About
Stick Figure Animations are a widespread artistic style on the Internet, popular for their simplicity and ease of animation. They started off as simple animated GIFs and went on to become often complex full-length videos.
Pre-internets History
The stickman dates back to the earliest prehistoric human art, where it’s used as basic symbol for a human being. Today, the simplicity of creating and animating a simple stickman has inspired the creation of thousands of stick figure animations on the internet, and been a critical component of popular viral hits like “Stick Figure Death Theatre” and the web-comic xkcd
Stick Figure Animations
One of the first stick figure animations to appear on the web was from JavaScript Tip of the Week, a site that, like it says, gives tips weekly concerning the object-oriented scripting language, JavaScript. It was presented on May 1996 to teach people about animation speed. Here’s the little guy used for the animation:
That same year, Matt Calvert launched Stick Figure Death Theater on his website calvert.com.
Two years later, on July 1998, a site called Stickmen Deaths Page appeared on the net. All of its animations were created with GIF Construction Set which is considered “the mother of all applications for creating all sorts of things with GIF files.” Most (if not all) of the site’s videos were made by the administrator, a person who calls himself Ash (in reference to the Pokémon series main character) and his friend, a person who calls himself Pikachu-Z:
Stickmen Deaths Page was Created By Ash and Pikachu-Z is a friend who is working with me on the site. Oh yeah! DON’T STEAL MY ANIMATIONS (or Pikachu-Z’s)!!! ASK ME IF YOU WANNA PUT THEM ON YOUR SITE! AND DON’T STEAL ANY OF THE FAN MOVIES!!!!
The site was discontinued and relocated to Angelfire.com and was renamed Sdp on December 2000.
On January 2001, Stick Figure Death Theatre was moved to sfdt.com. The site advertises itself as “the largest collection of stick figure flash movies on the internet”.
On February 2003, StickPage.com was created. It is a site that presents the “best online stick figure movies and stick games, with flash games, movies, all free Xiao Xiao style” (in reference to the popular series).
Most stick figure animations nowadays are made by using Adobe Flash. The popularity of stick figure animations had established the creation of several flash tools such as Cutout Pro Stickman, Pivot Stickfigure Animator, This Is Stick Figure Animation Theatre (TISFAT), and Stykz.
Documented Stick Figure Memes
Other stick figure sites
- Stick Death
- Stick Figure Ninja (NOTE: The videos are only made by one man)
Famous Stick Figure Animations
- Metallic Knights
Examples from Stick Page
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Meme Details
Origin
Stick Figure Death Theatre
Year
1996
Additional Links
