Dick Figures

» see dickfigures.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Ed Skudder and Zack Keller made a pilot called Stick Figures in September 2010 and then started the series properly on 18 November that year with an episode titled "A Bee or Something", in which one of the two leads swallows a bumblebee and gets an auto-tuned voice out of it. The leads were a red stick figure and a blue one, named Red and Blue, and the show was produced through Mondo Media, the studio that had already been doing this for a decade with Happy Tree Friends. Five seasons ran from there to 2014, with ten or so episodes each. None of them was longer than six minutes.

The numbers got genuinely large. Mondo put the series past 250 million views, which in the first half of the 2010s made it one of the bigger animated properties that existed only on the web, and the two creators took it to Kickstarter to fund a feature. The campaign raised $313,411. Dick Figures: The Movie came out on 17 September 2013 and was then released in twelve parts through to 2 December, which is what a crowdfunded film looks like when its audience is a YouTube subscriber base rather than a cinema chain.

I was twenty-six when this started and working as an engineer, which is the wrong side of the line for it twice over. The humor is American dorm-room, built on references to radio songs and fraternity drinking, and the delivery model was subscribing to a channel and waiting for the next upload. The web cartoons that had reached me in Turkey came the earlier way, as Flash files passed around a forum by people who had found them, and by 2010 I had stopped following that trail.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the finale that was not on YouTube ~

The last regular episode, "Happy Birthdump", went out on 10 July 2014, and it is about food poisoning and a stolen car. There is one more numbered entry after it, "Figured Out", an epilogue that shows what happens to Red and Blue for the rest of their lives, and the episode list gives its date as 27 March 2014 with the word "download" beside it. It went to the people who had paid, as a file. According to the show's own wiki it was never put on YouTube at all, and could only be watched on Mondo's website.

~ three commercials for beef jerky ~

In July 2015 Keller said new episodes were coming, and in October they arrived under the title Messin' with Sasquatch. That is not a Dick Figures idea. It is the name of Jack Link's long-running advertising campaign, the one where somebody pranks Bigfoot and Bigfoot retaliates, and the three shorts were a crossover made with the studio Six Point Harness alongside Jack Link's agency Carmichael Lynch. New Kid went up in the first days of October 2015 and Camp Fight on the 18th. Wild Kingdom followed on 8 November and was the last one.

Fans disliked them, mostly for the animation, which had visibly dropped a tier from the series. Nothing was published under the name after Wild Kingdom. Three years after its own audience had paid for its feature film, the show signed off as sponsored content for a snack brand. That is roughly what became of independent web animation across those three years.

~ where the episodes live now ~

dickfigures.com stopped being a real site long before the show stopped. The archive has it serving a real page of about 10 KB until mid-2012, dropping to 7 KB through 2013. From December 2013 onward it is a run of 473 to 614 byte stubs. By December 2024 the last captured page is 285 bytes, and the newest snapshot is a one-line script that redirects to /lander, which is parking-page furniture. There is no DNS record behind the name now.

The dedicated channel handle returns a 404 as well, so there is no youtube.com/@DickFigures to visit. What survives is on somebody else's shelf. Mondo Media's own site still streams the episodes, including Wild Kingdom under its episode number, and somebody has uploaded the complete series to the Internet Archive.

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