Some of the most recognizable elements of the early internet now seem to just…exist. Sometimes, you can find out who created them if you do a little bit of digging, but other times, it’s basically just “property of the internet,” and there’s no real clues. The latter applied to the trumpet skull/doot doot graphic until last week, when YouTuber Jeffiot uploaded a short documentary that gave fans a look into a pretty deep dive researching the image. In it, he discovered the origin of the meme, and the original context into which it was presented to the world.
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And no, just to get this out of the way, it isn’t from Microsoft 3D Movie Maker. Maybe somebody can do a second video that tracks down the origins of that particular rumor, which comes up numerous times in Jeffiot’s video.
You can watch the full documentary below.
Jeffiot isn’t the first to notice that it is not from Movie Maker, but — as he points out in the video — that’s as far as prior research has really gone, with comments on a previous video that dispelled the myth all raising their hands to say, basically, “…well then where did it come from?”
Jeffiot’s video follows his research path, which involves totally excluding Movie Maker as a possibility, then heading to the internet. He also points out that the classic GIF was likely created by hand using something like the Liquefy tool from PhotoShop. The original image first popped up on YouTube in 2011, and has become a favorite representative for spooky sites from the early internet, but it turns out it didn’t actually originate with the 2011 video.
After a number of false-starts and bad leads, Jeffiot recruited some help from social media, and that helped him break the case wide open. As it turns out, the gif was originally created by an amateur artist named Cathy Jarboe, and first popularized in the mid-2000s on Heather’s Animations, a site that collected early internet gifs. Jarboe passed away in 2020, but Jeffiot managed to get a message out to her family, so they now know that her (apparently award-winning!) skull animation actually won an award in the early days.
