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radwolf76 · 2 years

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FLASHBack Update: Madness Combat Merch

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Seeing as how I used to have a weekly blogpost series about classics of Flash Animation, and for the first year or so included monthly posts about the Madness Combat series, I figured I might as well leave this here.

#radwolf76FLASHBack #FLASHBack Mid-Month Madness #Madness Combat #Krinkles #Tricky the Clown #plush #merch #FEAR THE CLOWN

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radwolf76 · 2 years

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FLASHBack Updates

It's been a while since I've done any of my FLASHBack posts, and really, I'm a couple weeks late with this content, but it's worth sharing all the same.

First we have a multi-animator collaboration celebrating the 15th Anniversary of The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny:

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And second, the full finale to Charlie the Unicorn is out:

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#radwolf76FLASHBack #Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny #Charlie the Unicorn #Youtube

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radwolf76 · 3 years

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FLASHBack: Week 104 [Bisected-Month Brackenwood] - BWDS: Prowlies

On FLASHBack the third Thursday of the month has been reserved for long-runner Flash Animation series that didn't quite make the cut for inclusion in the First-Class posts, namely Madness Combat, and more recently Brackenwood. Today we make our last visit to Brackenwood, even though its creator, Adam Phillips, has moved on from Flash to other animation software. The second entry in the Brackenwood Wildlife Documentary Series, Prowlies, was posted to Newgrounds on 2 April 2019, where, like its predecessors it took the quadfecta of Newgrounds awards, being Frontpaged, Daily Feature, Weekly Users' Choice, and Review Crew Pick. Adam realized that while his narrator for the previous BWDS episode absolutely nailed the sound of a nature documentary narrator, it made more sense to have the narration be from someone within the story itself, namely the Viccan Lemonee Wee. Emma Reynolds reprises that voice role that she first played in Last of the Dashkin. Phillips tried something else new for this Animation. His various attempts at getting a Brackenwood video game off the ground left him with a hard drive full of unused game assets, and so he hit upon the idea of loading up some of the game levels in the Unreal Engine 4 rendering environment, and using it to generate background stills that he could do his traditional 2D animation overtop of in Toon Boom Harmony. It's a long way from the Flash that he started the series with, and an even longer way from whatever proprietary software he used with Disney in the 90s, but the end result is undeniably gorgeous. And because he had Unreal Engine in his workflow now, Phillips applied for and was accepted to receive one of Epic's MegaGrants. giving him a fresh source of cash to supplement his Patreon income, bringing us that much closer to his return to the main storyline of Brackenwood in the future. That wraps it up for Bisected-Month Brackenwood. Next week on FLASHBack, we'll look at another animator's struggle with their creation.

#radwolf76FLASHBack #FLASHBack Bisected-Month Brackenwood #Adobe Flash #Flash Animation #Not actually Flash #toon boom harmony #toon boom aninmation #late 2010s #normally I use the early web tag here but this was just posted last year #Adam Phillips #chluaid #Newgrounds #Brackenwood #Brackenwood Wildlife Documentary Series #BWDS #BWDS: Prowlies #Prowlies #Emma Reynolds #Unreal Engine

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radwolf76 · 3 years

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FLASHBack - Week 101: Turkey Song

It's Turkey Day on FLASHBack, and one thing the Flash Animation community has to be thankful for, are the contributions of Neil Cicierega. Whether we're talking about his hand in creating the Animutation genre of Flash shitposting, his immensely popular Potter Puppet Pals series, or his songs released under the stage name Lemon Demon that came to be used as the soundtrack to many Flash Animations, Neil's work helped to popularize Flash on the early web. Today's entry is brief but timely. Turkey Song is a hidden track from Lemon Demon's fifth album, Dinosaurchestra, that played 7 minutes after the end of last track on the disc. It was animated by Ryan Krzak, who posted it to Albino Blacksheep under the username R. Wappin on 23 November 2006. At 26 seconds long, there's not much to talk to about the animation, but it is worth noting that the kid who is so impressed by the turkey's presence bears a striking resemblance to the kid in the LOG (from BLAMMO™) commercial from the first season of the Ren & Stimpy show. (A commercial which was a pitch perfect parody of the ad campaign for Slinky toys,) Another possible reference/inspiration in this Flash is the fact that the kid is about to engage in that dangerous childhood pastime of sticking a fork into an electrical outlet, much like Maggie Simpson did in one of the early Tracey Ulman Show shorts from 1987. So, enjoy your turkey this week. Next week, we'll be doing the last chapter of First-Class FLASHBack.

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radwolf76 · 4 years

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FLASHBack: Week 90 - Saturday Morning Watchmen

Another Thursday, another installment of FLASHBack. And since it's September, it's the 24th anniversary of the release of DC Comics' landmark deconstruction of the superhero genre, Watchmen, Issue #1 of which was published with a cover date of September of 1986. While there have been many attempts to adapt and continue to cash in on what was intended to be a 12 issue limited series, such as the Zach Snyder movie, the HBO television series, and DC Comics follow-up attempts Beyond Watchmen and Doomsday Clock (the latter of which, by crossing over the Watchmen Universe with the rest of DC has now resulted in a Joker-toxin afflicted Batman from somewhere else in the multiverse who has had his brain grafted to the body of a dead Doctor Bathattan), none of these are quite as memorable as the Flash Animation we're going to talk about today. Released by Harry Partridge on 4 March 2009 on Newgrounds and a day later on YouTube (just before the premier of the Snyder film), Saturday Morning Watchmen asks that classic comic book question of "What If?" -- specifically what if this dark, gritty, mature story had been neutered and sanitized by Broadcast Network Standards & Practices and packaged up for the kids as a brain-dead 80s cartoon, with all the tropes that entails? If this seems like an unlikely scenario, it's exactly the sort of thing that happened to Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which in its original independent comic book form, did not shy away at all from bloody violence, police brutality, or sexing up April O'Neil (for late 80s values of sexy); pizza was not a defining plot element at all. The Watchman comics, being of the same era, could, in some darker timeline, have befallen the fate envisioned by Partridge, especially with the last season of the long-running Superfriends franchise having ended in spring of 1986.

