Adult Swim turned itself into a glitched-out apocalypse last night for April Fools
What other network would create its own "haunted TV episode" creepypasta?
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For our money, few corporate-owned entities have typically screwed up April Fools Day less than Adult Swim—especially shocking in light of the fact that the Cartoon Network spin-off observes the “holiday” pretty much every year. And while the network will probably never match the ballsy heights of April Fools Day 2017—when they aired, with zero fanfare, the much-anticipated third season premiere of Rick And Morty months ahead of schedule—this year’s offering is still pretty weird and delightful.
Basically, viewers of Adult Swim last night were treated to the network’s own attempt at creepypasta “Dead Bart” style programming, as Rick And Morty, Smiling Friends, The Eric Andre Show, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Joe Pera Talks With You all became corrupted with strange glitches, and the presence of “Pibby,” seemingly a cheerful kids TV character who’s found herself in a very bad place.
It all starts to make a lot more sense once you dip back and watch the first bit of Pibby content the network ran last Halloween, a trailer for a faux-show called Come Learn With Pibby that sees the character’s bright cartoon world get corrupted into an eldritch hellscape, before spreading into shows both real and fake from the Cartoon Network vaults. (Nothing quite like watching digital zombies of George Jetson and Finn from Adventure Time trying to devour all reality.)
Last night’s Adult Swim block, then, was a sort of long-form sequel, even if it doesn’t go quite as far as the short does in screwing up episodes like Rick And Morty’s beloved “Total Rickall.” (That being said, there’s something especially upsetting about seeing the Pibbyverse intrude on the gentle rhythms of Joe Pera talking about his love for The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”) Adult Swim has uploaded the whole block of programming to YouTube, but if you just want to watch the glitchy bits, they’ve also complied those for quicker viewing.
The original Pibby short was written and co-directed by Dodge Greenly; it’s not clear yet whether Adult Swim is gearing up for some more formal Pibby content, or if she’ll simply continue to wearily haunt the network’s holiday programming.
35 Comments
“Creepypasta.” Nails on a chalkboard in word form.
I didn’t much like its predecessor “copypasta” much either. I know all too well that trying to dictate the course of linguistic change (or to preserve a specific version of a language) is folly, but the whole “portmanteau, but with a pointless flourish” gimmick really bugs me, for whatever reason. It’s just lazy meme fodder.Whatever…Old Man Yells at Cloud.jpg, I guess…
Username checks out.
Guilty as charged. And thank you for your military service, Captain!
Copypasta makes actual sense, though, as it’s material that’s been copied and pasted.
And originally creepypasta was that, but scary.
The whole “posting the filename of an image instead of an image” gimmick really bugs me.
dealwithit.gif
better than “youtube poop” no? cuz thats a thing too.
LOL, the most ballsy April Fools was not airing R&M early. It was the biggest backlash, due to the prank delaying Samurai Jack Season 5 a week, but not the ballsiest.No, that would be when Toonami aired FLCL Alternative Episode 1, the movie Mind Game, and then the other 3/4 of their lineup. All in Japanese with English subs. And IIRC, a few of the subs were intentionally bad, too. Dub-only watchers got the last laugh, though, because after Black Clover (the 11:30pm show at that time), the ratings for Toonami cratered, especially once Mind Game started airing.
Didn’t they air all of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie ahead of release as a tiny thumbnail over their entire regular broadcast one year?
Damn right they did
Yeah haha they played the first 5-10 minutes and then the movie got minimized into a tiny box while regular adult swim aired.
mind game is one of the greatest movies of all time. If that tanked ratings then it’s a net loss for all animation lovers out there that still pay for cable
It wasn’t the most insane but I will never forget when for April Fools they replaced everything with the Toonami lineup from 2000. Gundam Wing, Tenchi, DBZ, ahhh it was amazing. So amazing that they were like “wait let’s just bring back Toonami”
I loved that they aired the first episode of FLCL’s third season, months before the SECOND season even premiered.
They wanted to do the second season, but it wasn’t finished and Season 3 was.
Also, they’re both sequels to the original FLCL, but not really connected to each other.
And backlash means you are harassing an individual with death threats and vulgar slurs over shitty decisions like this one in an attempt to force an individual to commit suicide and go to hell simply because you think they are greedy, evil, and they want to steal your data and sell it to Chinese government just for advertising and nothing else and therefore, backlash needs to be illegal for defamation RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!
