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Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’
- rcurry 3y agoSalad fingers was good, but nothing tops the Spoilsbury Toast Boy.
- oliwarner 3y agoIt feels perverse to even mention YouTube when this was the bread and butter of Newgrounds (and others) for so long before YouTube took off. YouTube only absorbed it later on as a delivery platform.
- yencabulator 3y agoNot as weird as some of the stuff here but I love me some Hamburger hamburger hamburrrgerrrrr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYBRTi8MM3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYBRTi8MM3c
- flashback2199 3y agoI always thought of salad fingers as like one of those weird flash videos but as a YouTube series. Anybody remember albinoblacksheep.com? I'm sure there were others too, maybe ebaumsworld but I'm not sure if those were as weird
- traspler 3y agoYes, very much :) that‘s also where I first saw Salad Fingers and The End of the World is still on my mind today.
- pjot 3y agoI can count all the way to schfifty-five
- dieselgate 3y agoHave been considering the vanity plate "MYIQS55" for years
- pjot 3y agoSwiggity-shwa!
- bebrws 3y agoFire the miiiiissssillllleeeezzzzz
- kingkawn 3y agoSalad Fingers I'm pretty sure started as a Newgrounds.com series
- wkjagt 3y agoIsn’t that also where Burnt Face Man is from?
- willcipriano 3y agoSame guy. David Firth. I watched it on Newgrounds.
- OliveMate 3y agoMuch like Salad Fingers, Burnt Face Man was created by David Firth - https://www.youtube.com/@davidfirth https://www.youtube.com/@davidfirth I don't remember where he originally uploaded each series, but his Jerry Jackson series (a personal favourite) were first uploaded to Newgrounds as a series of troll animations.
- Legogris 3y agoHe primarily uploads publishes all his material, alongside with Jerry Jackson et al, to his own website[0]. I remember subscribing to it over RSS as a kid and his stuff would always drop there first. Might be some gems to discover if you haven't browsed it before (: Newgrounds, ebaumsworld etc were all reuploads [1]. [0]: https://www.fat-pie.com/ https://www.fat-pie.com/ [1]: At least ebaumsworld was notorious for the bad kinds of piracy. albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, and somethingawful, were the major hubs outside of other individual creator sites like weebls and lemondemon otherwise IIRC. Firth did publish himself on NG, and later on YouTube. But I think he only appeared as himself on YouTube like a decade or so after Salad Fingers first went viral. https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/276616 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/276616 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBaum%27s_World#Copyright_infringement_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBaum%27s_World#Copyright_infr...
- nickf 3y agoYou are correct - I say this as the website ‘landlord’ (scroll right to the very bottom!) The fun part was hosting this myself 20-something years ago and seeing traffic spike like mad. Rented cheap servers from Kimsufi or Ikoula and tuning apache as best I could without a real clue what I was doing…
- ikari_pl 3y agoit WAS a flash series for sure. YouTube was just for the crowds :p
- at_a_remove 3y agoRight, I think Flash was first. Before they hooked up with Quiznos, remember those rodents who "love da moon"? Or someone would take a mashup of Ol' Dirty Bastard ("Shimmy Shimmy Ya") and The Cure ("Close to Me"), then make a clunky video of the instruments (xylophone, but also humanoid skulls) played by various animals and sung by a tiger in that Monty Python-like jaw animation.
- bitwize 3y agoI think those were both rathergood productions. The Quiznos rodents were called spongmonkeys. Rathergood provided me with many memories -- American Girls, the cats playing Independent Woman, kittens stomp marching to Tanz mit Laibach, etc.
- barcode_feeder 3y agoI'm glad someone else mentioned rathergood! That's the one that sticks out in my memory as older weird internet
- noqc 3y agoThis title seems to imply that youtube was normal before it was weird, though both reality, and tfa suggest that it was weird before it was normal.
- amelius 3y agoWhat does it have to do with youtube? Youtube is just the pipe. It's not like we ever said that VHS became weird ...
