no one knows who created skull trumpet (until now)

hey so remember the dancing baby this one this gift made the rounds online in the late '90s and it's considered to be one of the first viral videos now if someone were to ask you where this gift is from would you be able to answer well if not that's not a problem cuz I can tell you it's a simple Google search away here's the Wikipedia article where we can learn that Michael Gerard started the company unreal pictures Incorporated together with his wife sus and umra in 1993 together they worked on several sample animations to be released with a plug-in for 3ds Max called character Studio One of the team members they hired Robert luer provided the dance moves by expanding on an already existing file called Chacha do bit adding the shaking shoulders and air guitar moves the 3D model for the baby was created by Tony moral and sold through Viewpoint data Labs finally another unreal pictures team member John Chadwick took Tony's model applied Raw Roberts dance to it and there we go skore baby. Max was born okay let's do another one how about this one the doot doot skeleton guy kind of looks like something from around that same time shouldn't be that hard to find and yeah look at that yet again the answer is a simple Google search away except what if I told you that every single one of these search results are blatantly incorrect cor what if I told you that I've spent the last several weeks doing nothing else than trying to track down the origin of this trumpet playing skeleton and what if I told you that to my knowledge no one has attempted this before and if someone has no one has succeeded but I did so let me tell you [Music] what I [Music] [Music] found so about a month ago I was in the final stretch of editing my last video and at one point I wanted to add a quintessential spooky gift to spice up some joke I was making I opened the gift search bar and without hesitating I wrote the words trumpet skull I dropped the gift into the timeline but then I stopped for a second cuz I had a thought is it really called Trumpet skull this thought was quickly followed by another where's that gift from anyway so as implied in the intro I did what any normal person would do turned to [Music] Google and again just as expected here is a listing for skull trumpet dodot on knowyourmeme. com scrolling down to origin we can read the following according to various accounts the skull trumpet Sprite was first introduced through 3D Movie Maker a computer graphic software program developed and released by Microsoft's Microsoft kids subsidiary in 1995 there we go that was that my query solved I went back to work except something irked me see I didn't grow up with Microsoft 3D Movie Maker but about a year ago or so I was planning to do a stream where I'd be playing around in the software and in preparation for that stream being the spooky boy that I am I specifically played around with the skeleton and this trumpet skull looks nothing like I remember the skeleton looking in 3D Movie Maker but again I did what any normal person would do I Shrugged it off as a faulty memory and got back to work except I didn't instead I downloaded 3D Movie Maker opened it up placed down the skeleton and just as I remembered it looked nothing like trumpet skull something wasn't adding up back to Google I searched skeleton trumpet Windows 3D movie maker and among the pages upon pages of websites parting this same seemingly incorrect statement I found this video various sources online claim that the DU skeleton was created using Microsoft 3D Movie Maker this is the skeleton character provided in 3D Movie Maker now ask yourself does this skeleton look like this skeleton the answer is clearly no they they look nothing alike is there no consideration for fact s for the truth in today's modern web environment it starts with the dude skeleton but where does it end to what extremes will this disregard now obviously this guy knows what he's talking about but neither him nor anyone in the comments brought any Clarity to the next natural question if it's not from 3D Movie Maker then where is it from and this is where my hunt really began but before we continue here I just want to get this this out early on for this video I have gone places and I have found things that again as far as I know no one else has before this presents a pretty exciting scenario for you actually because you see I'm a small Channel and as of recording this I'm at almost exactly 5,000 subscribers this means that if you're watching this video and the view countdown there is still pretty low you're among the first people in the world to learn about this this means that you can say yeah I actually learned about this way before everyone else else this means that you can go to correct the Know Your Meme article this means that you can email Redbubble and ask how much money goes to the actual artist behind this image from the sales of all of their merch that has it right on it you can send angry DMS to everyone claiming that it comes from 3D Movie Maker but you can only do that if you finish this video am I just trying to get you to watch the whole thing maybe but what I'm saying is still true so sit back relax keep calm and I'll get into how I went about figuring this whole thing out and where it led me starting with some context for the [Music] meem on February the 15th 2011 a YouTube channel under the name p puppy 89 uploaded a 1 second video titled only skull trumpet here is that YouTube video in full as it would soon turn out this YouTube