The animation is rich with references to both events from the Watchmen comics (but twisted 180 to be shown on children's television) and allusions to other kids cartoons. We still get a scene with The Comedian, Ozymandias, and a broken window, a bedroom scene with Silk Spectre and three Doctors Manhattan, a scene with Silk Spectre having to deal with unwanted amorous advances from The Comedian, and a scene with Rorschach and some german shepherds. Meanwhile Ozymandias' genetically engineered cat Bubastis is the designated talking animal sidekick (and has a Scooby/Shaggy vibe with Ozy), Silk Spectre seems to be leading a Truly Outrageous band straight out of Jem & The Holograms, and Doctor Manhattan has stolen the gimmick from Turbo Teen only made it worse by retaining his face after turning into a car. There's also a Wilhelm Scream, because of course there is. And in a possible nod to the Ninja Turtles, there's a big scene with everyone eating pizza. The artist on the original Watchmen comics, Dave Gibbons, is on the record as having LOVED Harry's parody of it, having said of it "The thing is, obviously they’re having fun with it but the way it was done, you know that the person really cared about what they were doing … really knew Watchmen in detail." Writer and Rasputin Impersonator Alan Moore, normally very reticent to talk on the topic of anything Watchmen related (still sore over DC exploiting the part of his Watchmen contract where the rights to the characters he created revert back to him after the comic has been out-of-print for a set time by reprinting the comic in graphic novel form in perpetuity) has called Partridge's Flash the only adaptation of his works that he approves of. We're pretty much done watching the Watchmen for now. Next week, we'll watch some Brackenwood instead.

#radwolf76FLASHBack #Adobe Flash #Flash Animation #late 2000s #early web #newgrounds #Harry Partridge #Happy Harry Productions #Watchmen #Saturday Morning Watchmen #Dave Gibbons #Alan Moore #TMNT #Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #Ninja Turtles #Wilhelm Scream #I'm Nutty!

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radwolf76 · 3 years

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FLASHBack: Week 100 [Bisected-Month Brackenwood] - BWDS: Fatsack

It's the third Thursday of the month again, which means FLASHBack is going back to Brackenwood. As I mentioned last month, former Disney animator Adam Phillips had put the main series on hiatus while trying to get a video game off the ground, and has only recently returned to work on animating the next chapter. However, in parallel to his attempts to get his video game off the ground, he came up with a spin-off series, meant to expand the lore of Brackenwood, without having to advance the plot of Bitey's story. The Brackenwood Wildlife Documentary Series is in the pattern of your typical nature documentaries, with voiceover narration shown over footage of a particular example of fauna, explaining a bit about the creature. Phillips had laid out a long list of the members of Brackenwood's bestiary that he wanted to cover in the series: Fatsacks, Prowlies, Morrugs, Blood-Coats, Chisel-Lizards, Giribus, Mood Birds, Dandeants, Feathergnats, Umbrellaflies (Petalflies), and Salmogs. So far, however, he's only covered the first two from that list, and announced that the next episode would cover the third. The first chapter of BWDS, Fatsack was posted to Newgrounds on 22 June 2016. As is typical of a Brackenwood animation, it raked in the usual slate of Newgrounds awards (Frontpaged, Daily Feature, Weekly Users' Choice, and Review Crew Pick). Notably, this was not animated in Flash at all, but instead in Toon Boom Harmony; however as the bulk of the Brackenwood series was done in Flash, I'm including it in FLASHBack for the sake of completion. The short clip explains the simple anatomy of the Fatsacks, why they slosh when they move, and the source of their impolite noises. The narration is provided by A.K. Alfadel, a voice actor who offered up his services while watching Phillips work on the animation on Twitch. The musical score is the world map music from the canceled Last of the Dashkin video game. That wraps it up for this week. Next week, we'll talk turkey.

