The dark web is an area of the Internet that can only be accessed with a special browser. It is flooded with illicit content, the kind that might even get you arrested if you viewed it on Google (where surveillance is a priority). Drugs, illegal weapons, and various scams are just some of the items you might encounter on the dark web. But it is not all like that.

There are also forums where users can communicate with each other in a perfectly legal manner. In addition, individuals who can’t speak freely in their own countries can hide on the dark web and speak their minds.

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You must take some precautions before venturing onto the dark web, such as using a virtual private network, using the right browser, knowing which sites to avoid, and much more.

In addition, a lot of history has been made on and through the dark web, such as influential sites rising and falling, highly capable people impacting the real world in a serious manner, and information spreading like wildfire that has influenced the world in major ways.

With all that to consider, you must know these 10 critical facts if you plan on exploring this interesting yet disturbing corner of the Internet!

Disclaimer: This article is intended for entertainment purposes only and is not legal advice. If you have legal questions, consult an attorney.

10 It’s Accessible Through A Browser Known As The Onion Router (aka TOR)

The Onion Router (TOR) may be the most popular browser used to explore the dark web. It features a type of encryption function similar to that of a virtual private network (VPN).

However, that is far from the only form of security needed to browse the dark web. Some hackers have found ways to work around the encryptions on TOR, so it is safer to use TOR in combination with a VPN.^[1]

9 Dark Web Sites Use A Special Domain Ending In .onion

In a way, this is the “magic” behind the operation of the dark web. Most browsers can only view domains with specific top-level domain suffixes. Examples include .com, .org, and .gov.

However, sites with the pseudo top-level domain suffix .onion can only be accessed by specific browsers, such as TOR. As a result, .onion sites are much more difficult to track down and report.^[2]

8 It Is Not Illegal To Browse The Dark Web

One common misconception that scares many people from using the dark web?

The idea that they’re committing a crime by doing so. This is not true. In reality, no crime is committed unless someone views specifically illegal content on the dark web. It’s against the law to even click onto certain sites.

But if you go to various dark web marketplaces and look at the content without buying anything, you are probably not committing a crime until you make the purchase. It is also legal to browse or even talk in many forums on the dark web as long as you do not use them to set up illegal business transactions or engage in illegal activities.^[3]

7 Not All People Use The Dark Web For Crimes

When you hear about the dark web, you may think of people using it to sell illegal substances or upload illegal content. Perhaps you even imagine that stereotypical image above: A man wearing a hoodie in a barely lit room who is hiding his face and looking at binary digits on his laptop while typing in a way that resembles hacking.

But this is not always the case. Various people on the dark web have used it to evade censorship and make claims that would be illegal to say openly in their countries. Examples include opposing their country’s leader and whistleblowing.

In addition, people have far more anonymity and privacy on certain forums on the dark web. There, they can have more open discussions about various things than on the open Internet (aka the “clearnet”).^[4]

6 Silk Road Was One Of The Most Popular Sites On The Dark Web

Before it was seized and shut down by the FBI in October 2013, Silk Road was among the largest marketplaces on the dark web. It was founded in February 2011 to host independent online vendors selling various things, typically illegal substances and services.

They sold just about any illegal item or service you could think of, with very few restrictions as to what could be sold. After the original site was taken down, it took only a month for a new site to surface. It was called Silk Road 2.0. However, that site has also been shut down.^[5]

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5 Most Websites Are Scams

There are thousands of websites on the dark web, many of which claim to be selling certain things. However, when you buy something (which you seriously shouldn’t), you’ll find that it almost never makes it to your home.

That’s right. The seller just made off with both your money and your pride. You also probably ordered something illegal from the dark web, which makes you a criminal.

In addition, some marketplaces are dedicated to selling things that assist with scams. Certain marketplaces, such as the now-defunct Silk Road, had trust ratings for vendors. However, this can be abused by vendors who first gain their customers’ trust and then turn to scamming. Afterward, these criminals create new accounts and restart the cycle.^[6]

4 Most Sales On The Dark Web Use Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which means that it exists digitally without a central regulatory or issuing authority like the US government. It also relies on cryptography to prevent fraud and counterfeiting.

