The party invitation that started it all.
Do you remember Ze Frank? Don’t be ashamed if you don’t. You see, long ago, in the before time of the internet (around 2005), there was no Facebook or Twitter, and none of those obligatory “share” buttons that universally clutter and slow down your web pages even though no-one uses them. Which, combined with the fact that his early creations were often created using a sometimes lethal, long-abandoned tool called “Flash”, meant you had to share his creations with elaborate incomprehensible strings of text like http://whateveryourdomainis.com/d4x_ss3/pages/poop/how_to_poop.html, and you probably had to do it by email, for chrissakes. It’s a wonder anyone even discovered he existed. But exist he did, one might even say he thrived for several years. To paraphrase Jack Nichilson’s character Art Land in Mars Attacks, “Ze Frank was thinkin’ ’bout viral when there wasn’t no viral”.
You may very well have seen his later work, which has millions of YouTube views. His True Facts series had a much broader reach than his earlier series The Show, but they both were hilarious in their own way. There’s a good chance you’ve seen “True Facts About The Angler Fish”:
Although Ze Frank got a lot of page views back in his early days, he didn’t rise to the God-like status of say, Grumpy Cat or Rebecca Black. But he did make a splash, and his notoriety probably played a part in securing his current job as president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures. Which would probably be more suitably described as a Satan-like status. And which is ironic in another way: the formulaic success of sites like BuzzFeed and UpWorthy have pretty effectively killed the kind of organic sharing that made viral a thing in the first place, and made his new job possible. It’s like a time paradox in a Star Trek episode or something!
Strangely, ZeFrank doesn’t seem to have any videos about time travel. Or maybe he has simply traveled through time deleting them all. But he DOES have a funny cat video, proving the simple mathematical theorem cat+video=views. It has more views than any of his other clips:
But ignore our snark about his current employer, Ze Frank was an “Internet 1.9” genius, carving out a clever new niche in era when smartphones barely existed, and many were still on dialup. He created hundreds of clever and engaging videos, games, and interactives that were shared on “web forums” and “webrings” everywhere, and did a lot of it using – as we joked earlier – the animation/design tool Flash. Fortunately for us he didn’t delete it all in shame, it’s preserved for eternity in the labyrinthine archives over at ZeFrank.com. Or until he forgets to pay a hosting bill, whichever comes first.
Below are a couple of personal favorites of ours, but you can’t really get the full scope of his capricious genius without actually visiting his website, where his Web 1.9 creations are meticulously archived. You can learn more about ZeFrank on Wikipedia of course, or he’s done a heck of a lot of TED Talks too.
How to Dance Properly
One of ZeFrank’s first viral successes was How to Dance Properly, which was actually a party invite he had sent to a few friends. In 2001, this was a pretty sophisticated little dookickey to send as a casual invite, and it exploded in popularity. Fortunately for Ze Frank, the address of the party was not included in the page. (We’ve embedded a similar doodad further below, these items aren’t vary “share friendly”).
This is just a screengrab. Click the image to visit the actual Flash page.
My Advice to You
Again, this felt a little edgy in its day. ZeFrank takes on the character of your probably gay Euro-trash club friend, and answers advice questions in a clickable Flash page.
Sequencer
Although it’s not terribly musical, this little gizmo was the first time I personally had seen a Flash-based music sequencer embedded in a web page. It seems downright primitive now, but it was pretty amazing back then.
How To Impress Your Date
This one was hugely popular. We’ve embedded it here with an iFrame, because we know you’re too lazy to actually click on anything on this page so far. We hope ZeFrank doesn’t sue us, now that he’s a CEO with a hugely-funded tech firm. If the block below is all bunged up on your phone or something, just go visit the freakin’ page here
