My theory is ridiculous. *Music & singing about hidden lore* Hello, Internet. Welcome to Film Theory. The
show that needs you to skibidi dom dom that subscribe button. Yes. Yes. If you haven't
seen the astronomical rise of the series skibidi toilet over the last few months, get
your head out of the toilet and let me tell you that no one and I mean no one has seen
this much success so quickly on YouTube before. As I write this episode, the channel's
creator, dufu... I can't say his name, can I? Fine. How about I make it classier
for you. Daffick boem is getting somewhere between 3 and 4 billion views a month
with a B. Those are numbers that are so big they'd make Mr. Beast blush. It's
not just a lot of random views either. People are sticking around for this thing. The
channel had about one and a quarter million subscribers when it posted the first skibidi toilet video
back in February. Now, just five months later, it's already passed 20 million. So, yeah, to
say that this thing has taken over YouTube, it'd be a major understatement. In one of
the episodes, one of the titular skibidi toilets literally destroys YouTube HQ in a not
so subtle metaphor for how the show has broken, the website. Skibidi toilet has fully taken
advantage of YouTube's push for shorts content, and it has rode that wave to create a level
of virality that has never been seen before. So those are the numbers. But what is
it? Well, it's a head in the toilet. Yep. It's some g mod animations singing a song.
The internet is truly a weird and wonderful place. No, if I'm being completely serious, that's just
how the whole thing starts. As the series goes on, the whole thing evolves into a full
on cinematic war between toilets with human heads and people with camera heads,
complete with massive titans, mind control. And wait for it here in law. And I got to
say, after binging every episode of the series multiple times, getting that dance
song permanently etched into my brain, what became clear to me was that this goofy meme
show wasn't just about being lol so random. It's also not content just remaining as an epic toilet
action anime. Yeah, that doesn't sound good. Probably should rephrase that one. Instead,
there's an entire meta story buried in this thing, a story about the changing world of entertainment
and the fight for survival of art. Yeah, this This man's face in the toilet. He's
trying to teach us a profound lesson about the meaning of art. And once you see the story
that's hiding right in front of your eyes, it becomes clear where the story
is ultimately going to end. So grab your knob toilets,
plungers and KPRL speakers, loyal theorists, as we flush ourselves
deep into the fever dream that is skibidi toilets. Now the details for the base story
here are pretty straightforward. The whole thing starts when a man's head appears out
of a toilet and starts singing a mash up of the 2007 song Give It to Me by Timbaland
and the 2022 Turkish song called Dom Dom. Yes, Yes, by Biser King. But
things quickly escalate from there, the toilet head start to spread. Pretty soon
we see an army of these toilets marching, or rather sliding their way down the street
military parade style. They clearly pose a threat, considering they run over people, they shoot
lasers, they even transform humans into more skibidi toilets. Pretty soon they've established
their own cult like religion, a police presence. They even have themselves a leader of the army
in the form of the G-man from Half-Life. For those who don't know in the Half-Life
games, the G-man is described as this sinister interdimensional bureaucrat, and he
has this strange, reality bending powers. So why not just throw him into a show about
evil toilet, man? Very quickly, it becomes apparent that the people of this universe are
no match for the toilet terrors. At the time episode six rolls around we pretty much
stop seeing humans altogether. Enter the cameramen. People with cameras for heads,
pretty self-explanatory. But it quickly becomes clear that these characters serve both
literally and figuratively as our point of view. Pretty much all episodes are shown from
the perspective of one of these cameramen, often ending with the POV character
either giving a thumbs up to one of their comrades or being killed at the
hands of one of the skibidi toilets. This ragtag group of cameramen have made
it their mission to eliminate the skibidi scourge. They form an organized militia,
they Fortnite dance away from the police, and then they form unlikely alliances with
other species that inhabit this world. The Speaker men and the TV men to other
groups of creatures that are just here for some reason probably better suited
for a RadioShack than the front lines. And together they plan to protect the planet
from these porcelain pirates. And yeah, that's pretty much about it
in terms of broad strokes. The rest of the series basically follows
a fairly standard formula. Well, I mean, as standard is a show about sentient monsters
from Bed, Bath, and Beyond gets. We constantly see the cameramen inventing some new technology,