- jihadjihad 3y agoOutside of YouTube, the dawn of "weird web" for me is Homestar Runner [0], and Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected [1]. 0: https://homestarrunner.com/main https://homestarrunner.com/main 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSb-nV8l2QY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSb-nV8l2QY
- Loughla 3y agoJesus Christ, nothing makes me reminisce about college quite as much as homestar runner. That site was the beginning of my love affair with all things weird and esoteric on the internet. I got scroll buttons as the day is long.
- adamrezich 3y agowhat H*R quotes do you find yourself unconsciously quoting to this day? for me it's "dag, yo" and, whenever I see "Ontario": "On-tah-REE-oh, CAH-nah-da—ooh, a little south of the border flavor"
- bombcar 3y agoI still say “eaten by some kind of Linux” anytime I accidentally cat a binary file.
- erik_seaberg 3y ago“Can we just call you fhqwhgads?” when someone sends a Yubikey code over Slack.
- fknorangesite 3y agoMaybe not a quote per se, but every time I go to the gym and put my boxing gloves on, I think something to the effect of “How am I going to be able to type in these?”
- pjot 3y ago“First draw an S, okay now a more different S”
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoImportant to note that the paper the article is referencing [1] is titled: "Salad Fingers: Pre-YouTube digital uncanny and the ‘weird’ future of animation" So, the actual data is about PRE-Youtube weird internet. Baffling why they chose to focus on YouTube instead of Newgrounds like the original paper does I think I'm reacting like this because I'm actually unaware of anything that originated on Youtube that fits into this category. Youtube just reposted stuff from elsewhere (it's the biggest pirate site on the internet probably). Edit: The key point is that there is a huge network of weird internet that predated and continues outside of YT. The Absolutely[2] Produced stuff is the standard bearer here [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565231208569 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565231208569 [2] https://absolutelyproductions.com/ https://absolutelyproductions.com/
- epiccoleman 3y agoMaybe MeatCanyon[1], or Joe Cappa's stuff[2], could fall into the modern "YouTube weird" - but I think a lot of the particular "weird" vibe of the early days of the modern web is pretty much dead - or at least not mainstream enough for me to know about it. There was a much more amateur bent to a lot of the old viral flash stuff, which I think just wouldn't stand out today. These two are a sort of new kind of weird - MeatCanyon is based largely around gross-out body horror parodies of pop culture, and Joe Cappa is ... I'm not sure what it is, but I love his stuff. If you like either of these videos the rest of their work is well worth a look. Especially the Joe Cappa "Haha You Clowns" series is just the weirdest kind of hilarious. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3BJpO59F4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3BJpO59F4g [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQckI_NqgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQckI_NqgY
- bitvoid 3y agoAlso, H3H3's original videos before he started doing reaction/commentary stuff as well, which was more early YouTube than current.
- j33zusjuice 3y agoDude, that is the best shit on YT right now. I think it’s more “absurd,” than “weird,” though. It’s more in the spirit of Tim & Eric than Salad Fingers. I haven’t checked MeatCanyon, but I will be soon.
- macNchz 3y agoI recently heard about Skibidi Toilet being the latest sensation among teenagers and had a very old person "what is wrong with kids today" moment when I watched some, before remembering that 20 years ago my friends and I were all watching Salad Fingers, Sick Animation, Homestar Runner and other dumb flash cartoons on albinoblacksheep.com.
- knubie 3y agoSick Animation is still around and even dumber and better than ever.
- vinberdon 3y agoOkay but there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with Homestar Runner. Well... yes there is, but there's nothing wrong with the site aside from it being built in Flash.
- bombcar 3y agoThere is a Poopsmith. I have to assume that us quoting Strongbad seemed as weird to our parents as this skibidi toilet or whatever is gem these days.