#radwolf76FLASHBack #FLASHBack Bisected-Month Brackenwood #Adobe Flash #Flash Animation #mid 2010s #early web #Adam Phillips #chluaid #Newgrounds #Brackenwood #Brackenwood Wildlife Documentary Series #BWDS #BWDS: Fatsack #Fatsack #A.K. Alfadel #canceled Last of the Dashkin video game

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radwolf76 · 3 years

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FLASHBack: Week 99 - Harry Partridge's Skyrim Songs

Another Thursday, another FLASHBack. But today is also 12 November 2020, which means that yesterday was the ninth anniversary of the release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on 11·11·11. So for today, we're going to be checking back in with Flash Animator Harry Partridge, who you may remember from two months ago when we discussed his Saturday Morning Watchmen animation. That animation helped him to the attention of Bethesda Game Studios, who commissioned him to make some funny Flashes to hype up Skyrim before and after its release. After all, this was only the Dawning of the Fourth Era, before Skyrim had been Re-Released, Special Editioned, Nintendo Amiiboed, and ported to Amazon Alexa. And well before Microsoft bought Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax for only a little less than what Disney paid for Lucasfilm and Marvel combined. Harry's first Elder Scrolls animation was simply titled Skyrim, essentially an animated reaction to the announcement trailer linked above. It was posted to YouTube on 3 February 2011. I don't believe he was commissioned by Bethesda yet at this point, but it probably sealed the deal for his future collaborations with them. The animation opened with a reference to Saturday Morning Watchmen, but then proceeds to Harry watching the Max Von Sydow voiced trailer and then singing a filk song set to Jeremy Soule's theme Dragonborn, dismissing other games' fantasy worlds while praising Skyrim.

Bethesda's first commission for Harry would be Song of Skyrim, released on YouTube 5 November 2011, and then on Newgrounds two days before the game's release, where it would be Frontpaged, and win the Daily Feature and Weekly 2nd Place awards. This time around, the Flash contains 100% less Partridge boner and no mention of his girlfriend's breasts. It does however rattle off important game features like dual-wielding and being able to give your character a beard. On a personal note, I ripped the song audio from both these animations and played them for my fellow line-standers at the midnight release event for the game — they were both big hits with the crowd. Then after the game's release, Bethesda's next Harry Partridge commission would drop. Uploaded to YouTube on 1 December 2011, and the next day to Newgrounds, where it also was Frontpaged, and won Daily and Weekly 2nd Place, was Elder Scrolls Adventures with the Dovahkids. This time around Harry returned to familiar territory: 1980s Saturday Morning Cartoons. Instead of the wide net of inspiration he drew from for his Watchmen parody this one pulls primarily from one source: the Dungeons & Dragons animated series. Transporting a group of children into a fantasy realm where they're transformed into archetypal character types from that setting is pretty much an exact match of plots, and the Dovahkids' Dragy the Dragon is an obvious stand-in for Uni the Unicorn. The rock concert in front of the Dragon Wall is about the only element that's out of place, but I suspect that Harry may have wanted to mix in just the slightest pinch of Kidd Video into the recipe for spice. As an aside, while it may seem curious that a game like Skyrim, which in its original incarnation at release was 6gb in size, could fit on a single 5 1/4" floppy, that floppy probably only contains the installer for the Steam client. Bethesda would again commission Partridge when it came time to promote The Elder Scrolls Online MMO. On 11 April 2014, Back to Tamriel was released on YouTube and Newgrounds. Once again Newgrounds Frontpaged it, and it won Daily Feature, and Weekly Users' Choice as well as Review Crew Pick awards. This one opens with references to the final bosses of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim and then gets rolling in typical Harry style. They let him get away with mentioning breasts in a commissioned Flash this time, and the usual self-deprecating digs at gamer culture are there as well. Then, when Bethesda announced the Special Edition of Skyrim, they once again sponsored Harry so he decided to get together for a collaboration with someone else noted for creating Skyrim-based content, nerdcore rapper Dan Bull. Together, they made Return to Skyrim, posted to YouTube 14 November 2016, and Newgrounds the next day. As previously, it too was Frontpaged and won Daily Feature and Weekly Users' Choice. The song opens with Dan watching Todd Howard's announcement of the Special Edition before Harry pulls him into his animated world. This time around the lyrics make jabs at the fact that NPC's theft detection can be defeated by blocking their line of sight with a bucket or a cauldron put on their heads, as well as the fact that the game's numerous side quests and faction storylines can entirely distract a player from ever finishing the main quest. Namechecks are given to Skyrim's DLC expansions, and mention is also made of the Elder Scrolls Series' pastry of choice, the Sweetroll, as well as the game's vibrant modding community and the sometimes strange content it produces. Adelle the Mudcrab from Harry's previous Elder Scrolls Flash gets a blink-and-you'll-miss-her cameo, as do the Dovahkids, and the whole series gets bookended by Harry popping another gamerboner. A remixed version of the song appeared on Dan's own channel. One thing that I've not done much of here on FLASHBack is get into the nitty-gritty of how Flash animations are made. For Harry Partridge's Elder Scrolls animations however, we have a unique opportunity, as the YouTube series Boundary Break, while normally focused on out-of-bounds content in video games, did happen to do an episode on Harry's Flashes. Of particular interest out of the topics covered are the fact that Partridge uses the more traditional frame-by-frame animation technique, avoiding the automated shortcuts that Flash provides, such as motion tweening. That wraps it up for now. Next week, we'll start on the Brackenwood Wildlife Documentary Series.

