Felix the Cat, besides his well-known cartoon career, enjoyed a second birth on the amateur web as an animated GIF:

The origins of this animation are at the moment unknown to us. From the many instances it was used on Geocities, the oldest found until now dates back to February 13th 1997 and was created with version 0.2 of GifBuilder by Yves Piguet from Lausanne.

While it is true that some times the animation was placed on web pages purely because of its entertaining nature, void of any context, in most cases Felix’ appearance added meaning and served as a clever illustration. Some examples:

1. Under Construction

By combining Felix with an Under Construction message, the web page’s author shows understanding for surfers’ frustrations caused by an incomplete page. (In this example, a class yearbook was still missing some photos.)

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Corner/9222/wiley.html

2. Looking Forward

Felix appeared in announcements of future events. Holidays like Halloween were especially popular. Here is an example of a Christmas that will never come:

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Sands/3614/date.html

3. Webmaster’s Impatience

Not only surfers had to wait during the early times of the web — for pages to be updated and images to be downloaded. Webmasters, the creators of web pages, had to deal with their own kind of delays. For example, not receiving enough communication for their publishing efforts.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/2165/friends.html

4. Relief

Felix can be found on many pages with relaxing images, poetry, music and  jokes. Indeed he appears a little stressed out and could use a laugh or two.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/2150/wellness.html

5. Avatar

Some webmasters felt that Felix was a good representation for themselves. In this example, the animation also helps to ease the gravity of a man’s confessions about his mental illness.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Spa/6611/BIO.html

6. Deep Thought

Online riddles and assignments have been known to feature Felix. The illustration suggests that you should deeply think about the questions. In the following example, the file is even called think.gif:

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/abdessalamis/bqs.html

7. Cat Representative

Yes, and some times Felix was used because he is a cat.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/5463/Pets.htm

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Corner/9222/wiley.html

On the 30th of March 2011, Jason Scott, the man behind the textfiles.com archive and Archiveteam, the group that brought Geocities back to life, has published a transcript of his talk at the Personal Digital Archiving conference.

It is a very tense text, almost a manifesto. Some quotes:

On the current attitude to data loss:

In fact, if you step back and look at it, the loss of data has moved to epidemic proportions. I use the term epidemic specifically here; I mean that there is a mental condition to accept the loss of data as the price of doing business with computers. And beyond that, the expectation that data will be lost, and the spreading of this idea to the point that data loss becomes no big thing.

[…]

The current natural order of things for hosting user-generated content
is this: Disenfranchise. Demean. Delete.

On the uniqueness and significance of Geocities users’ experience:

But I think what they lost was that Geocities arrived in roughly 1995,
and was, for hundreds of thousands of people, their first experience
with the idea of a webpage, of a full-color, completely controlled
presentation on anything they wanted. For some people, their potential
audience was greater for them than for anyone in the entire history of
their genetic line. It was, to these people, breathtaking.

How services should deal with User Content:

This is about understanding that user data is a trust, a heritage, history.




I’M



GOING


TO

HAVE



FUN

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Pointe/2510/
(Cleaned HTML)

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/4078/Rainforest.html

John, aka “VRMAN”, used to study Multimedia at Teesside University in Middlesbrough. He was fascinated by Virtual Reality and created this representation of himself:

A graphical extravaganza, especially for 1997! While elements of amateur design – background patterns, centered text and images and the default hr divider – dominate the page, there is a sense of composition and elegance present, especially in  the navigation cubes.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/9134/

Writing about Chuck Poynter, I assumed that he not only made Dancing Girl GIF famous, but was also the author of the original graphic and animation. In the comment to the post user laserbeing noted:

“A few of these, including the dancing girl, the cat and the man with the briefcase, look very much like the sample animations from an old black & white Macintosh application called VideoWorks, which was an early predecessor of Macromedia Director.”

So we downloaded VideoWorks and made it run in vMac.

And here she was. Moving even smoother than seen online, in black and white, but with a clumsy shadow on the floor. Probably this shadow is the cause of the blinking pixel in Chuck Poynter’s GIF. He removed the shadow, but not completely. Though, Dragan’s close ups and frame by frame comparison don’t prove this theory. We continue to investigate and wait for Jay (Jamie) Fenton to answer on who made this extraordinary demo animation for VideoWorks.



hulagirl tag for the posts about the dancing girl.

The beautiful background in the last post is one of dozens created by web graphics master GloriAnon. Join her as she dances among the stars to a Led Zeppelin MIDI file.

 

Water becomes sky, sky becomes water in this epic, background image. On today’s high resolution displays it is definitely an interesting experience. It especially shines compared with such a setting:

Even though there is no shortage of star backgrounds on Geocities, it is still a quite rare occasion to find an astronomy page with an outer space motive. Astronomy for All by Amy is such an exception.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/Skunk8/