such as their giant toilet kicking boss robot. In turn, the toilets repurpose the
discarded remains of their fallen foes to become more and more powerful. This cycle
of escalation repeats over and over again, eventually leading to where we currently
are in the story with giant Kaiju level battles between the G-man toilet and the various
Titan robots that are created or partnered with the cameramen. And that to 99.9999% of
people is what the story of the series is. But I'm here to tell you, it is so much
more than that. The battle between the toilet heads and the cameramen is really
symbolic of the battle between YouTube content and traditional medias like the
film industry. Yes, I'm feeling okay and no, I don't want your long sleeved jacket,
even though it looks very pleasant and warm. Skibidi toilet is at its core a story
about how entertainment is changing and how the series creator daffick boem is going to be the
one that merges those two worlds together. It sounds insane, right? I know. That's why I'm so
excited about this one. Let me explain it to you. As you might or might not know,
this series is littered with models, assets and references to an age gone
by on the internet. An age before YouTube. Yeah, for our Gen Z and frankly,
most of our millennial audience there was a time where internet videos didn't solely exist
under the careful watch of Google and YouTube. In the beginning, the world of Internet video
was splintered off from each other. Sites like New Ground's, Albino Black Sheep, and Ebaums
World is where you'd go to find the memes, viral videos and animations. This is where
Internet meme culture truly began. Not to be too internet boomer about it, but there
was a time that when you saw a funny video, you'd have to send it to your friends via email. Yeah, that platform that your parents use for work
these days, it used to be where you got all your lolz from, like the numa numa guy and
I'm a snake. And one of the biggest styles of video that arose from this early internet age was
the genre that would eventually come to be known as the YouTube poop. Ironically enough, the style
of YouTube poop just predated the age of YouTube. These videos would involve taking clips
or assets from TV, film and music, just mashing them all together into
an unholy stream of consciousness. The Internet back then: very different,
but still very much the same. By the way, I didn't edit that clip at all. That is
it unedited in its 240 p. Goodness. Did these videos make sense? No. Was it insane?
Absolutely. Did any of it matter? Who cared? Anything goes. It was the earliest days of
online video. For the first time in history, you could literally make anything you
wanted and upload it to a website. Anything that came out of your head. In
the eighties and nineties, if you wanted to make your own movie, you needed a video
camera. The ability to cut and edit, film, a platform to share your creations, all of
which were either prohibitively expensive, difficult to achieve, or quite frankly, just
didn't exist. In the early 2000s, though, free software like Windows MovieMaker opened up the
world of filmmaking to a wider audience than ever. One company that really embraced the Wild
West nature of the Internet was Valve. Today, they're best known for creating Steam.
But back in the day, believe it or not, they used to make video games. They
were responsible for tentpole series like Half-Life, Counterstrike, Portal, Team Fortress,
Dota valve dominated the gaming scene and the one game that truly embodied both their gaming ethos
and their embrace of the online was Garry's Mod. Garry's Mod was a sandbox game where players could
mess around with the physical objects and assets found in Valve's popular franchises and then use
those to create their own little movies, games and shorts. This eventually evolved into the creation
of Source Filmmaker in 2013, a video editing tool that allowed creators to more easily create
funny videos just like they had with Garry's Mod. And this proved to be a godsend for YouTube
poop creators. If you've ever seen a video featuring characters from Team Fortress 2 doing
insane things, it's probably created using SFM. In fact, the daffick boem, creator of Skibidi Toilet, as
we all know, originally made a name for himself online by making these sorts of videos. SFM content
exactly like this. I mean, unless I'm wrong, skibidi toilet seems like it still is being
created in SFM. So why the big trip down memory lane? Well, I believe that those edgy
videos, those YouTube poops that came and went with Internet trends, I believe that those are
what the toilet heads in skibidi toilet represent. Look at the evidence. First, there's the fact that
the characters are literally toilets, the place where you poop like YouTube poop. Pretty direct
connection there. Second, there's the fact that the heads of all the skibidi toilets are straight
from Garry's Mod, Half-Life, SFM, drawing yet another direct connection. There's also some more
subtle hints as well if you look between the lines. In episode four, there's a subtle background
detail that shows how humans become toilet people as soon as they're exposed to the influence of