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radwolf76 · 4 years

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FLASHBack: Week 89 [First-Class FLASHBack] - Japanese Cartoon

Time for another First-Class FLASHBack, where we talk about the more prolific and influential Flash animators of the early web. This month, we're going to be looking at another offering from Homestar Runner. As mentioned previously, the Brothers Chaps drew on a wealth of 80s and 90s pop culture (and even a dash of the 70s, absorbed from pop-culture osmosis from their older siblings, as well as the influence of older decades from the fact that syndicated broadcast television reruns mined content all the way back to the Golden Age of Hollywood). One example where this 80s/90s pop culture overload really shines is in Strong Bad Email #57, Japanese Cartoon, posted on 6 January 2003. James F. asks Strong Bad what he would look like as a Japanese Cartoon, and what it'd be about. Strong Bad goes on to describe himself in a chibi big-eyes/small-mouth style (except when the mouth is open, when it goes ridiculously huge), reminiscent of a helmetless Mega Man. With blue hair. You gotta have blue hair. (WARNING: TV Tropes link.) The show itself consists of him in space flying around in cool poses, an allusion to how many animes of the 60s-80s would rely heavily on a library of stock sequences for fight and transformation scenes, to pad out a show's run time (and sometimes that stock footage would get abused even further by US editors who needed to make up for runtime lost to localization censorship). The English is clearly dubbed, with mouth movements not even close to matching. Strong Bad's anime counterpart, Stinkoman, has a voice that sounds like voice actor Cam Clarke, who while best known for being the voice of Leonardo on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, also voiced on several prominent 80s anime dubs, including the roles of Max Sterling and Lancer on Robotech, Dirk Daring on G-Force, and Kaneda in the original dub of Akira -- at one point Stinkoman even breaks out with a line, "You're just a kid!" that echoes Kaneda's dismissal of Tetsuo's interest in riding his bike at the beginning of the movie. (The name "Stinkoman" was a reference to a line from another Strong Bad Email, Island, which may have been a take on the old 90s Sierra-Online/Dynamix Screensaver, Johnny Castaway.)

Now, it's important to note that television was not the only vector for introducing anime stylings and sensibilities to Western audiences. The shift of video game console market dominance to Japan after the video game market crash of 1983 meant that many titles would originally be developed for the Japanese market first and then have to be localized for the US. One such title is Rad Racer for the Nintendo Entertainment System, originally Highway Star for the Famicom. The Brothers Chaps lifted one of the songs from the Rad Racer soundtrack for their hypothetical Stinko Man K 20X6 anime. The anime's name is only revealed in an easter egg accessible by clicking the words "japanese cartoon" during the end credits -- using X to obscure a year was a gimmick that the Mega Man titles were particularly known for (but also occurred in Metroid as well as the Mother/Earthbound series). Inception-like, there are easter eggs within easter eggs here; clicking "japanese cartoon" a second time would bring up a clip of Homestar Runner watching Stinko Man K 20X6. For the final layer of the easter egg, under Homestar's TV are a collection of VHS tapes, one of which is labled "NES Endings". Clicking that tape brings up a pop up window that shows the ending to Rad Racer. Subsequent clicks on the pop up cycle through the endings to a bunch of video games: Castlevania 2, Mega Man 2 (furthering the connection between Stinkoman and Mega Man), Super Mario Brothers 2 (The US version, which began life as the wholly unrelated title Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic), Hoops, Ghosts n' Goblins, Blaster Master (with a sketched on label and arrow calling out "Blue Hair"), The Legend of Zelda (whose credits provided the inspiration for some of the made-up names in the Stinkoman credits), Metroid (Samus is a girl?!?), Jackal, and Rygar. The world of 20X6 and Planet K would become recurring elements of the Homestar Runner site, and eventually the Brothers Chaps would even make a full Mega Man clone starring Stinkoman. Another subtle video game connection is the fact that the little mushroom clouds around Stinkoman's head when he laughs were inspired by Animal Crossing. Surprisingly, the indie video game I Wanna Be The Guy was NOT an intentional reference to this Flash, despite featuring a "Kid" who's motivation is "I Wanna Be The Guy"; the creator does acknowledge in his FAQ that he and his friend Eric who helped him name the game had probably seen this animation, but claims any influence it had was a subconscious one. (Fun Fact: I cosplayed as The Kid from I Want to Be The Guy at DragonCon one year, and almost got into hot water with con security over my gun prop.) That's all I really have for this week. Next week, we'll go from badly dubbed anime, that staple of after-school weekday cartoons, to something a little more Saturday Morning.

#radwolf76FLASHBack #FirstClassFLASHBack #Adobe Flash #Flash Animation #early 2000s #early web #Homestar Runner #Mike Chapman #Matt Chapman #The Brothers Chaps #Strong Bad #Strong Bad Emails #SBEmails #japanese cartoon #island #Stinkoman #Stinko Man K 20X6 #Rad Racer #You gotta have blue hair

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radwolf76 · 4 years

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FLASHBack: Week 85 [First-Class FLASHBack] - Angry White Boy Polka

