Flash Animations
Let me take you back to a time when one of the top forms of entertainment on the web was Flash animations. I don't think it was even "adobe flash" then, I think it was Macromedia Flash. They were popular because they used vector graphics, which were small in file size compared to raster video. The largest part of them was the audio, though people tried to minimise that by reusing small samples. But the premium animations had full audio tracks and came with a hefty multi-megabyte download size.
I'm talkin' five Big Ones.
This was back when my friends and I were seniors in high school, and internet connections at home either didn't exist, or were extremely restricted. My home connection ran through what must have been the most primitive copper lines you can imagine, because my supposed 56k connection tended to be more like 14.4k. If you have no idea wtf I'm talking about, what that means is it took at least an hour to download 5MB.
There was another option, however—one afforded as a privilage of our senior status at school—the computer rooms. During free periods one could head to a vacant computer room and access... well I don't know what the speed of the connection was but it was sure as hell faster than my home one. 128k? 256? Who knows.
During that precious window of time you had what felt like boundless possibilities. What did we do with those boundless possibilities? We watched flash animations.
Star Wars Gangsta Rap
One of the funniest flash animations that I remember hearing being played all the time was Star Wars Gangsta Rap. Check this shit out:
Genius. We quoted this all the time at school. The top quotes for us were:
| Voice | Quote | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Darth Vader | You are correct. | Used to tell someone they were, in fact, correct. |
| Darth Vader | We got Death Star! | Used to proclaim that we had something of value. |
| Gumby Yoda | I thought I told ya | Used after you have to repeat yourself. |
| Gumby Yoda | I'm Yoda, I'm a soldier. | Used mainly to annoy people or make them laugh when they were trying to concentrate on something. The yoda voice was just so good at that. |
| Gumby Yoda | You won't believe your eyes, watch the X-Wing rise! | I think this was also to annoy people, but we also had a boy-band-esque dance sequence that went with it. Yeah the more I think about it, it was definitely used to annoy people. |
| Normal | Why ya bein a playa hater? | Used when someone refused you something. |
| Normal | So now Vader, I'm comin' for you, bitch! | "Bitch" was added as an embellishment. I think this got used during a Multiplayer Night when we were playing Halo deathmatch. |
It was all gold, though. We could all recite the entire thing from memory. There's actually 2 versions of SWGR: the original (which is the one we watched in high school), and one that came out a couple of years later titled Special Edition (I guess it was a play on the fact that the original Trilogy movies were getting SE releases at the time... yes those infamous ones...)
Part of me will never be able to see SWGR any other way than the extremely clunky and hilariously badly animated original (I think that's part of its charm,) but I do admit that the entire ending of the SE is much better. I always felt the "Knock him out the box, Luke" section of the original was under-baked.
The End of the World
You want to talk about quotable material? Look no further than The End of the World. Behold:
This one is less niche than SWGR, so it occasionally pops up in popular culture when people are talking about geopolitics going to hell, or whatever. For some reason I always think its called How It All Ends, not sure if it was titled that at some point or my brain has crossed wires.
Anyway, the way this guy's voice seems to max out the mic he used to record meant that every time this was played in the computer room (all the time), it would pierce through any other chatter going on and demand attention. This was unfortunate if you tried playing it during class with the volume turned down, as it was distracting enough to draw the teacher's ire.
TEOTW had enough staying power to carry through from high school into my uni dorms. I had a russian roommate and our neighbour nicknamed him "Motherland" in reference to the (funniest, imo) line from the animation. The fact he made that reference without explaining it made us immediately bond. When you know, you know. This brings me to the quotes:
| Voice | Quote | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Ear-piercing Yell | ARGH MOTHERLAND!!! | Battlecry before doing something reckless. |
| Bad Aussie Accent | WTF Mate? | Asking for clarification. |
| Extremely Obnoxious French | But I am le-tired | "I don't want to partake." |
| Ear-piercing Yell | FIRE ZE MISSILES! | Before you threw/kicked something at someone, or attacked them in a game. |
| Normal voice | Shit! Shit! Who the fuck is shooting us? | "What's going on?" |
What I really love about these stupid animations is... well, how stupid they are. They're like the comics my friends and I used to draw in the back of our maths books and pass to eachother to get a snicker. I love that people went to the effort to make them, seemingly for no other reason than "the lulz."
I think this really points to a sentiment that has been drowned out in the modern, corporate web: do things for the joy of them. Make people laugh, have fun. Coming back and watching these flash animations always reminds me of that.
Last wrought upon June 18th in the year 2025