This Adult Swim Animated Series Is A Chaotic Trip
There's something truly magical about a small niche community finally being introduced to a massive audience, and finding instant success. On the 10th of January 2022, the mad geniuses over at Adult Swim exposed hundreds of thousands of people to the particular sense of humor that was once the domain of a website called Newgrounds. Smiling Friends first aired as part of an April Fools' Day programming block on Adult Swim in 2020, but the demand for more episodes was immediate, sustained, and overwhelming. In a surprise reveal, rather than releasing weekly, the entire series dropped without warning on a single night.
In the beginning, there was Newgrounds. Browser-based games were beginning to become big, allowing independent creators to make their own full video games for no money. A man named Tom Fulp created a website to host a couple of homemade games, and it gradually gained popularity. Fulp began to create unprecedented leaps forward in-browser games, through the use of Adobe Flash, leading to the still present shorthand term "Flash games." Fulp gained an audience and democratized it, crafting the Newgrounds Portal, which allowed anyone to upload Flash games to a rapidly expanding community.
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Alongside games, art, music, and most importantly, animation developed and thrived within this tight-knit community of creators and fans. Though Newgrounds is no longer in its heyday, and other sites have overtaken its place of prominence, the impact it had on a nascent internet culture remains incalculably massive. The creator-driven world of solo developers and artists may have gone their separate ways, but many still command huge fan bases with the same sense of
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