First-Class time here on FLASHBack, and we're again going to look at the one First-Class Artist who inspired and or commissioned many a Flash Animation without ever touching Flash himself, Weird Al. You may be wondering how a busy musician even discovered Flash in the first place. Well, first off, Al does happen to be White and Nerdy (to the point that he's All about the Pentiums), so write that down. But ultimately, Yankovic was introduced to the potential of Flash Animation set to his tracks at a party for people who have guest starred on The Simpsons, hosted by Simpsons creator Matt Groening, and held at his house. Groening's son had been a big Newgrounds fan, and ended up showing Al a Flash Animation of one of his polka medleys. The Flash Animation in question was Daniel "LisVender" Rocha's rendition of Weird Al's Angry White Boy Polka, posted to Newgrounds on 29 October 2003, where it took the Daily Feature and Weekly User's Choice Awards. To animate the singers LisVender used a technique reminiscent of the Synchro-Vox limited animation technique. Though instead of superimposing filmed images of talking mouths over the animation, Rocha instead used still frames from low quality animated gifs of lips, synched to the lyrics. System of A Down's song Chop Suey (who's Richard Cheese cover was last week's topic) is one of the featured songs in the medley, which is from Yankovic's album Poodle Hat. Also featured is Disturbed's Down with the Sickness, which LisVender avoided having to add his crudely animated mouths by putting the band in surgical masks. At the time this Flash was made, the use of masks to curb the spread of respiratory diseases was only commonplace in Southeast Asia, so the backgrounds for this part of the song are images of China. (For more Flashes that promote mask usage, see the very first installment of FLASHBack, with the Korean animation There She Is! by SamBakZa -- One of the supporting rabbit characters from the Jjintta Set gang, Sam-ho, is never seen without his mask.) LisVender's Flash and Al's polka also feature Eminem, although it's the rapper's song The Real Slim Shady instead of the one we covered two weeks ago, Just Lose It. Anyways, that's enough music focused Flashes for a while. Next week, we'll be getting back to that other Flash Artist favorite, excessive graphic violence.

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radwolf76 · 4 years

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FLASHBack: Week 92 - www.Kubrick2001.com

So far on FLASHBack, we've covered over ninety Flash animations that were intended to amuse and entertain in some fashion or another, either with humor, stunning visuals, catchy music, or over the top action movie style violence. This time around, we're going to do things a bit differently, and look at a Flash that was made to educate the viewer on a particular point of view. In 1968 Stanley Kubrick released the landmark science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, loosely based off of the short story "The Sentinel" by Arthur C. Clarke (Published in 1951 under the title "Sentinel of Eternity"). As a cinematographic work, Kubrick's intent was to leave its meaning up for interpretation, but this left many a moviegoer wondering just what it was they had watched. In honor of the fact that by one reconstruction of the story's timeline, this week in 2002 (September 21th to be exact), the spaceship at the core of the film, Discovery-1, launched from lunar orbit to set out for Jupiter, we're going to look at an early Flash animation that offers up one possible interpretation of 2001's themes and meaning. The site www.kubrick2001.com went online, aptly enough, in the year 2001, on 20 January. In its original form, it was available in eight different languages, selectable in an interface patterned after the scene in the film where National Council of Astronautics Chairman Haywood Floyd checks in with voice print at Space Station V's Customs Desk. Over the years, another four languages have been added. They've also upgraded from Flash to mp4 video, at a 20x increase in file size. Their videos are also now upscaled from the original 550x290px Flash Animations to 720x1008px (vertical), targeting consumption on mobile devices. It has garnered many accolades, including a Golden Web Award for 2001-2002, USA Today's Hot Site of the Day, El Mejor Sitio de 2001 from Yahoo! en Español and mentions in major international newspapers such as O Dia, Le Monde, and la Repubblica.

Now, normally on FLASHBack, there's an explanation of the content of the Flash. However this Flash is already an explanation, and we don't need to go deeper into the layers; this is supposed to be about Stanley Kubrick's 2001, not Christopher Nolan's Inception. (Though I can understand the confusion, the sets were pretty similar at a quick glance.) So, I'm going to follow the strategy of the very first FLASHBack post and just say go watch the thing, especially if you're familiar with 2001 itself. What I can do, however, is note some minor changes from the original Flash and its current video form. At the end of the Dawn of Man section, where the commentary notes that when facing the Monolith on the Moon, man "shows none of the ape's fear and wonder", the Flash would go on to note "Instead, he makes a video ...". It's not clear why this line was cut from the script; It coincided with audio of Neil Armstrong's "One small step for (a) man", so it's possible it could have been cut to distance this commentary from the Moon Landing Deniers who claim Kubrick was in on the conspiracy, but the fact that the second half of the quote, "One giant leap for Mankind", remains in the current version makes that reasoning unlikely. In the Jupiter Mission section, the scene where Bowman first goes outside the ship to retrieve the AE-35 unit is uncharitably described as "the scene where a lot of people get up and leave", this was later revised to a more neutral statement on the length of the scene. The offer to skip it is present in both, but in the original flash, there was a working skip button. The scene where HAL takes over the EVA Pod by remote control to attack Poole during his spacewalk has been re-edited: The original is a straight zoom in whereas the current version makes it clear that the target is Poole's air hose. Another edit occurs at the scene where HAL refuses to open the Pod Bay doors for Dave: where the mp4 version asks "Game over?", the original Flash reads "The computer has won" followed by several cuts back and forth from the EVA Pod's view of Discovery and Discovery's view of the Pod, echoing the back and forth of the dialogue during the standoff in the scene from the film. One final difference in this section is that the original flash labeled the screwdriver. Unfortunately as this Flash was structured as a main Flash that loaded other Flash files in the background, I haven't been able to find an archived version of the final section to compare to the modern video version. It is worth noting however, that the current version pays homage to the notion that Pink Floyd's song Echoes synchs up nicely with the opening to the Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite portion of the film. And on that musical note, we'll close for this week. Next week, more music.