- smcl 3y agoHonestly I would have struggled to describe to my parents why on earth I was howling with laughter when "homsar" became a thing on Homestar Runner. I'm quite happy that Gen Z have their own weird humour like skibidi toilet that is impenetrable for older people like me. There's even a level that I can genuinely enjoy this little universe too - I have no idea if these tweets and replies are made by someone invested in the whole toilet thing or poking fun at it (likely the latter) but I loved them: https://twitter.com/nleglopnar/status/1679676790401380357 https://twitter.com/nleglopnar/status/1679676790401380357
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI remember them making a metajoke[1] about Flash being dead and Strongbad was trying to rapidly learn HTML5 as a result lol 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nuQ5o2DYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0nuQ5o2DYU
- slowhadoken 3y ago“Weird YouTube” owes a lot to Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. It spawned shows like MTV’s Liquid Television.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoBut (thank god) the internet opened it up so anyone with the ideas and motivation to put together a video can get their art out there. Best thing about the internet, IMHO.
- bagels 3y agoCompletely agree here. They were showing animation like this in the 90s.
- malingo 3y agoStill remember seeing the first episode of Æon Flux on late night MTV when I was 13. Good stuff
- fumar 3y agoThe fly in the eye is forever burned in my memory.
- Springtime 3y agoAeon Flux is wonderful. About 20 years ago Peter Chung curated his favorite episodes for some animation festivals. Pity it never was released on Blu-Ray from what I can find via the Blu-Ray.com forums.
- nonameiguess 3y agoGuessing you mean you want a hard copy, but it's on Paramount+ at least if you want to watch it.
- slowhadoken 3y agoYou can watch them for free on MTV's site @ https://www.mtv.com/episodes/scyb0g/aeon-flux-utopia-or-deuteranopia-season-1-ep-1 https://www.mtv.com/episodes/scyb0g/aeon-flux-utopia-or-deut...
- CivBase 3y ago> While it looks and feels like a children’s show, Salad Fingers does not conform to the norms of children’s television. What part of Salad Fingers could the author possibly be referring to that "looks and feels like a children's show"? Every part of it - colors, character designs, animation, voices, music, story subject matter, everything - is designed to be extremely discomforting.
- anyfoo 3y agoThat baffles me as well. Nothing about Salad Fingers gives that vibe to me. Does the author also think that Akira looks and feels like a children’s show? There were other shows that went for that vibe only to subvert it (happy tree friends or what it was called, I was not a fan of it at all), but Salad Fingers is not that.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> What part of Salad Fingers could the author possibly be referring to that "looks and feels like a children's show"? Between the Hays Code (1968) and the Simpsons (1989), most Americans had no exposure to adult animation. So even in 2004, for a subsantial number of adults, animation meant children's television. Also, a lot of 90s kids' television played with the boundaries of what is and isn't disturbing.
- pjot 3y ago“Courage, the cowardly dog” was horrifying.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoI was thinking of that and Rocco's Modern World.
- FridgeSeal 3y agoThe episode where Rocco sits in his bosses chair is burned indelibly into my brain since I saw that as a child. Real fever-dream material.
- taspeotis 3y agoCharlie the unicorn??
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoCharlie! Look out for the Liopleurodon! A magical Liopleurodon!
- FridgeSeal 3y agoAh shit they took my kidneys.
- mmikeff 3y agoAnd weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dwedit 3y agoPeeks at paper. They immediately misspell Tom Fulp.
- csours 3y agoWe've always had weird shit. Look up "The Goon Show" on BBC, or Firesign Theatre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmWFrMq3qNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmWFrMq3qNY
- JohnMakin 3y agoIf you think Salad Fingers is weird, wait until you discover Cool 3d World.
- self_awareness 3y agoWhat has been seen... cannot be unseen...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- themagician 3y agoPre-YouTube internet largely didn't exist anymore. Flash is gone and one-by-one the old sites fall with no usable archive. A lot of the old culture is just GONE. It is now myth or legend. The stories only exist verbally. Stile, Encyclopedia Dramatica, LiveJournal, Geocities. Much of the culture content from the early internet is just gone.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoGeocities at least is archived and fairly easy to torrent the whole thing. There is definitely the desire to memoryhole a lot of this though. I'm surprised motherless is still around but i guess it's just a porn site now (was it always?)