“It was the biggest backlash, due to the prank delaying Samurai Jack Season 5 a week”Yeah that’s not true lol Rick and Morty had way more hype at that point than S5 of Jack
Real OGs remember April Fools Day viewings of The Room all night long.
I really like the original Pibby cartoon as well as her haunting the block last night, but I honestly hope they don’t make any sort of formal content because I feel like then they’re not gonna be able to do all the crossing over with actual properties*, and that’s like half the appeal of the concept. Inserting original characters is fine here and there but a big part of the creepiness is for the viewer to see shows they loved destroyed and/or corrupted by an eldritch nightmare. *I mean, maybe they can since I suppose Cartoon Network/Turner owns it all at the end of the day but I feel like there might be some backlash from creators that CN might want to avoid.
All of the Cartoon Network originals and Hanna-Barbara stuff is owned by CN outright. The creators don’t need to give OK for anything. After restructuring, CN and WB Animation were essentially merged together, so that includes Looney Tunes too.
I can see them making the concept work as a limited series or something like that, but not as an ongoing show.But even though CN owns it all, I can still see that being really hard to negotiate the usage. While it wouldn’t be exactly the same, I’m reminded of how Venture Bros. originally had permission to actually use the Jonny Quest characters. They got away with killing Race Bannon, but their interpretation of Jonny himself raised enough eyebrows they had to start filing the serial numbers off of things.
I mean, Harvey Birdman kind of already did it so I’m pretty sure Pibby could too.
I do miss ThinkGeeks April Fools product stunt. Always fun seeing what they come up with
It seems like this could have an angle for a genuine ‘thing’, which they seem to be working towards, but I have no idea what form an actual ‘Learning with Pibby’ could possibly take that would work. I’m not sure they could get a sign-off for all the rights stuff that’d be needed for a genuine product based on the original Halloween short, and I’m not sure it would work without the Scooby-Doo and Adventure Time sort of cameos.
??? The short was made for Adult Swim, which is on Cartoon Network, which is a part of WB, who owns everything seen on the short. AS wouldn’t have posted the short to begin with if it never cleared legal.
True, and I guess I wasn’t really thinking about the rights per se. But if you made a whole Thing out of this, then getting signoffs is less about having legal clearance and more about making sure nobody gets mad about it in the future. Like, there’s that bit with Finn and Jake; in its current state it doesn’t really have anything that objectionable, especially since it’s a small scene, but if they were making a whole big marketed product then you’d want to make sure Pendleton Ward is at least okay with it, make sure no bridges get burned for the future.Plus, getting the help of the original or currently-active creatives would help nail the legitimacy; using Steven Universe characters would work better if Rebecca Sugar has some input on how you use them, a Scooby-Doo sequence would fly better if you got the help of the animators and voice actors that currently do Scooby-Doo stuff.
I love horror and creepy shit.I don’t know that April Fools is the right holiday for it.
There’s literally a horror movie named April Fool’s Day though!
Just about every holiday has a horror movie. That’s no excuse.(Eli Roth’s fake Thanksgiving trailer is the best thing that hack has ever done.)
Fully agree on Thanksgiving, but disagree about April Fool’s Day being bad holiday for horror stuff. Also I recently watched a really odd low budget horror film called “Creepy Corey Gorey” and I’m still trying to decide if it was a fever dream or not.
Well that was a whole lot of ‘meh’. I like the premise, but the execution seems dumb and not nearly scary or funny enough. Just a whole lot of meh.
You youngsters weren’t around for the great South Park “Not Without My Anus” April Fools prank of the late nineties. The world breathlessly waited the episode that would finally reveal Cartman’s dad. We’d waited and waited and waited, bearing the tremendous emotional toll of knowing there would be answer, but not knowing the answer itself. Finally, we were to have relief in knowledge on April Fools Day. But nay, Parker and Stone pulled the greatest prank of all tv-dom. They instead released a completely unrelated episode focused on Terrence and Phillip.I was there, man. We were all huddled around an unwieldy CRT monitor, waiting for the sweet release from ignorance. We watched, in equal parts horror and delight, the shenanigans of two flappy-headed Canadians, whose misadventures replaced the long-promised answer for which we yearned.I still can taste the bitter disappointment of that night. That was the greatest television April Fools Day prank of all time.