the toilets. We pan across a normal restaurant, the toilets march in, and suddenly
people are transformed into more toilet heads. Some of those toilet
heads even rise through the ranks, appearing in later episodes as leaders of the
toilet army. It is the definition of virality. The toilet people are a disease that's spreading,
just like a video going viral in the early days. We also know that the events of the series are
happening sometime in the past. In episode 20, after going toe to toe against the G-man,
the camera titan flies away, flying past two very important buildings,
the Twin Towers. Notice here how it's an exact replica straight down to the spire
at the top of one of those buildings. This tells us that the events of the series
pre-date the events of September 11th, 2001. Now, admittedly, YouTube poops didn't exist
back then. They originated back in 2004, but websites like New Grounds did exist
back then, and G mod videos were also big in the early internet days like around
2006. So while it's not an exact timeline match, this toilet world isn't meant
to be some dystopian future. Instead, it's much more of a dystopian past, a
reference to an earlier time gone by. Also, just take a look at the way that the
skibidi toilets get stronger throughout the 50 episode series,. While the cameramen
develop new technology and techniques to get the upper hand in the battles, the
toilets instead repurposed. They remixed. They reused the stuff that the cameramen
leave behind. If that spirit of remixing isn't just the pure essence of what
is YouTube poop, I don't know what is. And then look what you have on
the flip side. You have the film, music and television industry literally
represented by audio visual equipment: cameras, speakers, TVs. It does not get more
direct than that. Who else would serve as the perfect antagonist for the literal embodiment of
YouTube poop than legacy media? Digital content like YouTube poops are made from reusing and
rehashing content from those three industries, just like how the skibidi toilets get stronger by
repurposing the tech that they find on the camera, speaker and TV men. Need more proof?
The camera, speaker, and TV men being metaphors for the Big Three Media
Industries has actually been teased throughout the entirety of the series.
Back in the beginning of Skibidi Toilet, when we were just dealing with toilets and
cameras, we could see a clear hierarchy among the ranks of the cameras. So the grunts were
all the small closed circuit TV style cameras. The more advanced and the more movie like
the camera became, the higher up it was. The big movie studios were literally the
most powerful entities. Also, take a look at how the TV titan goes about destroying
the toilets. It uses this sound. *THX Style Sound* Sounds an awful lot like the old THX intro sound. *THX Intro Sound* Furthermore, there's the main theme song that's
used by the speaker men whenever they attack. That sweet bop is the 1985 song Everybody Wants
to Rule the World by Tears for Fears, who apparently are still touring. Good for
them. Not only is the song very on the nose in terms of the theme for the series:
two factions at war trying to rule the world. But it's also just an old song from
the eighties. It's dated just like the media it's meant to represent in the series,
media that in the real world is actively fighting off the digital video threat.
But there's something off about that, right? It feels like the series wants us
to be rooting for the cameraman. In fact, there's this one scene in episode 49 that clearly
establishes the toilet heads as the bad guys. Occasionally, throughout the series, you'll have
a character speak in some distorted voice. What's actually going on there is that they're speaking
in reverse. And in that particular episode, the TV says to the toilet what sounds
like "you are so bad" when the whole thing's reversed and cleaned up. But there's
no world where we should be rooting for traditional media, right? Especially
when you're talking about a digital series. I know the show's odd, but the idea that
we're supposed to be sympathizing with some of the least sympathetic industries on the
planet seems like a step too far. Meanwhile, we're supposed to dislike the
Internet video side. I mean, the series got popular because of Internet
videos. Spoiler alert: singing meme face in a toilet. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that
would never happen in the world of TV or film. We are clearly missing some sort of key point
here. We have our two sides clearly established, but who or what exactly are we supposed to
be rooting for here? Well, that, my friends, is where the most recent episodes come in.
At the end of episode 47, we see a G-man toilet destroy the P.O.V. cameraman, just like we've
seen him do in many other episodes before. But then through the lens of our fallen camera, we
see someone coming into frame. And it's not just anyone, it's a person. We haven't seen a human
in the series for literally dozens of episodes, and yet out of the blue, a person appears.
