no one knows who created skull trumpet (until now)

December 23, 2023 9:38 PM

YouTuber Jeffiot goes digging for the origins of skull trumpet / doot doot / mr skeltal, and ends up taking a trip to the early web heyday of animated gif art, and ruminating on creativity and legacy
posted by jason_steakums (11 comments total)

Wow that was pretty great... both the process and the results. Worth the time to watch. And in this case, do read the comments.
posted by evilmomlady at 4:09 AM on December 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

I am not watching it yet b/c I've got Christmas Eve stuff to do but omg I kind of assumed he was from the 7th Guest era based on absolutely nothing but a general feeling of what things looked like back then when the game came out and now I MUST KNOW THE TRUTH...once all the cookies are finished.
posted by mittens at 5:50 AM on December 24, 2023

Without giving away too much about the video itself, it does offer a welcome glimpse into the old Internet, and how special it truly was. I for one am glad I got to see it when it was still around, even running a personal blog of my own here and there. That remnants of that time like the Skull Trumpet gif still linger on the modern Internet is oddly reassuring. What is dead might not have truly died after all.
posted by spoobnooble 3D: the spoobening at 6:19 AM on December 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

This documentary is beautiful and important. My life is richer for having encountered it. It's easy to forget that there are people behind every website, handle, image, and post and this is a reminder that the Internet is just a digital Plato's Cave. These pixels aren't people, they're a painfully limited perspective.
posted by Plutor at 7:10 AM on December 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

Cathy Jarboe. Her name is Cathy Jarboe.
posted by glonous keming at 7:34 AM on December 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

I saw this pop up last night, and enjoyed it.

Mostly for the video production, at which this guy is very talented. The investigative aspects were much ado about the Wayback Machine (and not knowing how to use it right the first time), and the reflection on it a little grandiose.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:51 AM on December 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Really good video production, and the host also seemed to really care about being respectful to his sources. It reminded a lot of the documentary posted last year, chasing down the creator of the Disney Channel theme.

Without giving too much away, one thing I've found really interesting as a "'90s kid" is how a lot of people who did pioneering work on the internet and adjacent technologies back in the '90s stayed active online, as you'd expect, but a pretty big fraction did not.

It seems pretty common to chase down or see someone chase down tech pioneers whose work everyone knows and they've moved on to something else entirely.
posted by smelendez at 8:27 AM on December 24, 2023 [4 favorites]

Whew, now that I've seen it, just...whew. That was some kinda time back then.
posted by mittens at 9:01 AM on December 24, 2023

> (and not knowing how to use it right the first time)

In defense, the thing I related to the most in the documentary was his explanation of how he dropped the ball and it wasn't not understanding archive.org. I do a lot of this type of data-sifting, hours, days, weeks, and ... things fall of the edge of the table. Because of the tedium, because of bad luck, etc. It's somehow almost always the thing you're looking for. I spent ... days looking through phone books from the 1950s, knowing that there had to be a listing for person X around year Y which meant something about company Z's formation. Missed it the first time, somehow felt I would find it the second time. A second go-round staring at phone book listings, again, days. It was there.
posted by user92371 at 10:40 AM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

Considering the responses, and mostly lack thereof, from the family, part of me feels a little uncomfortable with giving away any names other than Cathy's. And the lack of family input makes revealing her name feel a little uncomfortable, too. He was very respectful but I don't know if that still makes it okay.
posted by charred husk at 10:57 AM on December 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

That was a really sweet and touching video. There’s something really profoundly beautiful about the story if this odd little gif traveling through time and finding itself in a very different Internet from the time of its creation.
posted by Kattullus at 3:56 PM on December 26, 2023 [2 favorites]