WhirlGirl

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

~ the obit ~

WhirlGirl was a science fiction serial about Kia Cross, a young woman in 2077 Southern California who recovers her memory, picks up a bladed weapon and starts fighting ZoneWerks, the media and technology corporation that destroyed her mother. It was created by David B. Williams and produced by Visionary Media, the studio he founded for it, and it launched at a trade show in the spring of 1997.

The first version was not animation. Home broadband barely existed in 1997 and anything heavy took minutes to arrive over a modem, so WhirlGirl shipped as comic-book panels with small animated GIF elements and a looping soundtrack. In August 1998, using Macromedia's new Flash 2.0, Williams threw out the panels and replaced them with five-minute animated webisodes, which put the series among the first animated shows made for the web.

Showtime licensed it in January 1999 for both the website and the channel, which made it the first regularly scheduled animated web series and the first independently produced web series a national television network had picked up. Viacom took an undisclosed equity stake in Visionary Media as part of the deal. On 27 February 1999 an episode premiered on Showtime and on SHO.com at the same time, the first animated webisode to do that, and later in the year Showtime put a million dollars of billboards and full-page magazine advertising behind a cartoon that mostly lived on a web page. The character also turned up on the channel itself, hosting a programming block called Lethal Ladies.

The run ended at one hundred weekly webisodes in March 2001, with no closing announcement anyone has found since. Visionary Media went quiet along with the rest of the entertainment web that year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ built for a modem ~

In 1997 I was thirteen and about a year away from my first modem, a 14.4k that did not last long in the house. WhirlGirl's original form, still panels with a few animated GIFs and a loop of music underneath, was built for exactly the connection I was about to get. None of it was reachable from where I was. The series was syndicated through American and Canadian portals and then licensed to a premium American cable channel, which is three layers of geography stacked on top of each other.

The interesting part is that the technical constraint was identical on both ends of the wire. Williams was designing around the same kilobits per second I had, and a Showtime license meant that none of what he made with them crossed the Atlantic.

~ the firsts it collected ~

WhirlGirl accumulated an odd number of industry firsts for something almost nobody remembers. In July 1997 it became the first web series promoted with a conventional television advertising campaign. Five syndication partners carried its March 1998 debut, including Microsoft's WebTV Networks and Canada's BeyondTV, with Lycos added that July. In June 1999 MTV Networks took it on for licensing and merchandising, the first non-MTV property it had ever represented.

There was a genuine guest-star economy around it too. Penn and Teller appeared as animated versions of themselves in a futuristic Las Vegas in September 1999. All hundred episodes were dubbed into Spanish in February 2000 and distributed through Yupi, one of the first large Spanish-language online networks. A crossover with the SciFi Channel's Barbarian Moron ran on both networks' sites that May. ReSaurus showed a WhirlGirl action figure prototype at Toy Fair in 2000 and never brought it to market.

~ most of it is gone ~

A hundred episodes of a weekly series made between 1998 and 2001 should be an easy archival problem and it is not. Some webisodes survive through the Internet Archive and a handful were later posted to a Vimeo account, but a large share of the run has no known copy and the series sits in the lost-media catalogs as partially found.

The format is the reason. WhirlGirl was Flash, and Adobe ended Flash on 31 December 2020, so even a recovered file needs an emulator before anyone can see what is in it. A show that was celebrated for being first into a new distribution channel got buried by the runtime that channel depended on.

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