- doublerabbit 3y agoYTMND is still around-ish.
- selfhoster11 3y agoI think you're a touch overestimating the degree to which everything is lost. The Internet Archive has some coverage (though admittedly, not all), and the Flashpoint Project has decent coverage of Flash games and animation. It's not as dire, IMO. A large part of the culture has been saved, enough to give people who put in some effort to access it, a gist of what it was like.
- k__ 3y agoTangentially related, but as someone who watched Salad Fingers when it came out (I was ~20) I have the feeling it didn't age well. Somehow much of the stuff I found really funny in the 00s seems kinda pointless to me now. I rewatched Scary Movie and thought it was disgusting. People say, yes that's because you're old now, but it's not true for everything, and especially not for stuff that came before the 2000s.
- sublinear 3y agoIs this a paid post or something? Weird and avant-garde compared to what? The reason most of this crap never got archived is because it was the purest of crap, not the death of flash or other silly excuses. Similarly nobody cares about the vast majority of YTMND or Vine. There absolutely was a certain type of "nerd" into the junk on Newgrounds and they were probably the same loud minority who flocked to Facebook until they realized how crappy that was too. Nobody really wants to remember the internet between 2000 and 2015. Nobody likes most media from that era in general.
- javier2 3y agoI think Salad Fingers is very good, but surrealism was not invented in 2003. Surely there must have been earlier animated films with surreal themes. It could have a place as early internet art, and I don't understand how novel it really is, but I am not a art historian either. On the contrary, I think many of us miss a bit of the internet that was before 2015. Todays walled gardens of stalker ad agencies and mega corps feels very different to the internet I knew.
- thequadehunter 3y ago"Nobody plays those terrible NES games anymore, so who cares?"
- Apocryphon 3y ago> Nobody really wants to remember the internet between 2000 and 2015. Literally all of HN wants that era of pre-FANG commodification of the internet to come back. Before so much of the web was siloed off into corporate gated communities and the death of personal websites, blogs, BBS forums, and the like.
- FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago2000s internet was so much better than the current, social media dominated, shit where every page looks the same.
- theultdev 3y agoClaveman[1] and Tankmen[2] were my favorites. [1] https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/182926 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/182926 [2] https://www.newgrounds.com/series/tankmen https://www.newgrounds.com/series/tankmen Hopefully some of you get to enjoy them for the first time.
- mike_hock 3y agoYou couldn't make Salad Fingers today. Edit: Oh come on, lighten up! Every joke gets downvoted here.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- scheeseman486 3y agoIt's funny to think that "weird youtube" is just Newgrounds, much like "weird twitter" is just users from Something Awful/FYAD.
- wslh 3y agoNot comercially successful but I produced a Flash animation between 2000s and 2001 [1]. It ended up in a very successful and original Latam TV channel called Locomotion [2]. [1] http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotion_(TV_channel)?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotion_(TV_channel)?wprov=...
- meanginlessT 3y ago“Weird YouTube” “Science Twitter” “Gay Instagram” I wish we would stop pretending topics inside generic social media constitutes some unique community. It’s the same site, used by the same people; there is nothing unique or special about it. But everyone has to pretend “their thing” is special.
- carrozo 3y agoA demographic does not a community make.
- thequadehunter 3y agoI don't know if I buy the Skibidi Toilet thing. It reminds me more of Badgers than Salad Fingers. I remember it used to be really commonplace for spam groups to make loops over songs in single flashes or collabs as well. Back in the glory days where we all hated Wade for trying to do his job...
- doublerabbit 3y agoSay what you want about Flash but Flash allowed you to create such creativity, nowadays there's nothing even close to the faculty of what it could provide.
