The Badgers Didn't Make Us Nazis - A Tribute to the Old Internet
The videos I grew up on didn't make my generation into Nazis.
Last week, the British Film Institute inducted several internet videos into its archives, including “Badgers,” a looping animation of badgers accompanied by an endlessly catchy song I’ve been singing to my son Auden all weekend. (He loves it, by the way.)
This got me thinking about how much I miss the old internet. Growing up, I had an online diet of of Twilight Zone fan sites, Shockwave games, Hiddenmickeys.org, Ebaumsworld, and a lot of movie columnists who may have taken down their sites, but whose work will live in infamy.* The work I encountered, including the awful movie columnists, made me a better writer and gave me the permission I sought to live my life publicly, as I realized I had a medium where I could spread my words – even if they will never be deleted.
Today, the internet is basically just five websites that we’re stuck on all day, doomscrolling as we’re fed a diet of memes, terrible news, racism, and live streams where losers like Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker feed us memes, terrible news and racism. Auden will never remember a time before the internet existed, nor will he remember a time before it was populated by Nazis. As a Millennial, it’s my responsibility to keep the memory of the pre-Nazi internet alive. Here’s some of the stuff I grew up with, and whether or not it made us Nazis.
“Just Two Guyz” (2005)
This music video starring Jorma Taccone and Akiva Shaffer (with a cameo by Andy Samberg as Steve) was my introduction to The Lonely Island, a comedy trio of childhood best friends who performed sketches and songs. Their sketch pilot Awesometown had been rejected twice – first by Fox in a version filmed in front of a live studio audience, and then by both MTV and Comedy Central after they re-filmed it as a less safe for work, non-live version - so they started posting their content online instead. “Just Two Guys” was my favorite of their videos, for Jorma and Akiva’s deadpan delivery and their intentionally bad rhymes like rhyming “be” with “be.” I showed it to all my friends. I remember thinking as I watched it, “this is the future. This is how people are going to get discovered.” Shortly afterwards, SNL hired them, and in December 2005, they produced “Lazy Sunday” and uploaded it to a new website called YouTube. The rest is history.
Did it make anyone Nazis: No. FFS, Andy and Akiva are Jewish.**
The Kitty Cat Dance (2004)
“Cat? I’m a kitty cat! And I dance dance dance and I dance dance dance!” And it does does does and it does does does.
Did it make anyone Nazis: No. Nazis don’t do cats. That’s more of a Blofeld/Dr. Evil thing.
“I Like Bukkake” (2003)
Rob Manuel made this flash animation of a song by DogHorse called “I Like Bukkake.” One of the rules of comedy is that words with a K are funny, so I thought this song was hysterical. Unfortunately, I sang it out loud in front of a friend’s mom – and that’s how I learned what “bukkake” meant. I haven’t sung it since.
Did it make anyone Nazis: No, but it did embarrass the hell out of me one time.
R*tarded Animal Babies (series)
This flash animation cartoon series, which appeared on the teenager-oriented Newgrounds.com, starred a cat, bunny, dog, donkey, and gerbil in R-rated adventures featuring violence, nudity, drugs, and scatological humor that out-grossed all other animation of its time. The outrageousness of this show made it a perfect fit for middle schoolers, including myself, but I find it unwatchable today. If you can get through the episode I linked to, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
Did it make anyone Nazis: Probably, given that the word “r*tarded” has made a comeback. This is the kind of edgy, transgressive humor edgelords love, and as we know, if you like one edgy thing on the internet, you’ll be down the rabbit hole sooner than you think.
A New Bunny (2005)
In 2005, Warner Brothers Animation rebooted the Looney Tunes as Loonatics, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi action comedy starring “Buzz Bunny” and “Danger Duck.” It was the animation equivalent of New Coke, dying an un-mourned death after two years – but not before Niraj Shah made “A New Bunny,” a cartoon in which Buzz Bunny curses at two high school boys while talking about how much cooler and extreme he is than Bugs. The things Buzz says are horrible, homophobic, and incredibly sexist - but I’m not going to lie, this video still makes me laugh for Shah’s line readings of Buzz’s utterly deranged comments. As Buzz himself would say it’s “EXTREEEEEEEEEEEME.”
Did it make anyone Nazis: This is total edgelord humor, and much of the dialogue was ripped from the site sexylosers.com, so yeah, maybe it did. BUT NOT ME BECAUSE I’M EXTREEEEEEEEME.
