I keep seeing it on my random feed suggestions and this is using NewPipe, so it has nothing to do with my actual YouTube activity (I think. Nothing there is stuff I’m interested in, with very few exceptions). So I’ve ignored it first, then I watched like two and was super confused. Wtf. These videos have millions of views and I don’t even understand the name or what’s the appeal.
My son watches this show and all the media that’s based on it, there’s alot of bandwagon youtube stuff that people have jumped on just to get those all-important views. I try to understand what my kids are into, so I sat down and actually watched all 60+ episodes of it that were out at the time.
As others have explained, it basically started as a video made with Source Filmmaker that uses assets/characters from Half-life. Alot of it is non-sensical, but there’s some sort of invading force of skibidi toilets (toilets with heads popping out that sing the skibidi song) that are apparently attacking this world. There seems to be regular people there sometimes in earlier episodes, but mostly you see Camera Men (literally just people with videocameras for heads) that are fighting back in some sort of forever war.
As the series progresses, new characters, skibidis, and electronics people are added to the roster, it’s a sort of constant one-upsmanship between the two powers, almost akin to GI Joe or Transformers, but weirder. So you start seeing SpeakerMan, TVMan, and even -Woman, and -Titan versions of all these, but then the Skibidis too come up with new weapons or variants in the war.
And that’s the basic gist of it, though the lore just keeps getting built up over time and keeps getting progressively weirder. My son gets obsessed with it and the music is annoying as hell, I hadn’t heard the skibidi song before, but it’s apparently a remix of something. The electronics people also play a Tears for Fear song (“Everybody wants to rule the world”).
This is real commitment… I’m at loss of words (in a good way, of course)
The episodes are fairly short, a few minutes at most, so it was maybe an hour or two (?), not a huge commitment, just sitting with my son watching what he’s watching. I’ve probably barely scratched the surface of it. Some recent stuff I saw lately was some sort of Clock people that can rewind time and you’ve got weird things with parasite skibidis that can control the electronics people. Shit is weird, but, at a basic level, I think it’s still in line with stuff like the Transformers cartoons. Raising the stakes to introduce new powers/characters. I’m actually surprised there isn’t any action figure marketing for this out there yet (not that I’ve seen). Amazon has some pretty shitty merch available that’s probably just been made by chinese knock-off companies.
You’re a hero parent and a hero explainer. We won’t forget your sacrifice.
I don’t know a lot of details it but it’s basically an animated series about skibidi toilets fighting the “cameramen”. It’s become extremely popular with generation alpha and younger children in general which is probably why it’s so nonsensical.
That’s really it. They’re just fucking weird, and dumb SFM shorts that, for whatever reason, took off. Source Filmmaker and GMOD videos have always been on the surreal and weird side, and this is just the latest line of new hit weirdshit soup.
It’s basically old-school gmod animation (I think it might have been done in source filmmaker, but a lot of SFM animators got started with gmod) that somehow got popular with gen-z/gen alpha. Gmod used to be a very common tool for people to make 3d animations with (especially animations revolving around Valve games) because it had access to all of Valve’s models and was extremely moddable. They were almost like 21st-century claymation.
Anyway, gmod and SFM animations have always been surreal and nonsensical. I imagine part of the reason it blew up is because of toilet humor and because it graduated from a dumb toilet-humor animation and into a surreal Kaiju battling series.
I’ll provide this.
https://youtu.be/TEfCSyLS1AM?si=x-c5PgCkSqhnmG6s
If you’re not into vinesauce he’s an older variety streamer from the pre twitch days. Lot of his stuff is finding obscure and terrible games. Halflife amd its mods being a favorite of his.
This video is him explaining what it is, from an outsiders perspective. He goes through a some of the garbage explotive stuff that’s comming from it but also has his friend AgentRedJackel interview some fans of it via vrChat.
I found it was a good summary of everything you need to know without actually getting into it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/TEfCSyLS1AM?si=x-c5PgCkSqhnmG6s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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