- cyber_kinetist 3y agoYou can still use Flash to make videos if you want! It’s just that most 2D animators nowadays on Youtube prefer to do everything hand-drawn…
- constantlm 3y agosalad findels
- pentagrama 3y agoI recently enjoyed the Netflix show I Think You Should Leave, it has some of the absurdist style like weird YouTube but with more budget and mainstream appeal. Recommended.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoThe Ronald McDonald insanity videos get exponentially more insane each year. The most recent will be the most demented video on all of YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRRzQGRMi6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRRzQGRMi6M
- 1970-01-01 3y agoWay before YouTube and also before Flash, in the late 90s and early 2000s, is when weird and silly animation and video began to pop. Hamsterdance.com, dancing baby, Kompressor[1], and so many others (abevigoda.com) predate the 'weird YouTube' phenomenon with nothing more than basic HTML and a few JPEGs. And because of that simplicity, you can still enjoy them as they were thanks to archive.org. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020407141113/http://www.kompressormusic.com/video.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020407141113/http://www.kompre...
- ggm 3y agoThis comment feed is a lot of people saying "I [dont] like" using fancier words.
- aidenn0 3y agoThe first two videos I saw online were Troops[1]! And soxmas.mov[2], the latter of which launched an animated show that is still running. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troops_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troops_(film) 2: http://www.killfile.org/soxmas/ http://www.killfile.org/soxmas/
- zzzcsgo 3y ago[dead]
- zzzcsgo 3y ago[dead]
- nntwozz 3y agoShoutout to Lev from ingredientx and Tales of Mere Existence from the same era, also Monkey Dust but that was a BBC production that felt like modern day YouTube. Here's a nice clip called "We Are the Cyclists": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFFrsvgu1Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFFrsvgu1Y
- atlgator 3y ago"Ever drunk Bailey's from a shoe?"
- spyder 3y agojust to add to the list of weird videos: Cyriak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FavUpD_IjVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FavUpD_IjVY Buttered Side Down: https://www.youtube.com/@ButteredSideDown/videos https://www.youtube.com/@ButteredSideDown/videos
- stefanka 3y agoBeen looking for Cyrak but could not remember the name. Thanks!
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoAs many comments have stated, this predates YouTube. By a weird coincidence, something that is recent YouTube weird is called "Bobby Fingers" and is probably worth checking out if you like this stuff though its not quite the same.
- majestic5762 3y ago16 years ago there were some rats on cocaine https://youtu.be/nDWMIwjfTHk?si=_g6BiqkamIJ2Glf- https://youtu.be/nDWMIwjfTHk?si=_g6BiqkamIJ2Glf-
- Miadallie 3y agoThe focus on pre-YouTube content reminds us of the golden era of Newgrounds, where the weird was more raw and less polished. Fast forward to today, and YouTube's 'weird' is a different beast. Think MeatCanyon with their bizarre body horror and Joe Cappa's indescribable humor. Yet, the essence of internet weirdness isn't lost – it's just found new forms, like the SCP lore captivating today's youth. It's a testament to the internet's ever-changing, ever-weird landscape
- rigmarole 3y agoAnother weird anim pioneer was Joe Cartoon in 1998.
- cugs 3y agoThe Super Fly series was so funny as a child. Definitely doesn't hold up as an adult, but I'm glad to see it mentioned here.
- polytely 3y agoNot sure if it counts a 100% as Weird Youtube, but Bill Wurtz music is my favourite weird stuff on there (because it's also actually interesting musically). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elizAugXVcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elizAugXVcI
- fennecbutt 3y agoSuch a shame that this era of the Internet is dead. Now everyone and their mum is on the net and things like TT have only worsened the quality of content. It's just a huge pool of reposted content, clout seeking, compliment seeking bs all with an annoying robotic voice over it (at least some of the YouTube bots have started using 11L I guess). Sure, now the Internet is much like humanity itself, the average person likes football and celebrities like the kardashians, trashy shows like love island. But I really do miss the Internet back when it was uncool and geeky. The Internet's been turned into TV.