Bin Laden Animations (too many)
No one was immune to post-9/11 jingoism. Just as cartoons from World War Two ripped on Hitler and the Nazis, internet animation from the 2000s did the same to bin Laden. They became so ubiquitous that The Simpsons parodied them in the episode “I Am Furious Yellow,” where Bart’s flash animation studio produces the short “bin Laden in a Blender” (which is exactly what it sounds like.) Newgrounds, the home of R*tarded Animal Babies, had a bin Laden game where you could kill him as many times as you wanted with any number of weapons. There were also cartoons like “On the Run Again,” sung to the tune of “On the Road Again,” and the Colin Powell “Day-O” parody “Come Mr. Taliban, turn over bin Laden.”
Did it make anyone Nazis: No, but they’re really, really cringe, and that’s the way that word should be used, kids. The WWII cartoons of Disney and Warner Bros. were politically incorrect at best and racist at worst, but they had more creativity than any of these.
The Saddam Hussein Animations (too many)
Same as bin Laden: the Iraq War led to a bunch of Saddam cartoons, like “Time to Bomb Saddam,” the Slim Shady parody “Will the Real Hussein Please Stand Up,” and the “Hey Ya” parody “Hey Allah” after he got kidnapped.
Did it make anyone Nazis: No. These song parodies were way better than the bin Laden ones.
This Land Is Your Land (2004)
The 2004 election between George W. Bush and John Kerry was the most divisive America had experienced up to that point, but when it came to online content, instead of Pepe the Frog and dank memes, we had the music video “This Land is Your Land,” one of the only things that year that brought us together. Performed by expert mimic Jim Meskimen, this video stars Bush and Kerry singing about how great they are and how much the other one sucks. The most impressive thing about the cartoon is how accurately the lyrics capture Bush and Kerry’s personalities, with Bush’s grade-level insults of Kerry, and Kerry’s continued bragging about winning three purple hearts. It also references some of the first campaign moments to go viral, like Howard Dean’s scream. JibJab’s follow-up videos never quite captured the magic of this one, especially the “Dixie” parody “Good to be in DC,” which fell into the “everything’s gay” trap of the 2000s. 22 years later, “This Land is Your Land” remains the gold standard for political animation.
Did it make anyone Nazis: Absolutely not.
Homestarrunner (website/series)
My high school girlfriend, comedy writer Jenna Martin, introduced me to these cartoons and I still love them to this day. The shorts star the Mexican-wrestling-masked Strong Bad, the oblong Homestarrunner, and their sidekicks Strong Mad, Strong Sad, Marzipan and The Cheat as they answer emails and go on adventures. Strong Bad’s crudely drawn cartoon series Teen Girl Squad is one of the great online cartoons, and Strong Bad’s video about his dragon Trogdor the Burninator featured a heavy metal parody song that later appeared as an easter egg in Guitar Hero 2. Strongbad and Homestarrunner’s return video last year, “Back to a Website,” is a nostalgic tribute to the early days of the internet, when you actually had to go to websites to discover content and not just find them on YouTube or one of the other five sites the internet consists of now.
Did it make anyone Nazis: No, but in the final Game of Thrones, Daenerys, who had turned into Trogdor and destroyed Westeros in the penultimate episode, is stylized as a Nazi in the finale because they steal a bunch of shots from Triumph of the Will. (Sorry, sorry, I just hate that finale so fucking much.)
Happy Tree Friends (series)
One of the most popular early online series, Happy Tree Friends had a simple premise: cute animals get killed in horrifying ways. If you liked the Tex-Avery-on-steroids violence of Itchy & Scratchy, then Happy Tree Friends was closer to Quentin Tarantino. The cuddly little stars of Happy Tree Friends would get their eyes gouged out and their faces ripped off on a regular basis, sometimes by Flippy, a bear and former green beret whose PTSD would cause him to do things like slam other characters’ faces onto a hot grill. It was a one-joke series where the joke wore thin pretty quickly – with the exception of this article, it’s not something I ever rewatch of my own accord.
Did it make anyone Nazis: No – but Nazi tattooed Senate candidate Graham Platner once posted on Reddit about how he liked to kill mice by dropping 53-pound kettlebells on them. He definitely watched Happy Tree Friends as a teenager. (You really thought I’d make it through this article without mentioning him?)
*David Poland, I am never letting you live down that “Phantom of the Opera will win Best Picture” article you wrote in 2004. It’s not the Dewey-Defeats-Truman of Oscar predictions: it’s more like “Literary Digest Predicts Alf Landon Will Beat FDR in a Landslide.”
**Fun Fact: Jorma Taccone’s dad Tony Taccone directed the very first-ever production of Angels in America!