Discovering the Internet, Via Badger

Twenty years ago yesterday, my eyes were opened.

I was in primary school, because I was seven and I suppose I had to be, as were all my friends. These were the hallowed days of the ‘IT Lab’, a sacred room full of clunky old PCs in which we were taught How To Computer (extraordinarily basically) and sometimes allowed to just do whatever we liked. Which meant that, back in September 2003, we were all messing around with WordArt (RIP Jokerman) and the like when someone burst in, eyes wide, with something along the lines of ‘Guys, you have to see this.’

And ‘this’ was this.

MrWeebl, 2003

On its own, this was, to a 7-year-old, phenomenal. A silly song about dancing badgers? Absolute perfection. We all watched it on loop – because these were the days before YouTube, the days of glorious infinite Flash loops – for as long as we were physically allowed to, and then as soon as I got home I instantly dragged my dad to the computer and showed him too. He professed to enjoy it, as dads do – but he, being less entranced by badgers, snakes and mushrooms, spotted something else. He spotted the ‘More Toons’ link in the corner.

And so we clicked it. And the Internet unfolded before me, a rich tapestry of silly videos and silly games and just stuff – because that link took me to Weebls-Stuff, home of Badgers, and the Moon, and Magical Trevor, and so many more things besides. It was everything I’d ever wanted and never knew, and I sprinted into school the next day to share the wonder with everyone else.

This was the moment, for me, when a computer went from ‘electric box that does stuff’ to the marvel that it really was. Weebls-Stuff was my portal to the Internet for years. I devoured everything Weebl made – and more, because these were the days of individual website and re-hosting, so there were plenty of other creators there too. Salad Fingers, Cyriak Harris – the list goes on. I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but this was genuinely one of the moments when I, a small child, realised there was more to the world than the sleepy country hamlet where I lived. And it came in the form of dancing badgers.

It’s been twenty years and a day since then. The Internet has changed. YouTube is where videos live now, of all kinds (which, while convenient for the viewer, is hell for many creators). Flash is dead. The landscape I look out on now is very different to what I saw aged seven: concentrated in great city-websites, with the wilderness and countryside home to fewer, but darker things.

But Weebl is still going. He’s making fewer silly toons, but he’s branched out into some great electronic music with Savlonic (and who would have thought that a silly video for ‘Electro Gypsy’ would turn into half a dozen albums?). I met him a few years ago at MCM when I was stewarding; he’s a lovely bloke.

Signed by the band themselves. It’s seriously good music.

It has been twenty years. And so, yesterday, the badgers came back.

MrWeebl, 2023

It’s a celebration of a very funny man with a fantastic career. But for me it’s more than that. It’s a celebration of the thing that brought me the Internet, of a thing that expanded my horizons beyond the ordinary and into the seriously daft. It’s a very silly thing, but it shaped me into the very silly man I am today.

So cheers, Weebl. Long may you reign, king of the Internet.

(Now please bring back On The Moon and Magical Trevor.)