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I have no idea what’s going on

Congrats, we have reached a period of time where there is a generation that does not remember the first memes.

Look, i’ve been on tumblr for nine fucking years and I don’t get this meme. I remember seeing it at some point, but have no clue what it means.

because this meme is pre tumblr and pre-youtube and is about 17 years old, almost twice as long as you’ve been on tumblr

the ancient depths of albinoblacksheep will never die

But like, can someone explain. The fucking. Context.

It refers to a meme song, called The Badger Song or sometimes Badger Badger Badger, Mushroom, Mushroom. There is a snake in the lyrics also. You can watch the video on YouTube, if you so desire.

By way of further explanation, this comes from a time when most people had 56K modems or even slower, so downloading a full video clip of even crappy 320x240 resolution could take 5-10 minutes. You really had to want to see the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins or the Exploding Whale.

Flash bypassed this problem with cel animation. Each scene uses a static backdrop image plus small images of each of the moving parts, like pieces of a paper doll, which are then repositioned, scaled or flipped using a series of text commands written in a simple programming language. As the visual components were just a handful of static images, they didn’t have to be compressed as much as later Youtube video, making their edges as crisp as modern 4K. The most bandwidth-intensive aspect of Flash was the accompanying soundfile, but that loaded in a matter of seconds rather than minutes for video.

The result tended to look like a Monty Python animation, and so Flash yielded a bumper crop of the absurd from BadgerBadgerBadger to Pavoratti’s Elephants to Fight! Kikkoman, the soy sauce superhero. All of which only survive in imperfect, fuzzy YouTube captures.

I originally just put this in the tags, but I think it’s important enough to add to the actual post:

these flash animations aren’t just found in fuzzy youtube videos! you can see the original animations using BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, a flash preservation project!

the software is free and open-source, and it has built-in players for flash and shockwave (as well as many other platforms). it allows you to search their archive of games and animations, and play them whenever you want!

they’ve got Badger Badger Badger, Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, Charlie the Unicorn, the original asdfmovie, and just…so many other animations and games that were thought to be lost or unplayable.

as of their most recent update, their archive has over 130,000 games and 20,000 animations, and most of them look just as crisp as they did 20 years ago.

so, go put Badger Badger Badger fullscreen and admire all of those sharp edges and clean lines! or play the Escape the Room series from 2keysgames, or the old Barbie games, or whatever you want! it’s an incredible resource, and I have spent hours getting lost in it.