As a decentralized form of currency, Bitcoin is hard (though not impossible) to trace, making it easy to use for dark web purchases. As Bitcoin can be tracked, people tend to also use mixing services to make their transactions completely anonymous.

Sales can sometimes involve other cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash. However, Bitcoin is the most common.^[7]

3 The FBI Has Performed Sting Operations On The Dark Web

At times, some links simply won’t load on the dark web or they will show a screen with the FBI logo that tells you the site has been seized. But this isn’t the full extent to which legal authorities have been involved in the dark web. One example is Operation Bayonet, where Dutch police hijacked Hansa, a dark web market.^[8]

2 People Might Use Hidden Wiki Sites To Find Links

There are many different “Hidden Wiki” sites, some of which are even on the clearnet. These sites are useful in finding .onion links to explore.

Luckily, most Hidden Wikis do not include links to sites that are illegal to click on. Some people even say that the FBI sets up Hidden Wiki sites to give criminals easier access to sites used in sting operations.^[9]

1 The ‘Deep Web’ Is Not Necessarily The ‘Dark Web’

Are you surprised to read this? You shouldn’t be. There are two types of “hidden” websites—the dark web, which features the illegal stuff, and the deep web, which is just an umbrella term for anything that uses a .onion link.

For example, whistleblowers who use the .onion domain to call out their governments are not part of the dark web. Instead, they’re in the deep web. However, Silk Road would have been considered part of the dark web.^[10]

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About The Author: Toby grew up in the lower middle class in a small Ohio town. Facing constant negativity by those surrounding him, he resorted to studying and learning different things to keep his mind away from all of it.

Though we all surf the internet every day, surfing is by definition a surface-level activity. We stay in that nice, clear top layer of cats, nostalgia, and Netflix. For the most part, it’s safe there and it is beholden to the same sets of rules that we are—namely social contracts and the legal system. But it’s a long, deep descent if you want to explore all the internet holds. 

At the bottom—the deep web and the even shadowier dark web—life is different than at the surface. Cats are fewer in number, substituted mainly by drug deals. Nostalgia is replaced by extremist meetups. And Netflix is traded in for sub-genres of adult entertainment that the government—and most of humanity—rightly shuns. In these deep places of the web, scary things happen. If us (relatively) innocent surface-dwellers ever dare to venture down there, we should brace ourselves. Anything is possible in a domain full of anonymity and free of oversight. Despite this, some of us do make the plunge, and luckily for us, some have decided to share their experience on Reddit. Here are 10 deep web horror stories from Reddit users.

10 Dancing Corpse

An excerpt from user MetalLava: “Some lady posted all this (sic) videos of her dancing with this corpse… All rigid, caked up but like. A corpse. She put on weird music and danced around and sang to it in her room.” The user stumbled across one woman’s channel on a video hosting site and found videos of her dancing with an actual human corpse. And there were many videos. Apparently, the corpse was not-so-recently dead, with it visibly decaying. That didn’t stop this woman from using it to cut a very creepy rug. Maybe the worst part was her singing. She sang to the corpse as she danced, and not in any intentionally creepy way. No warbled, slowed-down little demon girl melody, just your average, joyful, loving song. To a rotting corpse.

9 The Wrong Address

User TheKingofBananas tells the tale of their friend, alias Eli, who explored the deep web as a teen. Eventually, Eli found the infamous and surreptitious marketplace the Silk Road, and decided to order some drugs. He bought some from a dealer on the dark website, paid him, and had the drugs sent to a family cottage. Checking the cottage, he found no delivery. Angry, Eli contacted the dealer, who miraculously sent another shipment. Again, no delivery. And again Eli asked for more and more were sent, with no delivery.

