The Daily Populous Tuesday July 30th, 2024 night edition
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Skibidi Toilet: Exploring the dystopian Gen Alpha trend, from brain rot to Michael Bay movies

Introducing the dystopian world of Skibidi Toilet, a YouTube franchise that has spurred police investigations, moral syndromes and talks of a Michael Bay movie adaptation.

“Bro, didn’t you get fanum taxed because of your level 0 gyatt when you literally have L rizz only in Ohio while hitting the griddy? You need to cook more like Livvy Dunne and Baby Gronk or I’ll get the non-sigma rizzlers to mog you.” If that sounded like utter gibberish to you, then welcome to what’s allegedly left of the sanest generations on Earth.

Just when Gen Zers thought their age cohort was ruined by unrestricted internet access, Gen Alpha slid into the picture with all their inhuman iPad kid posture. As future consumers and influencers, it seems essential to analyse the cultural palate of the youngest generation—even if that means trying to find meaning in an army of singing humanoid toilets.

Cue the dystopian world of Skibidi Toilet, a YouTube franchise which has spurred police investigations, sparked some good old-fashioned moral panic, and fueled speculation about a potential Michael Bay movie or TV series adaptation.

First uploaded to YouTube Shorts in February 2023, Skibidi Toilet refers to a series of animated videos by DaFuq!?Boom!, a YouTube channel run by Georgia-based artist Alexey Gerasimov. Made using 3D graphics software Source Filmmaker (SFM), the series follows a virtual battle between human-headed toilets, or ‘Skibidi’ toilets, and humanoids with CCTV cameras, speakers and televisions for heads. Still with me here? Good, cause it’s about to get weirder.

All of this digital mayhem is set to a mind-numbing remix of ‘Give It To Me’ by Timbaland and ‘Dom Dom Yes Yes’ by Biser King.

You might be wondering what these lyrics actually mean. Truth is, not even the target audience of these videos has managed to get to crack that question yet. But that’s where the beauty and influence of Skibidi Toilet lies.

With a mere 11-second runtime, DaFuq!?Boom!’s first YouTube Shorts video amassed over 37 million views in the first three months. The creator then went on to release full-fledged seasons of the series with assets taken from video games like Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source. Currently sporting 76 episodes over 22 seasons, DaFuq!?Boom! has gathered over 40 million subscribers since 2023. PewDiePie could never, I guess?

What started as a modern recreation of weird 2000s SFM videos has become a Gen Alpha cultural icon—inspiring memes, video games and Roblox recreations across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. It’s hence no surprise that Skibidi Toilet now has its own Wattpad genre with questionably impressive works titled Robot love (Cameraman x TV Woman) and Maybe we aren’t different after All.

Depending on who you ask, ‘Skibidi’ has also evolved into a Gen Alpha term for ‘cool’, ‘dumb’, or ‘bad.’ Claimed to have been introduced to popular culture back in 2018 by Russian rave band Little Big, Skibidi is alternatively used as a filler word alongside Gen Z fave ‘Damn, that’s crazy’.

Skibidi Toilet plot and Gen Alpha appeal

Although the Gen Alpha trend has been the butt of intergenerational criticism, many of us don’t actually understand what’s at the core of Skibidi Toilet before rating its brain rot capabilities.

Essentially, the main characters involved in the series are Skibidi Toilets, Cameramen, Speakermen and TV men. These characters have then been mutated to form everything from ‘Jetpack Balaclava Laser Skibidi Toilet’ and ‘Jesse Pinkman Skibidi Toilet’ to ‘Scientist Cameraman’ and the ‘Duchess Astro Toilet’. Stay with me here.

The plot centres on Skibidi Toilets, led by ‘G-Man’, who aim to colonise Earth and infect humans by making them hear the ‘Skibidi Anthem’. Some of their allies include Skibidi Urinals and Skibidi Bathtubs. On the other end, The Alliance, or the organisation of humanoid mechanical beings, includes Cameramen, Speakermen and TV Men. These characters primarily aim to counter the invasion of the singing toilets.

In essence, the series follows the good versus bad guy trope as with most animations. But what makes them particularly appealing to an entire generation with deteriorating attention spans is their bite-sized length and lore engagement. Not only can you finish watching the entire series in less than an hour (or two with well-spaced mental health breaks) but the episodes are intentionally designed to be nonsensical when viewed outside its broader context—the latter of which is the root of all criticism.

Incomprehensible dialogues by murder drones and astral toilets also help the videos transcend language barriers and target global Gen Alpha audiences. Recreations, easter egg videos and Etsy plushies further mark the longevity of the trend.

Moral panic and big screen adaptations of brain rot

You can only Skibidi so much before the law and Transformers director Michael Bay takes notice. Earlier in 2024, reports surfaced that Skibidi Toilet and its creator Gerasimov were under police investigation for having “a detrimental effect on children” and leading to what is dubbed as the Skibidi Toilet Syndrome.

“We received an appeal from a Moscow resident about the need to block video materials on the internet in the form of short Skibidi Toilet films, which have a detrimental effect on children. After the appeal, the police began an investigation and appointed an employee who will collect materials on the application,” local authorities said at the time.

One can only imagine the mental turmoil of the appointed millennial employee as they skim through countless Skibidi Toilet episodes uploaded as both YouTube videos and Shorts.

Fast forward to July 2024, director Michael Bay and former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman shared their plans of making a Skibidi Toilet cinematic universe. In an exclusive Variety interview, Goodman said they were “building something that could be the next Transformers or a Marvel universe.” Highlighting plans of a hybrid animated or live-action version of the poster brain rot meme, Goodman went on to liken the style to John Wick and District 9.

“If we find a partner in this that really believes there’s [an] opportunity for this to grow and to really see the storytelling grow… then film and TV seems like a natural extension for us,” Goodman added.

Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that the worst manifestation of Skibidi Toilet in Gen Alpha features them crawling into boxes and mumbling along to the remix. A closer look at the trend will also highlight its roots in nonsensical YouTube Poop and old SFM videos that Gen Zers grew up with. Skibidi Toilet is what Five Nights at Freddy’s and My Little Pony Vore was for us back in the day.

This is also why it makes perfect sense for someone like Bay to test Hollywood’s appetite for an internet-birthed phenomenon. The series has all the earmarks of Bay’s style: the typical good vs bad guy trope in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Although it won’t win an Emmy anytime soon, the success of the franchise could end up beckoning a cinematic universe on the Gnomes vs Knights trend—just like our whimsical founding fathers intended.

digidave1 on July 29th, 2024 at 16:57 UTC »

My (45M) gf (43F) showed me skibidi toilet videos right before all this slang took over, so I was familiar with these obscure annoying vids. They look like normal weird YT videos to me. I've seen far more odd and infectious things. Though they don't alter a 12 year old's brain chemistry.

I don't get the outcry. We said rad and called good things 'bad', Pauly Shore and Adult Swim nonsense. Only difference is I grew up without internet, and these are iPad babies. That just makes Everything for them worse though.

Let them be all the sigma they want my fam. May the force be with you.

lingh0e on July 29th, 2024 at 16:44 UTC »

So my kids are too young to know this trend, and I'm too old to care enough to look for myself, but does this have anything to do with the song Skibidi by Little Big?

reidzen on July 29th, 2024 at 16:27 UTC »

Sometimes garbage breaches containment. I'll be crazy for a second and forgotten a minute later.

Cf. e.g. 'Snakes on a Plane'