Hacker Cinema
Happy Tree Friends
2000 · TV series · 4 min episodes · 11 seasons
Created by Kenn Navarro, Rhode Montijo, Aubrey Ankrum
AnimationComedyScience FictionFantasy
This action and adventure comedy is drawn in simple appearance and combines cute forest animals with extreme graphic violence. Each episode revolves around the characters enduring accidental events of bloodshed, pain, dismemberment and/or death.
2 negative2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
I remember hearing stories of people traumatized as children by Happy Tree Friends, a cartoon series which appears to be child friendly at the beginning of each episode, but gets more and more violent and gory as they progress.
Parents trusted YouTube to keep their kids safe (first mistake) and YouTube dragged their feet on fixing the issue. It's not a "harmless" babysitter like a VCR that a toddler can rewind to watch Barney again, or a game console that can only play physically connected games. It's a portal to any personal hell you wish to choose and dropping the kids off and saying "be back in an hour" sounds risky.
We use tons of vector animations in the UIs, but I guess what the GP meant are animations in the form of short movies like Happy Tree Friends or Animator vs. Animation. That style is no longer popular and it used to be everywhere.
As for the cause, I think it's not only that Flash is dead, but also that there are now many other easy options to create content including professional looking video and much more refined animations. That wasn't an option 20 years ago for most.
I wonder when AI will reach a point where it can reasonably detect and classify more esoteric forms of humor. Deadpan humor is very difficult to explain to a computer, the reason it is funny is because the delivery sounds like it is not a joke. You have to intuit that the speaker would never ever believe what they are saying for it to be funny.
At some point even comments will become a signal Youtube uses to decide how to classify videos.
And no, there have been many channels over the years that have complained about the age-restriction issue even though they expressed clearly that the are a mixed-audience channel.
To show a much much more severe example, here's a tweet showing youtube misclassifying Happy Tree Friends as kids friendly, a cartoon style animated show about cute looking animals that get gruesomely killed in various cruel and disturbing situations. Clearly a parody of things like Tom and Jerry in many ways. Reasonable and artistically meaningful, especially when it came out in 1999, but clearly no human was in that misclassification process. They are 1 to 5 minute episodes.
https://twitter.com/Rat_Tail_Tony/status/1215015868515655680
Those letters are helpful in making the snap decision as to whether to even bother investigating the content further. I can't give every game/book/movie/whatever proper review, so it helps to know that some sane adult marked it with an easily-understood cue. If there's an "M" or "T" on the box, I don't want to waste another second wondering if it's suitable for my toddlers.
Example: "Happy Tree Friends" is advertised & starts with cute forest animals in simple & colorful renderings; an appropriate parental cue helps prevent having to explain other definitions of "rendering" to a kid who can barely talk and is wondering why seconds later that cute squirrel is shrieking, spewing red, and has a bad case of the ouchies. A prominent "T" would be helpful to those adults who don't know the show and are being pestered by a 3-year-old to watch it on Netflix.