It wasn’t until months later that Eli would hear from the owners of the next cottage over about the mysterious shipments of drugs they kept receiving. It had all been just an address typo. Imagine the horror of being a teenager who had inadvertently sent a recurring shipment of drugs to your neighbors. And imagine a world where dark web drug dealers have that much respect for customer service.

8 The Webcam Feed

The shortest entry on the list, user kick299 writes about their short experience on the deep web by saying simply, “Found a webcam feed. Coming from my webcam.” It’s scary to think about the internet users who prowl the dark web for easy targets. It’s even scarier to know that you’re the target. Scariest of all is that the story only elicited from Redditors a series of responses like ‘yeah, that’s pretty normal’ and ‘Meh.’ This type of home invasion and forceful surveillance should not be par for the course. The fact that it is is… unnerving.

7 Bed Bugs

Another short one, but worth mentioning. User urbanhawk1 writes about how he encountered on the dark web “a guy online that was trying to buy large quantities of bed bugs.” This dark webber “wanted to try to breed them to be resistant to normal methods of killing them while simultaneously breeding in a weakness that only he knew. This way he could release them in people’s houses and then force them to pay him to get rid of the bed bugs.” The best part of this one? That’s the exact ‘create the disease so I can sell the only cure’ plot of both Amazing Spider-Man and the Michael Bay TMNT film. Hopefully, this bug-breeder never reaches his goal. Otherwise, we may get a third crappy movie.

6 A “Service”

User thijser2 used to visit the portions of the deep web where would-be hackers and cybersecurity specialists gather. He was there to learn (you hope with good intentions) and the best place to do that is where real hackers gather. He encountered plenty of run-of-the-mill “social engineering”, i.e. information and ID theft, but also one hacker who used their talents to offer something truly unique.

The hacker advertised “a service” whereby someone could pay to have… a certain type of illegal, immoral, illicit video… uploaded onto another person’s computer. The hacker would then report that person to the police, who after a computer search, would presumably be arrested. What a terrifyingly effective way to frame someone. Worse, thijser2 writes, “the scariest part was discovering that there were at least two people in the chatroom that I was in discussing about kernel security who had used that service.”

5 At Home Vasectomy

This one is as puzzling as it is disgusting. User busty_crustacean writes briefly that they found, “DIY vasectomy kit on SR. it was a kit of weird dentist tool looking hooks and some tube thing. $20.” SR of course being the Silk Road, this means that this at-home surgery kit was listed for sale on a semi-public marketplace. For only $20, you could buy the means to give yourself surgery at home. Non-anesthetized, you have to assume. Probably most worrisome is that the laws of economics, as well as the sheer amount of humans on this Earth, suggest that there were likely at least a few buyers. Which you have to assume led to some grisly accidents. And honestly, in a way it would be even more worrying if someone bought this kit, used it, and absolutely nailed the procedure.

4 Serial Killer’s Homepage

User Sakkyoku-Sha stumbled across the actual home website of a serial killer, later arrested for his crimes. The site features mainly the killer’s own drawings, which depicted… serial killer stuff which won’t be detailed here. Let’s just simplify it as ‘gruesome murder and subsequent mutilation of bodies.’ Though some drawings were simple and crude, others were more lifelike, and all the more disturbing because of it. Eventually one of the killer’s actual photos loaded, which depicted… let’s call them ‘trophies.’ There were about half a dozen trophies in various stages of decomposition, displayed on a shelf. Though the website has since been found and removed, it is apparently archived for your viewing (dis)pleasure.

3 For Sale: Enriched Uranium

When the infamous Silk Road was shut down, an even larger deep web marketplace named AlphaBay took its place. While idly surfing the site, user caddet5 found a listing for enriched uranium. Enriched uranium is of course one of the crucial components in creating nuclear weapons. The odds of a real sample being listed publicly, even on a site hidden within an onion address, are slim to none, but as caddet5 says, “Probably a scam but it was still scary.” If it were real, then caddet5 finding it means many much more sinister entities did, as well.

