Shut Up! Cartoons

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

~ the eulogy ~

Turkey blocked YouTube on 5 May 2008 and did not lift the ban until 30 October 2010, which is two and a half years taken out of exactly the window when the rest of the world learned to subscribe to channels. By the time the block came off I was twenty-six and watching YouTube the way you watch a search engine, one video at a time, arriving from a link somebody sent. Shut Up! Cartoons launched eighteen months later into an audience of American teenagers who had grown up with a subscription feed. That was not a habit I had, and it was not a feed I was in.

The channel existed because YouTube spent roughly a hundred million dollars in 2011 and 2012 trying to buy itself a programming schedule. Around a hundred funded channels went out under that initiative, each one supposed to behave like a cable network, with named shows in regular slots that gave you a reason to show up on a Tuesday. Smosh, already one of the biggest things on the platform, took an animation slot and handed it to Barry Blumberg, who had run Disney Television Animation through Kim Possible and Recess.

It opened on 30 April 2012 with Do's and Don'ts, followed that week by Pubertina and Zombies Vs. Ninjas. Eighteen short-form series went out in the first year, something like 180 episodes in total. For a platform that until then had mostly been a place to upload, that volume of original animation had no precedent.

~ the dossier ~

~ youtube's original channel money ~

The initiative is remembered now as a failure, and in the narrow sense it was. YouTube was trying to lure television advertising budgets by producing something that looked like television, and the budgets did not move. Most of the funded channels folded or went quiet once the first check was spent.

What it did do was pay animators. Shut Up! Cartoons was commissioning short-form animation at a scale nobody else on the internet was in 2012, and it was doing it for an audience that was already there rather than for a network executive who had to be convinced. That is a cheaper way to find out what works, and the channel got more than forty series out of it.

~ the roster ~

Oishi High School Battle was the one that broke out, an anime parody with a live-action host that picked up a Streamy nomination. Pubertina, a girl in the worst year of her life rendered in deliberately ugly flat color, ran the longest. Smosh Babies and Super Smosh fed off the parent channel's audience and eventually became the only two shows left standing.

The names worth tracing are the ones who left. Mike Hollingsworth went from here to supervising director on BoJack Horseman, which is about as far up the animation ladder as the decade allowed. Emily Brundige turned up on Harvey Street Kids and Brian Wysol on Hot Streets. A channel that paid thirty-odd creators to make short animation for five years was functioning as a training program whether or not anyone called it one.

Ownership changed underneath them. Alloy Digital merged with Break Media in 2013 to form Defy Media, which inherited Smosh and everything attached to it. Defy was a roll-up of web video properties and it ran them for the aggregate numbers rather than for any one show.

~ how the lights went out ~

Anthony Padilla left Smosh on 14 June 2017, after a decade, citing a lack of creative control under Defy. Nine days later Smosh Babies ended with an episode called OUR FUTURE SELF?!, and with it the channel. Defy Media itself collapsed on 6 November 2018, shutting without warning and leaving creators unpaid, which is the reason the whole catalog became an orphan rather than an archive. The domain does not resolve.

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