Hello strangers!
I used to make this series back about eight hundred trillion years ago called Retarded Animal Babies. Life events spanning a dozen years prevented any more than only 23 episodes to have been made for the series (slacker!), but it was a fun, sporadic, and rewarding ride. There are still a lot of fans out there; enough to have made the DVD sell out at the Newgrounds store. I still have a small box of them left, so I've once again made the DVDs available for sale on my website umop.com, but once they're gone, they're gone.
RAB used to always shoot up to the #1 spot in the Portal ten years ago, and as the first few vanguard episodes were uploaded in 2003, viewers very early on were split cleanly into "love" and "revile" categories (with around 95% being in the first category, thankfully). Eventually though, the heyday ran its course. As more time rolled by, it was becoming clear that the series wasn't aging very gracefully, and a new category of viewers - specifically the "meh" category - were starting to represent a larger and larger pie slice. I never stopped being in the "love" category myself, as tough as it was to fit animating-for-fun into my daily routine. But the viewership dropped, interest in a second DVD was sparse, and I was more demanding on myself than ever to deliver bigger & better entertainment on a shoestring budget (did you know I made the first one in 29 hours? Episode 23 took half a year...). I was fighting a losing battle to keep my disgusting little fingerless friends alive! Plus, I had already become a much bigger fan of the new Portal offerings than I was a fan of my own.
That's when I knew it was time to just let it go. I'm proud of the series, for all its filthy horror. I don't have anything else to prove with it. It kicks balls. I love that I made it. I'm proud that I was able to keep it as fucked up and raw as it is, and thankful for a site like Newgrounds to allow it to exist at all.
So now it's been, what? Four years? Four years since the last episode came out... and you know, I still connect with people routinely about RAB. And never once is it a person from the "hate" or even the "meh" categories! In fact, out of around 150 people at my new job in New York, there are fully three people there that are RAB fans!
And I even sold a DVD just three days ago (no, not to a work colleague...).
So, it's like... is it dead? Is it alive? Is it all just in the past? The answer to all of those questions is YES. The series itself is in the past, but the conversations about it are still happening. This has inspired me to (finally, heh) create a Facebook page for Reatrded Animal Babies. I'll stick weird old shit in there from time to time, and we can all talk about the show, and you can all drop by once in a while and bark at me to make new stuff.
And maybe someday, who knows? If the barking is loud enough, and it happens regularly enough, who the fuck knows.
I would personally prefer any presumed future of RAB to involve getting back to the fun randomness that made the series what it was back in 2003. As much as I loved (along with most of the fans who cried out for episodes that were "nice and long") the episodic nature of 21, 22, and 23, RAB wasn't ever originally about storytelling; it was about bash-yourself-in-the-face-with-a-dildo-made-of-solid-osmium stupidity.
It was about being "retarded" in every glorious, insensitive context that terrible, wonderful, fucking curse (this word alone helped create RAB's popularity while preventing its further success) of a word evokes.
VicariousE
Maybe it's a middle aged thing, I know my creative drive is up on blocks. After a while, everything in life looks like a retread of something we thought was cool in the past. There's nothing new and awe inspiring going on, so what's to kick the imagination's ass into gear?
We were retarded because we didn't know any better, there were still mysteries and adventures over the horizon, and it was easy to jump into the fray with our own mysteries and adventures... didn't matter if it was derivative, you take what you want from the salad bar, and leave the rest.
I guess 'problems of the future, today' can still be a relevant premise, but to me, today all looks like any one of several crappy 80's-90's post-apocalyptic flicks, I used to watch a few decades ago |: Maybe Bunny should get driven into a one rabbit holy war against... Bruce Willis? addictive Oreos? Pokemon?
Dave
Crazily, I really do think I was on the right track with RAB1-4, where if you asked what they were about, the response would be "they run around and do shit." After RAB4, which took quite a while to put together, I said to myself, "self, if you spend this long actually just working on one storyline, you'd end up with something like half a whole TV episode!"
And that's what happened! And it was great! But it was also the end of true randomness. This dystopian internet thingy in which we all reside subsists on funny, random shit that lasts as little as 7 seconds long. There's no point trying to go for anything too drawn-out unless it's being delivered on something as old-fashioned as a recordable disc or even a telly-o vision (remember those?).