2 The Portals

A website not being indexed by search engines is one thing. Actively hiding via onion services like Tor is another. But beyond even that, there is a whole world of encryption and camouflage that the average internet user is completely unaware of. User ProgressiveCoder dubs this phenomenon “the portals… Seemingly innocuous sites that have clues hidden in the page source, or seemingly innocent image galleries containing images that have audio clues or other things embedded in the code that have to be extracted through specific means.” This process allows savvy coders to hide things so they can never be found—unless they so desire.

One example ProgressiveCoder found was “a PDF that was a copy of the original Anarchist’s Cookbook – 1st Edition, before it was heavily edited and stripped down. It had s**t in there including detailed chemical breakdowns of military-grade explosives – way deeper than just your typical “this is how you build a weapon” stuff.” And truly, that is just the tip of an iceberg that descends deep down into the dark.

1 We See You

User fake_fakington (feel free to read into that or not) recounts their experience on the early days of the internet, when ‘the deep web’ was not yet a term because everything was ‘deep.’ Their story is worth checking out in its entirety, but the short version is that the user was casually surfing and stumbled upon something odd and cryptic. Through a series of internet maneuvers, they were able to make their way through the rabbit hole to a directory of what appeared to be “records a psychologist or similar mental health professional would keep. The images were of faxes, apparently of both military and medical nature.”

While browsing the files, the user noticed “a new HTML file named something like “1-.HELLO-THERE.html.” The time stamp was from right that minute. I opened it, and in plain text was the message “we see you.” No quotes, all lower-case. About 15 seconds later the server dropped.” Sometimes, in obscure places on the internet, just being seen is scary enough.

We take the internet for granted. Seriously, imagine having to fill out tax forms by hand and mail them or look at an actual map to travel to unknown destinations. What about spreading humor? Today, memes are the main currency of the internet, providing humor and virality in often unpredictable ways, but it was not always that way. When the internet hit the mainstream in the 1990s, users were met with the idea of being able to create and share their own projects outside of the confines of major media outlets. It was content created by the everyman for the everyman.

A popular vehicle for spreading humor in those days was animation. Typically created in Adobe Flash, these animations were crude, profanity-laced, and often violent. They were also surreal, funny, and highly quotable. They also managed to intertwine juvenile humor with dark subject matter and often had a finger on the pulse of what the ordinary person in that era found both humorous and frightening.

The feelings generated by these animations, followed along with the infectiously quotable dialogue, created a one-two punch of virality that helped to usher in the meme-age. In fact, some of these early internet animations were so viral that they cracked through the computer screen and made it as far as the silver screen. So if you’re here to learn about the early days of the internet or just looking for some nostalgia from a bygone time, here are 10 influential early web animations.

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10 The Dancing Baby

Perhaps the most ’90s thing to ever exist, the dancing baby, was an early 3D animation of a baby doing a cha-cha style dance. The origins are a little murky, but the animation is credited to a group of animators (Michael Girard, Robert Lurye, Tony Morril, and John Chadwick) who were working on a project called Biped that involved the popular 3D animation software Character Studio. From its inception in 1996, the animators knew they had something that was both spooky but impossible to stop looking at. Eventually, the animation was paired with the intro to Blue Suede’s “Hooked on a Feeling,” and the Dancing Baby exploded in popularity.

The Dancing Baby blazed its way through all corners of the internet before appearing on news channels, in commercials, and ultimately in the hit comedy Ally McBeal, where the Dancing Baby appears to Ally as a vision representing her ticking biological clock. The spread of the Dancing Baby was unprecedented at this point and is arguably one of the first examples of something going viral. The Dancing Baby has popped up here and there over the years, mostly as a form of nostalgia for the ’90s, but the original gif has been treated to a hi-def upgrade and developed into an NFT. As for me, I credit the Dancing Baby with reinvigorating Robert Downey Jr.’s career via Ally McBeal. ^[1]

Memorable quote: Oogachacka!

