This is the moment when humanity can see what happens when you let a generation of children grow up with iPads and YouTube. The iPad babies from the 1910s are now about 12 years old, and they love the animated YouTube series Skibidi Toilet. In it, people with a security camera for a head compete against evil heads who live in toilet bowls and want to take over the world. The landscape in which the story takes place is gray and dystopian and the toilet bowl men continuously sing a remix of the online popular songs ‘Give It to Me’ by Timbaland and ‘Dom Dom Yes Yes’ by the Bulgarian pop-folk singer Biser King.
The Georgian content creator behind Skibidi Toilet, Alexey Gerasimov (25), shares the videos on his YouTube channel DaFuq!?Boom! since February 2023. Meanwhile, he has 38.3 million subscribers and his most popular episode has already been viewed 287 million times. This is how many viewers the biggest YouTuber attracts MrBeast even on an average day. YouTube’s trend manager Maddy Buxton mentioned Skibidi Toilet The Washington Post an unprecedented phenomenon on the platform, never before has she seen something go viral in such a way. “What started as a meme has grown into a very complex storyline with many hidden messages that people are eager to unravel and understand,” Buxton said in an interview with the American newspaper.
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What is this about, I thought, and I sat down in front of my TV with a bowl of chips and started with episode one. Skibidi Toilet is the first web series to be shown entirely in the form of short vertical videos (YouTube Shorts, equivalent of the TikTok video, made for the size of smartphone screens) of about thirty seconds. Putting a handful of chips in my mouth without taking my eyes off the screen took two episodes, the story unfolded so quickly. In minute fifteen I was already at episode 39. A clear storyline unfolded with recurring characters, plot twists, loss, betrayal and humor. Just before a fight or after a victory, the people with camera heads did a viral dance from the online computer game Fortnite – genius and reason to burst out laughing, although I can’t quite explain why. Maybe because I see little kids doing the same dance on TikTok and wouldn’t expect serious heroes in suits to do it during a war.
Brr, skibidi, stupid stupid stupid, yes yes
This is a special moment in the cultural history of the internet. Skibidi Toilet is the result of totally democratized entertainment, conceived and created by a random twenty-something and then embraced by millions of young children worldwide. English has long been the lingua franca of the world wide web. But in these videos the main language is a remix of viral TikTok songs. There is only communication in “Brr, skibidi, dom dom dom, yes yes” – the meaningless lyrics of Biser King – and fragments of Timbaland’s ‘Give it to me’.
When a horde of terrifying toilet bowl men suddenly appear out of nowhere, the tempo of the music increases, and as the main character watches in despair as his friend is captured, the rhythm slows down dramatically.
There is quite a bit of violence in the series and the heads sticking out of the toilet bowls will undoubtedly give the youngest viewers nightmares. Earlier this month, authorities in Moscow decided to investigate the video series, which now has more than seventy episodes, after a father asked whether it could have a harmful effect on children. Indonesian parents warn each other mom blogs and TikTok for what they consider to be dangerous toilet humor.
Panic about online phenomena that would spoil the ‘early children’s brains’ is as old as the internet. In my childhood (around 2007) I watched the short episodes of the gruesome online animated series on YouTube Happy Tree Friends. In it, cute animal friends were skinned and torn apart in the most gruesome (and creative) ways. Such an episode usually started as a cartoon for toddlers and always ended in a bloodbath. That was also very popular.
Violent parodies
In 2017 it was stated De Volkskrant an article about automatically generated children’s horror: “In one video the characters commit crimes Paw Patrol ‘collaborative suicide’, in another Spiderman just pees on Elsa Frozen and it continues like this for a while, resulting in crying children,” wrote journalist Lisa van den Velden. And headlined this week The standard: “Peppa Pig steals and gets kidnapped: YouTube can’t control cartoon violence.” YouTube had promised to take the violent parodies of well-known children’s cartoons offline, but research by the Belgian newspaper showed that children are still recommended such videos.
The same age group that encounters the bad Spiderman and Peppa Pig on YouTube now voluntarily watches terrifying heads from toilets kidnap, torture and brainwash others. There is even a demand among fans for coloring pages of this. Anyone who wants can find them online. Just print it out and color it.
This is the last episode of Internet Explorer, the column in which Süeda Isik wrote about memes and internet culture.