Enter the "skibidi toilet" cinematic universe
Why do singing heads in toilets have more than 1.7 billion views on YouTube?
This month’s YouTube Shorts sensation is a 25-part (so far) sequence of SFM animations called “skibidi toilet.” This series has more than 1.7 billion views. Like the Matrix, you have to see it for yourself:
To get the obvious out of the way: I’m assuming the audience for these skews really young. The saga of the toilet guys fighting the camera guys feels like it proceeds in the childhood storytelling style of “then this happened and then this happened and then he got flushed down the drain.” You could shelve it alongside those classic YouTube Kids brainmelters where Granny and Siren Head stand on a fence and dab while a bull chases 3D parents around.
But compared to classic YTPs and the “cleanest godly transitions” Shorts I mentioned last week, these animations are really labor-intensive and elaborate. Their creator, @DaFuqBoom, has been posting unapologetically juvenile SFM animations for six years, building many around established memes (Big Smoke, Ugandan Knuckles, “in Ohio”). The channel sometimes went months between uploads in the past, but has been uploading Shorts at a furious pace in 2023, probably after seeing the astronomical viewership numbers.
The shorts combine props DaFuqBoom has been messing around with for a while — you can find other toilet heads and the same song in earlier Shorts. The “Dom Dom Yes Yes” remix itself has a confusing history on YouTube and Tiktok, but the head movements here seem inspired by a lip sync video that Paryss Bryanne posted in early Jan., shortly before the first skibidi toilet Short.
The skibidi videos use a bunch of well-established YouTube comedy tricks. They’re immediately goofy thanks to 200% facial animations, little dancing and T-posing guys around the edges of the screen, and sight gags like a row of urinals in an elevator. There are mild horror elements, like spider-legged entities and leering faces. The clips often end with a jumpscare and the apparent death of the cameraman, creating a little shock to restart the loop.
The heartwarming thing about this content, to me, is that it’s deranged in a way that “the machines” will never replicate. You might think that AI is good at producing surreal video sludge, but so far it only does so by accident. Many people are currently trying to use text-to-video technology to create jokey fake ads; the output is often so distorted that it’s hard to see what they were even going for. In the hands of an experienced animator, the ancient Source Filmmaker is still a far more precise and powerful tool for making your worst nightmare (or, in @DaFuqBoom’s world, “PISSMARE”) come to life onscreen.
Weekly AI Doomer Update
On the opposite note: Tumblr user @fantasyandfoodporn (via reddit) found an AI-run “history” channel from the blackest pit of hell. The Old Gods uses AI art, an AI narrator, and ChatGPT-sounding scripts; presumably the editor is human. As far as I can see the use of AI isn’t acknowledged anywhere.
The signs are everywhere. The images are full of giveaways like grotesque statuary and malformed hands, the script is repetitive and devoid of specifics, and the narrator chooses a new way to pronounce a name every time he says it. But most commenters are oblivious. You have to dig into the replies to find anyone saying “AI,” and even then someone else accuses them of being paranoid. (Extolling the virtues of AI pap seems like it will become the next frontier of trolling.)
I’m kinda curious how this month-old channel managed such a solid launch — the content is rancid and the thumbnails aren’t great, but it’s already cleared YouTube Partner numbers with 2.8K subs. Maybe its choice of subject (“Gods most people don’t know about”) attracts an unusually credulous audience.
In general I don’t have a problem with the kind of AI content I wrote about earlier this month. I don’t think slideshows about Peter Griffin as a Dark Souls boss or whatever really displace any existing human content. But channels that mimic existing YT history creators while serving up AI babble are something else. It feels like the start of a content shift that we’re really not gonna love.
Remembering L.A. Noire
This week, social media managers celebrated the 12th anniversary of L.A. Noire, an open world detective game set in 1947 amid the bright lights and dark alleys of California’s Uncanny Valley. The game is sometimes remembered as a tantalizing path not taken by the games industry, but its meme afterlife is more true to the experience: like watching a movie, but short of the mark in ways that are very funny.
The big thing about L.A. Noire was its 32-camera facial MotionScan technology. This was good enough to convey what actors were going for, but still too robotic to really sell the drama onscreen. What it was really great for was creating off-the-rails encounters that would live forever online.
I still have a t-shirt from a 2011 launch event for this game, which objectively makes me one of the world’s most dedicated L.A. Noire fans.
There are two kinds of Zelda players
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gives players the power to glue devices together to create larger machines. This mechanical freedom has made it clear that there are only two types of people in Hyrule: big wheel people and fan bike people.
The appeal of the big wheel is obvious. Investing a bunch of time and in-game resources to discover the limits of the sandbox. Enjoying the journey, not the destination, etc.
The fan bike is the opposite. You can make it almost immediately out of junk and it’s the fastest way to any POI in Hyrule. Several ToTK tips channels, like PhillyBeatzU and Its Shatter, have taken to recommending it in their guides, alongside a virtually identical slate of tips about feeding weapons to octoroks and finding the Hylian shield.
I don’t really believe in player taxonomies — I think everyone probably goes through both phases at some point in their TotK lifetime. If you’re not a big wheeler at hour 3, you have no heart; if you’re not a fan biker by hour 30, you have no head, etc.
Twitter users bring the ratio with them
Last Sunday, Twitter user @DigigameMV found an anti-woke gamer channel that many thought was satire:
There were a lot of funny things about this channel. The defeated Mario from Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The Portuguese flag in the background of the thumbnail. The script of the video essay itself, which is pretty short, and seems to pad its running time by quoting Polygon at length.
The tweet, which reached 5M views, led to a viewership spike of more than 50K for Disillusioned Player. But the interesting part was the influx of Twitter users who immediately changed the complexion of the comment section, filling it with jokes about Portugal and “Woke-tendo.”
I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a successful offsite invasion of a YouTube comment section — usually the comments get locked or the channel has an existing immune system of active commenters. Here Twitter users really did recreate the experience of getting ratioed on a different site, complete with an OP trying to post through it.
Thanks for reading
That’s it for this week. See you at the 24-hour MST3K channel.