9 I’m the Juggernaut B*tch

Two main staples of early internet humor are profanity and randomness. Both make a strong showing in the video “I’m the Juggernaut B*tch.” Uploaded to YouTube in 2005 by Xavier Nazario and Randy Hayes of My Way Entertainment, the video was a dub of an episode of the 1992 X-Men animated series. In the video, we see Randy voice the titular Juggernaut character as he fights Charles Xavier and friends while uttering profanity-laced and sometimes nonsensical lines, including the oft-quoted “Do you know who I am? I’m the juggernaut, b*tch.”

Per their website, the parody dub was created in 2005 to kill time and wasn’t unleashed to the internet until 2006, when they posted the video on their YouTube channel. The video quickly went viral and was so popular that it made it to the silver screen. In the live-action X-Men film X3: The Last Stand, the Juggernaut says the line while fighting Kitty Pryde. By the end of the year, however, the video was removed from YouTube due to copyright issues with Marvel, but it was later uploaded in 2007 by another user, where it has garnered 8.8 million views. As for My Way Entertainment, they are still active and posting on their own channel.^[2]

Memorable quote: what else? “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the juggernaut, b*tch!”

8 The End of Ze World

It may seem a little counterintuitive, but the crudeness of early internet animations is what made them so endearing in the first place. This is because these animations were homemade with whatever equipment the artists could find. It was primitive, but it was also for the average Joe just surfing the net. The End of Ze World is a perfect depiction of that.

This short animation features a hypothetical situation of what would happen if all the countries with nuclear weapons started firing them at each other. A dark topic for sure, but this animation was created in 2003, just after the U.S. had invaded Iraq, so war was on almost everyone’s mind. Like all great comedy, though, the video takes a tragic topic and presents it in a comical way by including funny voices, stereotypes, and highly quotable lines.

The video was created by Jason Windsor of Albinoblacksheep. According to him, the animation was conceived with a group of friends reenacting how each superpower would react to nuclear missiles being fired at them. He then went home, created a basic flash animation and voiceover, and sent the video to his friends. At some point, it made it onto the Albinoblacksheep website and then began making its way across the web. While the video was pre-YouTube, the video was uploaded to the site in 2008 and has reached over 14 million views. Jason Windsor didn’t receive much for the video, but it did help advance his career as an animator.^[3]

Memorable quotes: “H’okay, so here’s the Earth.” “Fire ze missiles!” “But I am le tired.”

7 Homestar Runner

You had to be living under a rock or had never even seen a computer at the turn of the millennium to not know about Homestar Runner. Even then, you likely heard a Strong Bad quote at some point. That’s just how popular the web series was. The series focused on the life and adventures of the titular characters along with a cast of other interesting personalities. It is hard to give a good synopsis of the show, given that the content was surreal and often parodied various pieces of popular culture. The idea of Homestar Runner was conceived by Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel when they created their own children’s book. While the book was never picked up for publishing, the character lived on when Mike and his brother, Matt Chapman, decided to work on Flash animation and thought it would be a good idea to revive the character of Homestar Runner.

On January 1, 2000, the Homestar Runner website was launched, and the brothers began releasing shorts. It took about a year, but Homestar Runner started gaining traction in 2001 with the release of their first Strong Bad Email episode. Strong Bad, the main antagonist of the series, would boot up his computer and read fan emails, often making fun of their names and grammar while rarely answering any questions directly.

This series, in particular, was so popular that if the Chapman Brothers were late posting any Strong Bad Email episodes, they would end up with a bunch of strongly worded emails asking where the next episode was. The site continued to grow, and from about 2001 to 2009, millions of visitors viewed the website, eventually gaining interest outside of the internet. Joss Whedon often featured references to the web series in his TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and the video game Guitar Hero 2 let you play Strong Bad’s song “Trogdor the Burninator” as a bonus song.

Another interesting thing about the series was that it never made any money from advertising. The website maintained enough money to support the brothers with sales of their Homestar Runner merchandise. To this day, the site is still running with plenty of animations, games, and other content to enjoy, all without advertisements. These guys were the real OGs of early internet animations.^[4]

Memorable quotes: too many to list. Just go watch it!

