Killfrog

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

~ the eulogy ~

Killfrog.com went up in 1999, made by Kevin Swearingen, who everybody on the site called Kev. His own about page said later that he started it "out of a basement in Denver Colorado using an out dated Power Mac". The name came from the email address he was using at the time. Before that he had run a volleyball clothing line called Dead Frog for about four years.

According to the same page, it was Joe of JoeCartoon.com who told him he would love doing web animation full time. That is the scene Killfrog belongs to, the late 90s crowd of one-man Flash studios around Joe Cartoon and Camp Chaos, the one Frog in a Blender made famous.

The front page was a Flash movie with banner ads around it and a loader line that read "Another waste of space on the net". By October 2000 it carried a "PARENTS STRONGLY CAUTIONED" warning and had its own chatroom. You got around the site with a giant remote control made of colored buttons.

~ the dossier ~

~ the cast ~

The Three Evil Piggies, named See, Speak and Hear, and their victim Little Susie went through seven Little Susie Experiments in 2000 and 2001 before getting their own Evil Piggies Show. The Kat lost fights to a toaster, a safe, a mailman and a power line. There was a Blue's Clues parody called Bad Clues, and three seasons of Ultimate Survivor making fun of the show everybody was watching in 2000.

Some of them were games, where what happened depended on which buttons you pressed. There was a run of kitty games, Save the Kitty among them. Deportation came out during the Elian Gonzalez story in 2000 and let you ship a small boy back where he came from. Our reader remembers that one and writes that "the 90's wasn't very politically correct", which is fair.

~ from a turkish modem ~

I missed Killfrog while it was happening. In 1999 and 2000 I was on dial-up in Turkey, where a Flash cartoon of a few megabytes was a real commitment on the line, so this American web-cartoon scene reached me later and mostly secondhand.

~ ten years of outage pages ~

In 2007 the site moved to Joomla under the line "flash animations & games since 1999", with a podcast and a separate games site next to it. The last archived copy that still has Flash in it is from 11 April 2015. On 15 May 2015 the front page was a MySQL connection error, and it stayed like that for a year. In November 2016 a note signed kev said "Remodeling. Sorry the sites been down for a bit". From 2019 to early 2021 it said "Sorry all, sites down for a bit. :( no cash". After that the domain sold an NFT starter pack until early 2026.

Kev's own explanation, written later, starts with YouTube taking the ad money that small sites lived on. Then Flash itself went, first with Apple refusing it on phones and finally with Adobe ending it on 31 December 2020.

~ the epilogue ~

Our reader wrote in sure it was 100% dead, which was true for most of the last ten years. In April 2026 killfrog.com came back as "the legendary Flash animation site returns from the void", an archive page that plays 33 videos from Kev's own YouTube channel. The original files survive too, about 40 titles in the Flashpoint archive and 27 .swf files on the Internet Archive. You can watch Little Susie again. You just cannot press the buttons, and the buttons were half of it.

credit to darkocean, who remembered the piggies and little susie, with our thanks.

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