By Jewish Mayhem

In the beginning of online communication everything was real slow and basic. It was a time when only text and a few colors were possible to be sent back and forth online. One of the important facets of the online communication was the ability for users to identify themselves with some type of unique icon, name or identity but this was determined by the might and ability of the computer hardware and also the speed in which it was able to be transmitted over a phone line.

As computers became bigger and better and the internet became more and more accessible, mainstream and affordable, it was possible to send and to receive heavier file sizes. What this resulted in was larger and more complex types of imagery and icons were able to be used to identify oneself uniquely. In chat rooms and in discussion forums users were always prompted to display an image or a picture that was supposedly represent your profile to other people. The first version of images to be used were called JPEGs, pronounced J-Peg, which is an acronym that stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.

Then along came a company called Compuserve and they invented a new type of file compression and encoding called a GIF, pronounced Jiff. The major advantage of GIFs was that images could be animated, transparent and/or interlaced. An animated GIF is a image without sound that carries several frames and these frames play one after another when the image is viewed, creating the effect of animation.

GIFs revolutionized the online communication experience because they allowed for more personalization of a user’s online identity as well as the simple fact that you could create animations,  so the end result of this was an explosion of cartoonized gifs. It got so bad that soon every website on the internet was inundated with cheezy gifs making them nauseating to see all of the time, however eventually a backlash developed against them and they disappeared almost completely from view.

Then along came a company called Macromedia who released Flash, which was a full blown animation program designed for the internet. Flash revolutionized everything once again, but most websites and in particular website forums and chat rooms did not allow for Flash to be used as icons, only GIFs and JPEGs. The GIF all of sudden reemerged from it’s grave.

Eventually video editing  and computers melded together and became affordable which enabled artistic types of people to encode  video parts as GIFs. What this resulted in was a digital art form unto itself called ani-gifs, which is short for animated GIFs. AniGIFs can be quite large  files depending upon how many frames it has and how many colors it uses and so it is only in the few years that serious aniGIFs have become usable as common features on websites and such. One of the funniest phenomenons to emerge from aniGIF making and video capturing is the phenomena of digital artists taking an existing anigif and tweaking it so that it fits into another context.

In this feature I would like to present a few aniGIFs and their various morphs that they have endured over the years. The final result of aniGIF tweaking is a hilarious and very entertaining art and peculiar medium which I hope you enjoy. The first aniGIF is a video capture of a overweight child with some sort of issue or problem or condition or simply having a happy attack.

This is what some saavy digital artist turned the child into, but it did not stop here.

It became quite political.

There are a few more variations which I will append to here when I find them, but let us move onto another example.

Here is a video capture turned GIF of a casting call for martial arts performers.

Hilarious. Just fucking priceless! This dude is infamous now just like that orthodox Jewish kid who on American Idol, smashed his face onto the ground while executing what was to be a brilliant move, I think.

But then along came Laserhead, some guy who tweaked existing aniGIFs by adding his character laserhead into the picture.

Here is another example of Laserhead inserting himself in an otherwise funny GIF.

Let’s take a look at another GIF. Here is The Governator of California from one of his movies.

Hilarious!

On a Jewish note, here is Rav Yehoshua Sofer otherwise known as the kung fu Rabbi and 2 examples of people chopping him up.

As more and more AniGIFs emrged a new style of aniGIFs came out known aniGIF Mashups, where sections of movies or television are mixed together in humorous manners.

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