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radwolf76 · 3 years

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FLASHBack: Week 106 - Ze End of Ze World

It's time. We've reached 31 December 2020, the final day for Adobe's support of Flash Player. This closing of an era was the inspiration behind the FLASHBack project in the first place. For those who have been there since the beginning, who enjoyed countless fun animations over the decade and watched several animators' careers get their start, this may seem like the end of the world, but it's not. Adobe Animate will continue to be supported, and will still be able to export animations in several modern file formats that are sharable on the web. Other tools such as Toon Boom are also available, meaning that up-and-coming animators Will still have a variety of tools available to learn the craft. Much of the old content is going to be available as well: Newgrounds has released its own Flash Player plugin, BlueMaxima's FlashPoint is a standalone player with a massive library of both classic Flash games and Animations, and The Internet Archive has developed a Flash emulator as well. And as we've seen over the past two years, many classic Flash Animations have already been converted to video. So while it may feel like the end of the world, it's not. Still, there was only one choice of classic Flash Animations to cover in this last week of FLASHBack: Ze End of Ze World. Made in 2003 by Jason Windsor, the Flash was originally shared among his circle of friends, one of whom shared it with some online music piracy contacts of theirs, and then on 30 October 2003, someone who had the file uploaded it to Albino Blacksheep under the username of Fluid. The dark subject matter of the animation is made hilarious by the funny voice that Windsor narrated it with, a nasally tone inspired by John Malkovich in the movie Rounders, that easily slips into the various stereotypical national accents of the characters depicted throughout. He starts off with a list of natural and or ecological disasters that could befall the planet before devoting the bulk of the animation depicting an exchange of nuclear weapons. He leans heavily into stock stereotypes for the various countries in the nuclear weapons club, milking comedy from them despite their long history of overuse, by pushing them to the point of absurdity. Several of the Animation's lines, such as the hairy-armpitted French woman's protest of "But I am le tired" became memetic catchphrases in their own right. After describing nuclear armageddon, Jason then ends the video with a simplified account of the mega-earthquake that could befall California. A decade and a half later on 20 January 2018, Windsor would release a sequel, End of Ze World ... Probably For Real This Time. This time around it was inspired by the U.S. political situation in 2016-2017. Jason did a video interview with VICE about the sequel (and the original as well), so I'll defer to his words on the subject. And with Ze End of Ze World, we now come to Ze End of Ze FLASHBack. It's been a fun two years of me infodumping these Flash Animation classics for you, and I would like to thank everyone for the support and feedback you've given me along the way.

#radwolf76FLASHBack #Adobe Flash #Flash Animation #early 2000s #late 2010s #early web #Albino Blacksheep #Jason Windsor #fluid #Ze End of Ze World #End of Ze World ... Probably For Real This Time #John Malkovich #Rounders #Flash Player End Of Life #31 December 2020 #But I am le tired

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radwolf76 · 4 years

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FLASHBack: Week 96 - The People’s Mario

On FLASHBack this week, we're going to take a cue from history, specifically Vladimir Lenin's October Revolution that began on 25 October of 1917, and marked the end of the reign of the Russian Tzars. (Yes, I know that's a Julian date and on the Gregorian Calendar it was actually 7 November, but this is a Flash Animation series, not a calendar series, and I wanted to do this post in October, so there.) However, instead of looking at historical communism, we're going to be looking at one of it's more modern incarnations, Nintendo's beloved mascot, Mario. On 15 April 2006, Newgrounds user Manuel "celarent" Alderete from Chihuahua, Mexico, posted The People's Mario, a Flash set to music from the Red Army Choir, and based off of a longstanding urban legend that the Super Mario Games were intended to be communist propaganda. Two days later it was Frontpaged and awarded Newgrounds' Daily Feature, and by the end of the week it was the Weekly Users' Choice. Filter effects have been applied to the animation to give it the flicker, grain, and vignette of old film. The Mushroom Kingdom of the first Super Mario Game is rendered as a bleak desolate brick plain. Mario, while ostensibly a plumber at this point in his franchise, wields an oversized hammer like he did when he was a carpenter facing off against Donkey Kong, although this hammer is clearly shaped like the one from the iconic ☭ Hammer and Sickle ☭ emblem from the Soviet Union flag. He is set upon by Goombas which he dispatches in the usual Mario manner, by stomping on them or kicking a Koopa shell into them, however the results are much more graphic and bloody than the 8 Bit NES game ever rendered them. The animation ends with him tearing down the Koopa banner from the flagpole and erecting a flag with a Red Star (the symbol of the Soviet military) over the castle.

Celarent was not the first to highlight similarities between Mario and communist iconography. The shock humor website murderize.com had an article detailing the major points back in 2001. A few frames of The People's Mario were used by MatPat in an early Game Theory episode on the subject (and he even title drops the Flash while showing the clip, sandwiched between the excess of meme-ery that is characteristic of MatPat's early work). Because of the humor potential of family-friendly Nintendo's beloved mascot of almost four decades possibly being secret propaganda for a hot button political topic (to US audiences at least), references and callouts to the rumor have persisted into the modern era, such as with Clickhole's review of Super Mario Odysssy. That marks the end of Marxism on FLASHBack for now. Next week, who knows? I'll determine something though. P.S. Krinkles has released a Demo for the latest iteration of his spin-off game, Madness: Project Nexus. The 2D Flash Animated character designs translate really well to the 3D engine.

