From Homestar Runner to Salad fingers to badgers, stick figure battles, and the End of Ze World, this — dare I call it an artform? — was a cultural touchstone for a generation.
Flash made vector animation available to the masses, and internet distribution of the relatively small video files was a piece of cake. With the filetype now essentially deprecated, the creators gone on to bigger and better things, the distribution sites shut down, it is a dead form. Most of it will be lost forever, although there may be someone archiving some of it for posterity.
They’re not lost, most of them are archived via Flashpoint. The most notable ones have also been exported as regular videos on sites like Newgrounds. But yeah, I miss that Flash era where people made fun animations and games for whatever was on their mind.
The thing I find that is lost is the blurring of the line between video game and animation. Homestar Runner cartoons were often interactive, they made several outright games but also the things that were closer to animations often had easter eggs in them, from (in Strong Bad’s words) dumb stuff that would pop up to entire extra scenes.
Early Youtube had a thriving animation community, but given the limitations of video-based content they really couldn’t do those interactive elements, then Flash died, and now that culture is basically gone.
Homestar Runner cartoons were often interactive
I got fond memories of hunting for the clickies at the end of the videos.
And, usually, throughout.
Fortunately, you can still do almost all of them.
Guys, homestarrunner literally works again thanks to something called the Ruffle Project (just from reading the website. Enjoy the vector graphics and Easter eggs again
I use Ruffle on my personal domain to host my college flash web page again. I made the super Mario world map into a web page for an internet gaming group on campus and spent way too much time doing it. I was delighted I could host it again.
If they were popular enough (like all the examples you’ve named), they probably have been converted to a more modern format already (like all the examples you’ve named).
You could also download the files and still watch them on a local machine using flash player to enjoy them in the original format, assuming the .FLVs themselves are still available. Makes me wonder if Newgrounds still has any of that somewhere, even if not accessible by the public. They’re still around, but they’re modern videos now.
I’m a little surprised nothing came to take the place of flash.
There are lots of animation tools that export to video, and there are WYSIWYG web editors that allow for interaction and movement.
But nothing really came out, built on html5, that let you easily create interactive motion narratives or games, so that you could just upload them somewhere.
There are huge archives of flash animations and you can install a safe “emulator” for playing flash that even runs in your browser. Look up Ruffle. I can’t remember the name of the big archive site I used, but it didn’t take much googling. I know I was able to find Homestar, Larry Carlson, Adam Phillips (bitey), joe cartoon and salad fingers as well as a ton of games from back in the day.
Newgrounds
Theres are some pretty massive archives already, including Flashpoint
Hey, the badger is still alive and badgering!
So is Homestarrunner. Most of their flash stuff still works, too.
They’re still making videos on YouTube at least once a year too! One of the two brother chaps who created it went on to work on the animated show Gravity Falls too.
They both also worked on Yo Gabba Gabba, though one (Matt) has definitely appeared to do a lot more writing/production work (and a good bit of voice work)
Salad Fingers lives on https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9383CC2C6DBD902F
People jumped ship to prerendered videos even before the death or Flash, using Flash as the video player.
It’s been over a decade since I learned this, but if I recall correctly, SWF animations that were large enough had desync issues with the audio and frames. The solution was to export the animation as an actual video file and play that back.
Does anyone remember Xiao Xiao?
Certainly. I don’t think I ever watched or played it, but I remember young me pronouncing it “zack-see-oh zack-see-oh” every time it came up, which was a lot because I lived on Flash games.
We have emulators for it, dude.
Salad fingers is still coming put with new ones lol
Many of the pure animations were done on newgro and they still work.
But the games and interactive videos don’t work anymore. 🤔 I wonder what that means for animations that had a loading screen (even i made one of those, back in the day)
I’ve spent a lot of time looking for old stuff from Stick Figure Death Theatre to no avail. It really is quite sad.
Most of this stuff has migrated to YouTube.
