That's right, old timers...
I uploaded RAB1 back on April 6, 2003. Incredible! And yet... given how much things have changed, I can fully feel all twenty of the years that have elapsed since that innocent day. And it is hard to believe it could ever be called "innocent", given how rude it all was and still is.
The story... early March, 2003, 3AM. I wanted a Flash cartoon to siphon off the need to draw ass cracks 'n ball sacks as subliminal messages into certain "advergaming" projects (we really had no idea how to earn money from the internet back then!) I was commissioned to work on. I woke in the middle of the night to scrawl out a script on a napkin and went promptly back to sleep, only to wake the next day to read "A is for Ass, B is for Balls", etc., next to a few silly drawings of a puppy and a cat with huge, triangular noses. And the puppy had a grossly exaggerated nut sack. Perfect.
I thought, "well, that's retarded," because in 2003, that was OK. Thus, the title was set in stone, and after a sleepless, 29-hour animation session, the one-off was complete. I sat on it for a while, not knowing what to do with it. YouTube wasn't around yet, and the distribution company who bought my "Sci-Fi Guys" episodes had already shuttered. At the time, I was a huge fan of Neil Cicierega's "Animutations" here on Newgrounds, and while the site was replete with Hentai ads at the time, I figured it was a good a home as any to host RAB. So twenty years ago today, I started an account, and uploaded RAB. I closed the browser window (probably Explorer, heh), and slept for a dozen hours.
The next day, I had dozens of emails from Newgrounds users in my inbox. RAB made the homepage! It was #1 of all time! What the everlasting fuck?!
I went straight to the light board (I used real animation paper and pens back then) and popped out the singsong RAB2 within a week. RAB3 was next, introducing Satan to the crew for "Show and Hell". It was followed by an insanely complex, interactive RAB4 (the one with the TV remote featuring dozens of hidden "channels"), and the epic, 12-minute D&D short film, RAB5. I churned out a total of 23 episodes, but by 2011, I ran out of steam, was going through a bad marriage, and without even realizing it at the time, I hung it all up.
The real dealbreaker at the time is that I was working on a second RAB collection for Blu-Ray, but after only receiving five pre-orders, canceled the project. I never looked back after that.
Well, almost never. Last year, I had an idea to make something called "Retired Animal Babies". I thought it might have been neat to upload it today as a celebration of twenty years. I decided against it though, because 1) actually using Flash in 2023 would require a very slow old computer with the ability to actually open that program, and 2) I need to continue to distance myself professionally from RAB, since the "R word" is received almost as poorly as the "N word" these days. Oh man... "N-word Animal Babies" would have been so popular a hundred years ago in 1923. Good thing Flash wasn't around back then.
I hope you enjoyed marinating in nostalgia with me today, thinking back on those old, innocent-yet-offensive days. It's been a dozen years since RAB23 but I'll still get a few messages from people every year, hoping somehow it might someday return. I have a never say never attitude; I always have. So I think the best present I could give to these triangular-nosed characters is a promise not to lock the closed door.
--Dave