And it's not just any person either. This character looks an awful lot like
the DaFuq's channel avatar, doesn't it? Like I mentioned earlier, humans
didn't really play much of a role in this franchise prior to this
very moment. In the beginning, humans were just cannon fodder for the toilet
overlords, but now we have one of these humans. In fact, the human who's making the series,
inserting himself back into the narrative. Not just here. He's also hidden indoors
during the opening seconds of episode 45. But why? One does not simply self insert their
avatar into a 2 billion view a month series so lightly, when the story is so deep in its own
narrative, unless you have a greater role to play in the story you're about to tell. DaFuq
clearly has a love and passion for this style of video. Before Skibidi exploded, he had created
dozens of videos in his SFM YouTube poop format. In fact, his two most popular long form videos on
his channel are still, to this day, SFM animations that he made years ago. That being said, I also
don't think he totally dislikes the world of TV, movies and music either. Why would he make them
the protagonists of his epic internet series if he did? I think DaFuq, like many other creators,
aspires to do this work on a professional level. And you can tell that desire for a
professional higher caliber of work in the way that he's handled this Skibidi
Toilet series. Each episode has seen an escalation of the animation, the character work
getting better, the ideas bigger and grander. He has literally turned what started as
a YouTube poop into an epic action movie that hangs with some of the best content
that I've seen this year. So what gives? What is the story that he's trying to tell
us through Skibidi Toilet? Well, to me, it's clear from the story that's laid out
in front of us that DaFuq sees himself quite literally in the middle of these two
loves of his that are currently at odds. Notice what his character is doing throughout the
series so far. He's picking up the broken remains of the camera heads, the broken remains of
traditional media. Creators like DaFuq got into making this kind of content on the
Internet, not just because it was fun and easy, but deep down they wanted to emulate the TV,
film and music that they enjoyed consuming. DaFuq wants to take the elements that make
the new and old media so great and fuse them together. He is the merge point. He is the next
step in the evolution of the medium. He's the missing link here. I mean, look no further than
Skibidi Toilet itself. The series starts off as a simple gag that latched on to a viral
internet meme in episode one. But by episode 50, suddenly, we have cinematic camera changes,
complex sound design, dazzling visuals and special effects that feel like they belong
more in the MCU than a YouTube poop. Skibidi Toilet isn't an epic takedown of toxic Internet
content or the corrupt industrial bigwigs at the studios. Instead, it's evidence that these
two things can co-mingle. These two titans of entertainment can co-exist together
and be stronger as a result. That the best of both worlds can be brought together
for the greater good of entertainment. So where does this franchise
end up going from here? Well, we have ourselves our new protagonist
in DaFuq, who will eventually take center stage, taking it upon himself to save the world that
he loves: the worlds of internet meme-dom and mainstream media. He's going to turn out to be
the Neo of this universe. He is the chosen one. He'll be the one who'll be able to marry both
sides of this war together and show that if the two sides put aside their differences, they can
create something truly magical. Or who knows, maybe we'll get a movie deal out of it. And
then truly, you've had the merging of the worlds. But hey, speaking of blending ideas from
multiple industries into one magical product, I want to thank our sponsor for today's video
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when we're researching videos, keeping tabs on all of our tabs can feel like a job unto itself.
After opening 50 Skibidi videos and dozens of fan wiki pages, it becomes a bit overwhelming to even
find where the script I was working on went. That's why I love Opera One's new Tab Islands
feature, which allows me to easily split my tabs into groups that make sense for my workflow.
And as I open similar tabs, new tab islands get created automatically helping me stay organized
much more easily. Tab Islands give me the power and flexibility to focus on what's on the screen
rather than the mountain of tabs above it. Opera one also comes with a new modular
design, which allows me to customize all the bells and whistles to make my browsing
experience truly feel like my experience and not one that was just arbitrarily chosen for
me. But the feature that I love most with this new Opera One is its native browser AI Aria.
Aria was made in collaboration with Openai, you know the company that makes Chat GPT, but with
some new features to help make it stand apart. Aria is web connected, meaning that it
can provide up to date information so we can stay current. Aria also makes it easier to
brainstorm ideas, rephrase confusing sentences, and do quick math all without having to open
up new tabs. And the best part is if I come across some text in a foreign language or some
topic or phrase that I'm not familiar with, I can just use the highlight tooltip to have
Aria give me the answers that I need instantly. There really isn't much you can't
do with Opera's new Opera One, so go use the link down the description
and in the pinned comment to give Opera One a try. Give yourself the better browser
experience that you deserve. And as always, my friends remember, it's just a
theory of film theory and yes, yes.
Damn Matpat is so nostalgic
now that would be the msot ending ending to ever exist
Insanity.