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2002·Early web, before YouTube

Weebl and Bob

Two wobbling eggs asking about pie, and the British Flash animator behind a decade of earworms.

You might remember it as Magical Trevor

From the early web

This Moment began as a web animation, not as a video upload. Originally published on web.

The story

What this was

Two egg-shaped characters rock from side to side and talk in flat, deadpan voices, mostly about pie. Jonti Picking, working as Mr Weebl, made them in Flash from 2002, and around them a body of work — Magical Trevor, Catface, Kenya — built on the same principle: a short loop, an insistent tune, and a lyric that will not leave.

It first appeared in 2002, during early web, before YouTube.

Picking is one of the most-heard and least-named British creators of the early web. Badger Badger Badger is his; so is Magical Trevor. The form he refined — a looping animation with an original song written to be maddening — is the direct ancestor of the modern short-video earworm, and predates it by fifteen years.

Weebl and Bob was picked up by MTV for short-form broadcast, an unusual crossing for a Flash cartoon of that period. Picking has kept working through the death of Flash, and the songs have outlived their format: they recirculate every few years on platforms that did not exist when they were made.

The same internet

Early web, before YouTube

More like this

Related

Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a web animation, not as a video upload. Originally published on web.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
Two egg-shaped characters rock from side to side and talk in flat, deadpan voices, mostly about pie. Jonti Picking, working as Mr Weebl, made them in Flash from 2002, and around them a body of work — Magical Trevor, Catface, Kenya — built on the same principle: a short loop, an insistent tune, and a lyric that will not leave.
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