Stick Figure Death Theatre

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

~ the last words ~

Between 2002 and 2005 I spent a lot of hours in Turkish internet cafes, and a reliable fraction of what was on the screens around me was a stick figure getting destroyed in some creative way. Somebody would find one, call four people over, and the whole row would watch a looping Flash movie of a white background and two lines with limbs. Those files traveled without their source. You got them forwarded, or on a CD somebody burned, and the question of which website they had come from never came up.

A lot of them came from here. Stick Figure Death Theatre was the place the genre was collected, and for most of its life it was the biggest such place on the web. Matt Calvert started it in 1996 as a page of animated GIFs on his own domain, calvert.com, back when a stick figure dying was a few frames and a file you could load over a modem. In January 2001 it got its own address at sfdt.com, and by then the submissions were Flash.

The slogan sat along the top of the page in white text on black: breaking the rules of entertainment. It is a grander line than the content deserved and that was the joke. Underneath it was a submission queue, a rating system, a top ten, a forum, and an ad server the site ran itself at the subdomain beelzebub.sfdt.com. Wired wrote about it, and so did men's magazines like Maxim, which tells you roughly what kind of cultural object it was in the early 2000s.

~ the record ~

~ why stick figures ~

The form existed because of the tools. Flash made animation possible for anyone with a mouse and no training, and the first thing anyone with no training can draw is a stick figure. Two lines and a circle is also the lowest possible budget for a character you can break, stretch, decapitate or set on fire, which is where the comedy was. Nothing about the drawing had to be convincing for the gag to land.

It also made the work legible at terrible bitrates. A stick figure movie was a few dozen kilobytes of vectors, which meant it loaded on a 56k connection in a Turkish internet cafe in 2003 at roughly the speed it loaded anywhere else. The genre spread on that property alone.

~ who started here ~

Terkoiz posted early work on SFDT before becoming one of the better known stick figure fight animators anywhere. So did Edd Gould, who went on to make Eddsworld and kept making it until he died of cancer in 2012 at 23. Eddsworld is still in production today, made by other people. A site built around cartoon violence turns out to have mostly been a place where teenagers learned to animate.

~ the last capture ~

The Internet Archive caught the real front page on 24 July 2013, about six kilobytes of submission listings and featured thumbnails. Three days later it was gone. The next capture, on 5 August, is 620 bytes: an XHTML skeleton with the title "Untitled Document" and one line in the body reading "We'll be back shortly." No explanation and no date on it.

That page was still there in 2015, down to 471 bytes, saying the same thing. Nobody ever announced anything, and the best guess anyone has offered is that Calvert simply moved on after seventeen years. sfdt.com now belongs to an investment firm called SDT Capital. A fan rebuild called Stick Figure Death Theatre Reborn runs on Neocities, which is a fittingly amateur place for it to end up, and the original is only in the Wayback Machine.

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