to
Hate these two shows because these are honestly weird little animations that I find no inherent value in comedic Lee
but at the time I thought they were the shit these cartoons provided me with positive experiences in really rough patches of my life and
Honestly, I can't wish ill-will towards anyone that contributed to that
In fact, I think it's pretty important to stop and discuss. What is in my eyes the greatest animation to ever come to YouTube
Eddsworld eddsworld was a comedy animation series inspired by the life and friends of eid gold for full transparency. I
Discovered eddsworld quite late into the game, but I always admired how well it was put together
You've got this iconic world and this whole pantheon of characters brought to life
Primarily by one key animator. I mean given that the series was started in
2003 when Ed was 15 there are a lot of quirky misses
But seeing him to his own comedic li and artistically is a fascinating and enlightening experience
Eidos always said that WT future was his best work
But in my humble opinion, I think that hammerin fail was even better
Although that might be cheating because that's a two-parter either way by that time in his career IDI was creating fantastic
Animations that absolutely have stood the test of time
After Ed's death in 2012 story said in the eddsworld universe continued to be told all the way through 2016
I think the series never recaptured that a rough appearance or appeal ever again
But it continued to be a fantastic series to the end and stepping back
I want to talk about one last creator that being a secret agent Bob or as he's better known now
film cow in
2005 Jason Steele created a
three-minute comedy video about unicorns as a birthday present to his mother his mother then uploaded this to Newgrounds on her own account and it
Was then ripped and uploaded to YouTube by someone completely unconnected to the story soon enough Charlie. The unicorn was one of the most mainstream
Online videos of all time a video so popular that it changed the pronunciation of a word
Oh god, what is that? It's a leopleuradon charlie
Magically up the road
Laia pleura done lipo Ronan live, Florida
Liopleurodon
This is the film cow master collection. It has a lot of rare gems
It looks better than YouTube, but worse than Newgrounds inside. There is just a picture of some geese
I'm sure that was funny at the time. So a lot of gems on here that most people don't know about
Commentary from the creators commentary on the commentary from the creators where they point out how that joke isn't funny. I
Broke it. What I appreciate so much about film cow is that despite the fact that it has features that appeal to children?
It's still very much ageless comedy to oversimplify it
I think that the straight man nature of Charlie makes so many of the jokes that wouldn't work in as deaf movie stand
Amazingly tall here. I'm not even gonna ask how I'm still alive because you know what?
I think I think I died long ago when you tore my eternal punishment
You're like a constant downer. Huh? Most of the comedy in Charlie
The Unicorn is built not off of the randomness of pink and blue but off of how Charlie reacts to them
Why did you bring me here like most things created out of an expectation for them to exist there are misses
I think Charlie the Unicorn - this is not my thing Charlie the unicorn theory
however Is is very possibly better than the original and Jason's extended repertoire with such work as llamas with hats and detective mittens
Absolutely reaches the same standard
But again, it's hard not to notice a change in the tone and representation of the film cow animations
Well, as diff movies slowly sold out more and more and a laser collection became increasingly
passive-aggressive film cow became
depressed I
Guess I'm done. You must complete your work. There's nothing left to complete. It's all gone. I'm done Paul
Why are you still yelling at me must complete your work Karl? I don't know if the guy was depressed
But his animations were definitely depressed Jerry you ever feel like I spend so much time
Just trying to keep going that you don't know how to follow your dreams anymore. I'm not sure what you mean
I just had a few moments of freedom today the freedom to finally do all the non horse stuff
I wanted to do and I just stood here don't know where to start
I don't know if I can start Gary as time continued to pass creating animations for YouTube meant working 10 times as hard while reaping
barely a fraction of the rewards and eventually got to the stage where animation online seemed to just
disappear
next time on Valentine's we're going to talk about what happened to animation on YouTube where it went and
Why it came back with a vengeance?
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