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radwolf76 · 3 years

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FLASHBack: Week 105 - Animator vs. Animation

Today on FLASHBack, we're going to get a little meta. Over the last two years, we've looked at roughly over six-hundred fifty Animations by various Flash Artists, but have only rarely taken the step back to look at the Animation process itself. So that's exactly what we're going to do, but not in the conventional way. Instead, we're going to be looking at a series of Flash Animations that takes its cues from the Looney Tunes classic Duck Amuck, in which a cartoon character ends up getting into a fight with the animator who's bringing them to life. And also touch upon intellectual property theft by a notorious content aggregator website along the way. On 3 June 2006, Alan "noogai" Becker uploaded Animator vs. Animation to Newgrounds. The next day, it was Frontpaged and took Daily 2nd Place, and by the end of the week it was the Weekly Users' Choice and the Review Crew Pick. The animation was of a stick figure "victim" being drawn in Flash, only to be tormented by the animator until the stick figure's selection box gets broken, letting him escape across Flash's user interface to take hold of the various drawing tools to defend himself. Five days later on 8 June 2006, the same Flash was uploaded to Albino Blacksheep. It was from there that the website eBaum's World ripped the Flash file to upload to their own site a day later. eBaum's had a bad reputation for stealing independent creators' viral content and hosting it on their own site without permission or compensation, even going so far as to strip credits and source watermarks from the content before uploading it to their own site. This is what they had done with Albino Blacksheep's authorized copy of Animator vs. Animation, but what eBaum's didn't know was that in addition to the visible "hosted at albinoblacksheep.com" that they removed, there was other tracking code embedded in the Flash that meant they'd been caught red-handed.

On 12 June 2006, the siterunner of Albino Blacksheep made a statement about the content theft. eBaum's World then approached Alan directly with an offer of $250 to buy the permission to continue to host the Flash on their site (as well as naming him the "winner" of a nebulous "Best Flash" contest that had a prize of an additional $1000). However, this money came with a price: Becker had to submit a statement for eBaum's to post, making it look like he was clearing them of blame. Alan, who was 17 at the time, and from a family that was not well off, had initially taken the money, but then sent it back, demanding that his Flash and the "Statement" he'd made be taken down. In a post made by Albino Blacksheep on 23 June 2006, it was pointed out that the statement had been pre-scripted by eBaum's to carefully sidestep the fact that while they had contacted Alan ahead of time asking to be able to host his animation, he'd told them no, and so they went and stole his file anyways. That post included an apology to the Flash community from Becker for falling into eBaum's trap. The animation and the statement were removed from eBaum's on 26 June 2006. After receiving funding from Atom Films, Becker would revisit the concept with Animator vs. Animation 2, posted to Newgrounds on 15 Mar 2007. It took the same slate of awards as the first, with the exception of being the Daily Feature instead of Daily 2nd Place. This time around the stick figure isn't labeled "victim" but instead "Chosen One" (possibly a Matrix reference). He immediately breaks out of his selection box on his own, and begins breaking the Flash user interface with fireballs. This time around The Animator has prepared an arsenal of weapons in Flash's library of animatable "Symbol" objects, including a SPNKR rocket launcher from Halo. However, the Chosen one breaks though Flash to get to the Windows XP desktop beneath (complete with the Bliss wallpaper). There he battles with the fox from the Firefox icon and the Stick Figure from the AOL Instant Messenger Icon. Finally, he's contained by an Avast Antivirus Scan (though alas, Avast's language settings were on plain English, and not he infinitely more fun "Pirate" setting). The animation ends with The Chosen One having been tamed and being used as a Pop-Up Blocker. Later, this animation would get a Live Orchestral Score courtesy of Joe-Pietro Abela, who used it for his Masters project at the Berklee College of Music. On 6 August 2011, Alan would upload the third chapter in the series to Newgrounds, where it again took the quadfecta of top awards. In this installment, The Chosen One breaks free of his enslavement as a Pop-Up Blocker, to again spread havoc throughout The Animator's computer. This time around the battle ranges across such iconic windows software as Microsoft Word, Solitaire, & Minesweeper. Clippy the Office Assistant proves to be a formidable foe, but eventually, The Animator has to open up Flash to draw a new red stick figure to be "The Dark Lord", coding him to go after The Chosen One. In the end however, the two team up and end up causing a Blue Screen of Death on The Animator's computer. It would be another three years before Becker would put Animator vs. Animation IV on Newgrounds, 2 October 2014, to the usual maximum acclaim. For this chapter, Alan had turned to Kickstarter to get support for production, raising $11,280 in donations. With that funding, he expanded the scope of the series, by not just showing what was happening on the computer screen, but also incorporating real world video of himself as The Animator. The Chosen One has a Second Coming, and when The Animator discovers this, the ensuing battle ranges from Facebook to The Animator's iPhone, and then back onto the computer via Dropbox. In his process of containing The Second Coming, The Animator realizes that The Second Coming is better at animating than he is, and strikes a bargain with him, allowing his continued existence in return for tutoring. After that, Alan would begin doing spinoffs, such as Animation vs. Minecraft and Animation vs. YouTube, where his stick figures would begin having adventures outside the context of Adobe Flash and interactions with The Animator. These would then be followed up with Animation vs League of Legends, Animation vs Pokemon, and Animation vs Super Mario Bros. However, in between those spinoff episodes, he would continue to produce the occasional short animation for the main Animator vs. Animation series, and on 5 Dec 2020, he compiled those shorts into Animator vs. Animation V, which was uploaded to YouTube on 5 December 2020. That's all for FLASHBack this week. Next week, THE END.

