Salad Fingers

This is a thread to discuss the oddity that is Salad Fingers. Was it pretentious bullshit or avant-garde genius?

 

The early Salad Fingers shorts were just David Firth having fun and messing around. According to David, the first Salad Fingers episode took a day to animate. When they became more popular he devoted more time to them, which is how we ended up with the much longer and much more experimental later episodes.

Personally, I prefer David Firth's other animations to Salad Fingers. Burnt Face Man is pretty good as a straight (albeit weird) comedy. Spoilsbury Toast Boy is weirder and more interesting than Salad Fingers, and the health reminders are pretentious, but interesting.

 

I rather liked the series he did based on dreams. 'World within a sock' or something similar. I think he captured well the strange way that absurd things can be presented very matter-of-factly within dreams.
As for Salad Fingers, I discovered it when I was in my very early teens, and it was instantly quotable. In the days pre-YouTube, websites like FatPie and stuff like RatherGood were really popular in my school. I kind of lost interest towards the end, but I did recently go back and watch a couple of his shorts for sake of nostalgia, and they held up pretty well, I thought.

 

I remember seeing it on Newgrounds around the time I was a freshman in college. At the time I thought that the, based on Salad Fingers, the Internet was going to be a haven for entertainment that was too unique and wonderful for mainstream media.

Fast forward 11 years to the age of PewDiePie, and now I realize just how wrong I was.

 

I don't know what I recall more:
How Salad Fingers was *the* Internet thing for pre-teens for about 2-3 months, or how many videos/sites popped up devoted to over-analyzing the different Salad Fingers episodes...

 

To be fair, Salad Fingers was meant to be analyzed, it was just meant for the individual viewer to analyze it and draw their own conclusions, not for people to watch Film Theory and mimic the opinion of a Youtube personality.

 

Fair enough. I was more talking about the people who analyzed Every. Single. Frame.

Like "Look, see, see there? That one frame where Salad Fingers lifts his hand up slightly? This is what that *really* means...."

 

Salad fingers is just creepy shit for the sake of creepy shit. Just because something is weird or artsy it doesn't mean it has a deeper meaning.
It gets views and views = money
That's all it is

 

I miss the days of the Internet when weird for weird's sake got views. Now you can get YouTube money just from overreacting to jumpscares.

 

David Firth,the dude who made salad fingers also did the JERRY JACKSON CARTOONS. The man is a batshit insane dude who was great at translating that insanity to a web cartoom

 

I would really hate to be inside one of his nightmares.

 

Spoiler: this involves badly drawn willie things, this is common in his works

does it involve making meta parodies of your own work?

 

It pretty much reminds me of middle school, and makes me go "wow, I remember when I thought this looked good" in the visual sense. But I still think it holds some charm, much like Blockhead still does. I do like the earlier episodes more though, since they're more quotable.

 

Among my favorite Newgrounds flash animations.