6 The Badger Song

Depending on who you ask, this is either one of the greatest or worst achievements in internet animation. It is a 30-second song that, when viewed on the original website, would loop infinitely. If you’re getting vibes of Lambchop’s “Song that Doesn’t End,” you’re on the right track… only more nonsensical. The video features a bunch of badgers with cutaways to a mushroom and a snake in the desert, all the while a dance beat and voiceover provide a song that just describes what is onscreen. It seems silly to try and describe what the video is, considering how simple and ridiculous it is.

The video was created by Jonti Picking of Weebl and Bob fame, and it was released in 2003. The video became so popular that it helped to earn Picking’s website a People’s Choice Award. The video was uploaded to YouTube by Picking in 2008 and has gotten more than 28 million views since then. The video also inspired many fan-made videos of people reenacting the dance that the badgers perform, one of them being mine.^[5]

Memorable quote: “Badger (x12), mushroom (x2), a snake, a snake, ohh, it’s a snake.”

5 Salad Fingers

So far, most of the animations discussed have been bright and silly, even if the subject matter has been a little dark. Salad Fingers is the opposite of all that. It’s visually dark and dreary and covers equally dark and creepy topics. Salad Fingers is a thin, green man with a creepy disposition and possibly mental issues. I mean, in the introductory episode, Salad Fingers tells the audience that the feeling of rusty spoons against his salad fingers is almost orgasmic. So yeah, he’s an odd fellow. As of now, 12 episodes follow Salad Fingers through life in the desolate, post-apocalyptic world he inhabits.

Salad Fingers is definitely an outlier on this list, highlighting the creepy and disturbing over humor. Still, we have to look at the time it was released to understand its virality. The first episode was released in 2004. Hot Topic was exploding in popularity in malls across America, emo music was surging, the Nightmare Before Christmas was experiencing a renaissance, and works like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac were becoming cult classics. With that in mind, it’s no wonder that Salad Fingers’s disturbing dystopia has been viewed over 110 million times on YouTube and screened at multiple international short film festivals. The creator, David Firth, has even created a new episode this year, so the creepiness is still going strong.^[6]

Memorable quotes: “Hubert Cumberdale, you taste like soot and poo!” “I like rusty spoons.”

7 Happy Tree Friends

Disturbing, but in a totally different kind of way, Happy Tree Friends takes the concept of a children’s cartoon like Tom and Jerry or Tiny Toons and moves the needle from cartoon violence to bloody gore. Think Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons but with cuter characters and more cruel depravity. The series relies on the cognitive dissonance and shock value of cute cartoons committing and receiving extreme acts of violence. Most episodes begin with the mundane lives of these adorable woodland creatures until an event, like a balloon popping and triggering a bear’s PTSD or a beaver tripping and falling onto his lollipop eye first, causes violence to ensue.

Created by Rhode Montijo, Aubrey Ankrum, and Kenn Navarro of Mondo Media, the first short was released in 1999. The cartoon quickly grew to the point that they were viewed 15 million times each month. The success was so exponential that Happy Tree Friends even got its own television series that premiered in 2006. The show has also won numerous awards, and some of the characters were also featured in a Fall Out Boy music video. Currently, there hasn’t been an addition to the series since 2016, but the show hasn’t officially ended either. So there’s still hope to see a cute woodland creature get mutilated, thank God.^[7]

Memorable quotes: the sounds of cute creatures getting mutilated.

3 Charlie the Unicorn

Another divisive entry on the list is Charlie the Unicorn. Like the Badger Song, people tend to either love Charlie the Unicorn or absolutely hate it. After losing almost all his possessions in Hurricane Katrina and moving to Orlando, Jason Steele did not have much to give his mother on her birthday, so he created a unicorn-themed Flash animation. The animation features Charlie, a pessimistic, rough-around-the-edges unicorn who gets approached by two overly cheerful unicorns that tell him they have found a way to get to Candy Mountain. The adventure becomes increasingly nonsensical until the end when Charlie is double-crossed by the two unicorns and wakes up in a meadow where he realizes his kidneys have been removed.

