Icebox.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

Icebox was making cartoons for broadband in a year when hardly anybody had broadband. That sentence covers most of the web video companies that died in 2001, but Icebox had a better bench than the rest of them and it did not help. The writing staff came out of network television. The audience came in over a modem.

It launched on 1 June 1999 with six founders, and their credits were the pitch. Jonathan Collier and Rob LaZebnik had written for The Simpsons. Howard Gordon had written for The X-Files. The idea was that the web needed original animated series the way a network needed a schedule, and that the people who knew how to make those were sitting in Los Angeles with nothing to do about it.

Over roughly twenty months they put out more than twenty series. Queer Duck, Hard Drinkin' Lincoln, Zombie College, Starship Regulars, Poker Night. Episodes ran a few minutes in Flash, free to watch, paid for by banner advertising that was already evaporating as they built it.

None of it reached me at the time. In 1999 the internet at home in Turkey was a dial-up account, and a site whose entire product was animation playing in a browser window was not a site you opened twice. Whatever web cartoons did get to me arrived years later through internet cafes, as files small enough to be passed around by hand rather than streamed off anybody's server.

~ the dossier ~

~ who made it ~

The founding six were Steve Stanford, Jonathan Collier, Howard Gordon, Rob LaZebnik, Scott Rupp and Tal Vigderson. That roster is the reason the money showed up. In 1999 a company could raise on the argument that television talent plus a web browser equaled a new network, and Icebox was one of the cleanest versions of that argument anybody made.

What they built was closer to a studio than a website. Series had writers and full voice casts. Some of it was genuinely funny and one of them, Queer Duck, went on to a Showtime run and a feature-length film years after the company that made it had gone. The problem was never the work. It was that nobody had solved how to be paid for a three-minute cartoon watched by somebody on a 56k line.

~ the mr. wong year ~

Mr. Wong debuted in 2000, created by Pam Brady and Kyle McCulloch, both of whom had written for South Park. The title character was an elderly Chinese houseboy drawn hunched and yellow, with slits for eyes, who could not pronounce his l's. Fourteen episodes aired. It became the most-discussed thing Icebox ever made, for the obvious reason.

Asian American organizations went after it in an organized way rather than a rhetorical one. The Media Action Network for Asian Americans and the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition both took it on, and when word got out that Artisan Entertainment was negotiating to turn the cartoon into a film, a letter-writing campaign persuaded Artisan to drop the project in October 2000. The coalition then bought an ad in Daily Variety thanking them. Advertisers pulled banners off the site and staff were cut that November. Three months later the company was gone, and while the campaign did not cause that, it took away the one thing Icebox still had, which was advertisers willing to be seen there.

~ fifteen million dollars ~

The number that explains this grave is the burn. Icebox raised about fifteen million dollars and was spending upward of 1.4 million a month before the end. At that rate the runway was never long enough to reach an audience with the connection speed to watch what they were making. In February 2001 the money ran out and the original Icebox.com closed.

It was a bad month to be looking for a second round. The advertising market that funded free web video had already gone, and every company in the category was making the same call to the same investors with the same numbers. Icebox happened to have better cartoons than most of them. That was not a difference anybody was paying for in early 2001.

~ the second icebox ~

Three of the founders and two former employees bought the assets back out of the wreck for a reported five hundred thousand dollars, domain included, and restarted as Icebox 2.0. The new operation ran out of Tal Vigderson's house in Los Feliz on a budget that would not have covered a week of the old one. They tried charging twenty-five cents a view. In the first month that produced somewhere over three thousand transactions and about seven hundred and fifty dollars gross.

What kept it alive after that was licensing rather than the website. British and Irish distribution went through Flextech, and a German distributor took DVD rights to Mr. Wong. The site limped on for years, moved to icebox.tv in June 2018, and the portfolio page that survives it has nothing newer than 2013 on it. The domain itself went the other way entirely. Before the cartoons, icebox.com was a tourism site for Grand County, Colorado, listing ski areas and dude ranches. Today it sells diamond jewelry.

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