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radwolf76 · 3 years

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FLASHBack: Week 103 - Windows Noises

As we have seen here time and time again during the last two years of FLASHBack, often times the key to making a memorable Flash Animation would be to have a good soundtrack. And while I don't have much detail on just how the music for this week's entry was edited together, the Flash Animation makes it look like it was pieced together with sndrec32.exe, an audio editor bundled with Windows XP (one that was often the target of replacement by malware that wanted to pass itself off as a legitimate Microsoft executable). Windows Noises was uploaded by Clown Staples to Albino Blacksheep on 9 April 2004. The animation shows a Windows Desktop where a user opens multiple instances of the Sound Recorder Utility, each with a different WAV file from C:\Windows\Media\. We're shown a few instances of the different audio transformations that Sound Recorder was capable of, such as manipulation of volume and playback speed, but then the mixing accelerates into a full blown musical composition with the soundfiles in various windows starting and stopping on their own with progress sliders jumping back and forth to different portions of each sound to scrub back and forth. To the best of my knowledge there was no way to automate Sound Recorder windows to do that on their own, which is why I suspect while sndrec32.exe was used in the making of the audio, what is shown in the animation is a dramatic recreation of how the track was composed. That's all for this time around. Next week, one final visit to Brackenwood.

#radwolf76FLASHBack #Adobe Flash #Flash Animation #mid 2000s #early web #albinoblacksheep #Clown Staples #Windows Noises #sndrec32.exe #audio mixing #C:\Windows\Media\#chord.wav #ding.wav #chimes.wav #The Microsoft Sound.wav #instrumental nerdcore

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radwolf76 · 4 years

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FLASHBack: Week 83 - Vertically Continuous Image

For this installment of FLASHBack, we're going to look at a Flash Animation from Andrew Kepple, also known as TmsT (Too Much Spare Time), whom we last covered back around Valentines' Day for his Flash of Neil “Lemon Demon” Cicierega's song Geeks In Love. This week's "animation", if you could call it that, is called Vertically Continuous Image, and is a collaborative effort by posters to the IMHOSTFU Forums. The rules of the project were simple: an image was posted, and then someone else had to post an image of the same width drawn in such a way that the top of the new image had to blend seamlessly with the bottom of the previous. The bottom of the last image in the chain also had to blend seamlessly with the top of the original image. Kepple then animated the series of images scrolling by and posted it to Albino Blacksheep on 21 February 2005. (This was not the first time that Kepple had done this type of Flash, an earlier collaboration called Vertical Scroll had also been posted to Albino Blacksheep, with image contributions from ABS Forum Members, however this earlier work was far inferior as it lacked the crucial continuous loop that gave Flashes of the era the repetition power to attain meme status and go viral.)

By themselves, the crudely drawn images, likely a product of MS Paint, weren't particularly compelling, but Andrew's choice of soundtrack is what earns Vertically Continuous Image its status as a Classic of Flash Animation. As we've seen with many Weird Al Flash Animations, accordion music pairs well with Flash for a humorous effect; Kepple himself had learned this with his parody Flash, Badger Badger Polka. So for Vertically Continuous Image, he turned to a remix by DJ Nono titled Just Lose the Accordion, which mashes up Eminem's Just Lose It with Lawrence Welk regular Myron Floren's Clarinet Polka off his Disco Polka album. As a result, Andrew's Flash is one of the funniest uses of Just Lose It from the early web.

The other top contender for funniest use of Eminem's Just Lose It wasn't an animation, but Flash's video playback usage was most certainly involved in distributing it at some point in its viral cycle, so I'm going to include it here. In late 2004 or early 2005 (I've found links as early as 17 January 2005), University of Texas at Austin student Anthony Le got a bunch of friends and family together to film their own "Asian Style" music video for Just Lose It. Much of the video was filmed at a Wal*Mart, with additional footage shot in parks and a shopping mall. For a bunch of college students in their spare time, the video has some excellent choreography, especially Anthony's recreations of the King of Pop's signature moves like the moonwalk.

Next week on FLASHBack: another musical interlude.

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radwolf76 · 3 years

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FLASHBack - Week 98: Newgrounds

It's First-Class FLASHBack time on FLASHBack, and that means talking about the giants of the golden-age of Flash Animation on the web. We've covered everyone from Weebl to Weird Al, but today I'd like to do something different, and take a look at Tom Fulp's website, Newgrounds.com. If you've been following FLASHBack at all, you know you can't swing a dead badger around without hitting a post that mentions a Flash that was on Newgrounds. Even Flash series with their own dedicated websites such as Brackenwood's BiteyCastle.com or Foamy the Squirrel's IllWillPress.com would often post to Newgrounds as well, because that's where they could build an audience. However, while researching to find out just what I wanted to say for this post, I came across a YouTube video that already encapsulated everything I wanted to cover. So rather than re-invent the wheel, allow me to link you to kaptainkristian's Newgrounds - The Foundation of the Future of Animation. Don't worry, next week, FLASHBack will return to its elder ways, and talk about Flash animations, instead of linking to other people's videos about hosting websites.

#radwolf76FLASHBack #Adobe Flash #Flash Animation #early web #Newgrounds #Tom Fulp #kaptainkristian #no Flash Animations #I mean I guess the linked YouTube video might have been done in flash #hosting websites #flash portal

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