The proud mother posted the animation to Newgrounds, where it gained a lot of traction and was eventually released on YouTube, where it currently has 68 million views from its original upload and 37 million views from its official release. While many people were annoyed by the falsetto-voiced, overly cheerful unicorns, many found themselves identifying with Charlie as he is often annoyed by his compatriots and ends up getting taken advantage of.

The video achieved such a high level of popularity that it even made its way into the music video of Weezer’s song “Pork and Beans.” It is wild to think that such a work of surreal and nonsensical humor could result from such a tragedy as Hurricane Katrina, but given the dark undertones of the plot, maybe the evidence was there all along.^[8]

Memorable quotes: “Charlieeee! Heeeeey, hey Charlieee!” “Shun the non-believer!”

2 Gröûp X

This one is more of a collaborative effort among Gröûp X and various online animators. The group bills itself as a Saudi Arabian rap rock group from the fictional town of Cramshananteen. Their music can be described as joke songs featuring vocalists with silly accents over basic drum beats. Unfortunately, that is about all I could really dig up on the group because what really made them blow up were the fan-made music videos that were uploaded to sites like Newgrounds and Albinoblacksheep. Three videos, in particular, managed to go viral: “Bang Bang Bang,” “Schfifty Five,” and “Mario Twins.” Each video was stylistically similar, portraying the band as stick figures and roughly acting out the lyrics to the songs.

Currently, each video on YouTube has over 500,000 views, with the video for Schfifty Five having 10 million views over 15 years. The combination of funny accents, basic drum beats, crude animations, and silly lyrics about only looking for carnal love (Bang Bang Bang), counting all the way to Schfifty Five (Schfifty Five), and how the Mario Bros. are difficult to tell apart (Mario Twins), make the videos quirky, quotable, and extremely accessible. As a testament to the popularity of these videos, the spell check on my computer does not mark the word schfifty.^[9]

Memorable quote: “I know how to count all the way to Schfifty Five, and I can do it faster than you can say ‘poopty peupty pants.’”

1 The Spirit of Christmas

The Spirit of Christmas is very similar to the Dancing Baby animation in that the virality of the animation wasn’t about how many people saw it but who saw it and spread it. The Spirit of Christmas is a 1992 animation short made from construction paper and depicts four boys reenacting the Frosty the Snowman story. However, once Frosty comes to life, he begins a violent rampage and ends up killing two of the boys. The remaining boys seek the help of Jesus, who uses his halo to cut off Frosty’s hat. The boys then reflect on the true meaning of Christmas: presents.

The animation was discovered by Brian Graden, a Fox executive who commissioned the creators of the short to make a sequel that he could send as a video Christmas card to his friends. The follow-up featured Jesus and Santa Claus physically fighting over the true meaning of Christmas until the four boys intervene. The video ends with the boys deciding to be Jewish in order to get more presents over the eight nights of Hanukkah.

I have left out a key detail of this story that will give you an idea about why this animation was so influential: the creators of the Spirit of Christmas animations were none other than Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. The interest from Fox led Trey and Matt to further develop the characters and themes and pitch the show to the network. Unfortunately, the network denied the pitch, notably because of a character that was an anthropomorphized piece of feces.

The animations began to spread via bootleg copies throughout the internet and eventually made their way to Comedy Central, which picked up the show. The first episode of South Park premiered in 1997 and immediately took off, becoming the behemoth it is today. Currently, South Park has 318 episodes, one film, and multiple video games and is still going strong. In many ways, the Spirit of Christmas was a harbinger of the early internet animations discussed above: crude artwork, vulgar but extremely quotable dialogue, and dark humor.^[10]

Memorable quote: “Oh my God! Frosty killed Kenny!”