no one knows who created skull trumpet (until now)

just a couple of things: 1. I am now aware that it is infact "tineye" and not "tinyeye". It is the strongest mandela effect I have encountered, but alas: it's tineye. 2. some have pointed out that cathy didnt create the original 3D model. that is true, and I would love to know the origins of that! but that isn't what I wanted to figure out with this video; i set out to learn who created the GIF specifically, i.e rotated it, edited it, made it into a .gif and posted it online. 3. I've seen some expressing concerns about doxxing, and I want to address that: firstly, all the graphics are "incorrect", for example, the animated map (35:40) is of a completely random place, and screenshots have been altered in various subtle ways like changing peoples names with photoshop etc. that being said, I understand the concern, and I have now gone through the video with youtubes built in editor and blurred out a couple of sections. again, these parts were already anonymized in various more or less subtle ways, but better safe than sorry. thank you for watching.

A 40 minutes Youtube documentary about a 2 seconds GIF has better storytelling than 90% of what's on Netflix

Internet dinosaur here. I don't think this is easy to understand nowadays, but this kind of animation was kind of a big deal back in those early years - if you built your website, you HAD to put in there a few animated gifs, a midi song and, for those fancy enough, a visitor counter and a guestbook. So people like Cathy were actually performing an important public service, by allowing anyone to get an interesting GIF to plaster their Angelfire/Geocities website with. So, thank you Cathy, your legacy lives on. Doot doot.

I had a similar experience, but managed to contact the artist. He was a graphic designer for Star Wars games, and he says I'm the only person to have ever found his Easter egg. Star wars has it's own alphabet, yeah? So for in-game computer screens, signs, posters etc the artists need to fill it with something. Sometimes cool technical info, sometimes jokes, poems, sometimes nonsense. So I was looking at a screen in a certain Jedi game reading the blurry letters and translating. (I learned the alphabet in middle school or something when I was bored) Some words on the screen were pointing to parts of a machine labeling them "doodad" and "thingamabob", but at the top of the screen was a name, a short number, and a misspelled type of tree. Having seen this pattern thousands of times delivering pizza, I immediately recognize this as a street address. This artist had literally signed his work. Now, my wife is a paralegal, and used to make a living tracking people down to serve them for personal injury cases and the like, so she knows how to find contact info from old addresses. I corrected the spelling of the tree name, entered the address and game release date, and the names matched. Obviously the number and address were out of date, but another website gave some potential newer numbers (all public info btw) and a reverse phone book website narrowed that list to two. I made a group text with both numbers, introduced myself and asked if either of them were [John Doe] and if they'd worked for lucasarts around that time. And luckily, one of the numbers was his cell! 20 years later! I explained the Easter egg I found, sent a screenshot of it, and asked how many people had noticed it. I didn't want to ask a million questions because I could already the mayor of creeper Town at this point. He said he had worked at the developer company of the game (not lucasarts, so he wasn't just playing along), that the address was a tiny duplex he rented for around two years, and that he'd completely forgotten putting that info there, because no one brought it up in all twenty years. I told him it was friggin hilarious, thanked him for responding, and left it at that. Felt pretty cool being the only one to find it.

This video goes in with my collection "Who wrote the Disney Channel theme tune" by Defunctland, these uncoverings of forgotten artists are heartwrenching. It fills me with bittersweet joy to see the artists behind cultural landmarks be finally recognised and appreciated.

I love the genre of YouTube where you solve a mystery you didn't even know existed

How dare you make me cry over a jazzy skeleton? Fantastic video. Thank you for making it.

0:22 Wow! I was actually the Wikipedia editor who rewrote that article's "Origin" section back in 2022 (it has stayed around the same since). It was entirely unsourced and poorly written before, so I gathered some sources and gave the section the treatment it deserved (the rest of the article still has a lot to improve). So happy to help you and see over a million people be informed in that video introduction, even just for a minute!

Rest in Peace, Cathy Jarboe. I hope those that loved her know how much impact she had on so many people

"going SUPER deep into a research rabbit hole to give credit to the creator of a relatively small thing that nonetheless became a huge cultural touchstone" is my new favorite genre of youtube video

Oh man, Cathy's gifs were hugely popular back in the day, everyone I knew in the early 2000s would go to one of her sites to download 'em so they could use 'em on MSN Messenger Plus, including jazz skeleton.. I didn't know its origin was considered "obscure", guess people forgot about her when Tenor rolled around (which is weird since she was a guest of honor at a few conventions and was talked about on quite a few blogs). RIP Cathy, you were a big part of Internet history

I was first getting online as I teenager/young adult when Cathy was making the art we looked at in the video. As soon as you stopped at 2011 I was like "nooooo that website is ten years older!!! don't stop!" This whole video reminded me of the older women who were online and running all kinds of important stuff at the time and are now not just forgotten individually but as a class of people who were even there. Family websites, blogs, art and hobby pages, genealogy pages, forums for anything you could think of. Some of my first online friends were women in their 30s-50s (30 was old to me at the time lol). Anyway. Thanks for reminding everybody and hopefully teaching some other young people that the internet was pretty great before social media 😂

I watched this with a friend just now, and after we finally hung up I just immedietly broke down into tears. As an artist myself, still adoring your craft is a hard task, and I hope that Cathy spent the most of her life creating. I hope she knew how this silly little gif brought many people together in many ways, even if the purpose was simply so silly. May she rest peacefully, and wherever she is and whatever she may have believed in, know she inspired a lot of content by other artists. A doot to Cathy.

Thank you for making this video. I wish I had known about Cathy and her art at the time and I regret not being able to properly credit her in the youtube video description and in that Gawker article. Very sad to hear that she has passed away. I would like to retract what I wrote in my last message in the video as both you and Cathy put a lot of thought and effort into The Mystic Trumpeting Skull.

Cathy Jarboe has achieved true immortality in a way most of us can only dream of. Thank you for sharing her story.

There's only two videos on YouTube that have ever made me cry, Defunctland's 'Disney Channel's Theme: A History Mystery', and this. Bravo man, this was beautiful.

Allthough i don't know how i feel about the last part where you tried to contact the family i do want to say that i think it was a great video over all. I can't even imagine how much time you must have spent on research and i think it is great to see another obscure part of internet history cleared and brought to light

Cathy getting the classic artist treatment of her work becoming such a huge sensation years after its creation without her knowledge.

If only you had asked me, I would have told you right away, that gif was made on an Amiga2000 with a very old and basic 3D program and ported to a 286 with windows 3.11, some (or many i can't remember) years before the internet. The trumpet was animated with Aldus Photostyler 2.0 (bulge effect) , the frames were assembled with a program (I don't remember, Gif Movie Gear?) and assembled as 256-colour GIFs. I was in contact with Katy at the time, this video made me fly out of my chair! (I remember that her site had a different name, Katie's World, but the data in my brain is vanishing)

The ending, with the entire monologue set over your IRL recreation of the gif on canvas, was wonderful <3 Beautiful work, Jeffiot.