account is owned by Tumblr user illustrator and Twitter personality wolf puppy and due to them already having an established audience this video quickly garnered some views and as with anything of this nature it's a pointless Andor to try and understand exactly how or why virality happens but happen it did soon the video had racked up thousands of use this trumpet playing skull now permanently affixed with the phrase doot doot and often follows by comments reading thank you Mrseltal had risen to meme status over the coming years and up to this very day it can be seen in a variety of contexts especially around Halloween time and it has had countless fanedits parodies and offshoot memes and at some point along the line someone somewhere must have claimed that skull trumpet originated from 3D movie maker and someone else decided without verifying any of it to just run with that statement cementing it into the the skull trumpet lore but as already established I have strong reasons to believe that that is not the case and with that history out of the way let's get back to the hunt first and foremost just to be 100% sure that I could exclude 3D Movie Maker completely I went through all of the animations all of the maps and I dug through all of the files to see if I could find a single trace of a trumpet playing skull or even a skull or even just a trumpet but other than our bony friend here I came up empty-handed so let's take our first real plunge into the rabbit hole and start studying the GIF in a bit more detail to see what we can gather the trumpet skull animation is either 13 or 20 frames long depending on what version you're looking at for many of the ones you'll find online the first two frames are repeated three times right at the start I believe this to be an error that happened somewhere along the line next I want to draw your attention to the top of the skull's head note how the shape of the light Reflections change as the skull moves this implies that whatever software was used to create this gift has some sort of rudimentary light engine which by the way 3D Movie Maker does not next I want you to pay close attention to the movement I.

E how the head turns this looks to me not like a key framed animation but rather it looks like someone using their Mouse to rotate an object a little bit at a time time taking a screenshot rotating it a little bit more taking another screenshot Etc and finally let's focus on the bell of the trumpet as it toots see that look at the hand see how one finger and parts of the hand also distorts as the bell grows this tells me that while the rotation of the skull and the trumpet is in 3D the trumpet Bell growing is not rather it's simple photo manipulation on top of the 3D animation something along the same lines as the liquefy tool in Photoshop affecting this area here's a quick Recreation by me just so we're all on the same page rotate the model screenshot rotate some more screenshot repeat this process until satisfied now take one frame bloat this area which accidentally also includes some of the hand compile into GIF and here they are side by side now obviously I can't verify this but I'm pretty confident in my assessment here so with this knowledge let's try and figure out who did all of this in the first place for the obvious first step I use tiny ey to perform a reverse image search if you don't know what that is it's essentially like a Google search to find an image except reversed you load an image into it and it finds where that image has appeared online I get these results that date as far back as 2011 this makes sense as that is when the meme first blew up but I refuse to believe that there are no traces of this thing to be found from before that time I go back to the Know Your Meme article scroll down to the sources and go through them one by one as expected and already established several claims here completely lack sources however at one point an article written by Gawker is mentioned this would have probably been a good place to start as it hopefully would have been written by an actual journalist who verifies their sources but as as it turns out this article has since been deleted I file that into the back of my mind for now and continue digging another link takes me to a Facebook fan page simply called skull trumpet started in March of 2011 just one month after piie puppy's video at first glance this page doesn't seem to have much of interest in it but then I noticed that due to Facebook not allowing gifs to play the GIF has here instead been converted into a singleframe JPEG furthermore judging by the size of the image and the reasonably clean pixels this looks like it could be from a cleaner version of the gift than the one that I've been working with to clarify cleaner as in one that hasn't been uploaded downloaded converted upscale compressed uploaded and downloaded again before falling into my lap hopefully so I take this JPEG and I go back to Tiny ey I hit upload [Music] and Bingo results now stretch way further back and I can almost taste the sweet sweet release of closure sorting the results by age the oldest instance that I can find is from 2008 on a URL called peeron. com a now defunct website with a strange and confusing history that I can't make much sense of the most interesting aspect here is the file name which tells me that this image likely did go by the name trumpet skull around this time time while also possibly pointing to an original resolution and color space below pepperon we have popl this website is also long gone by now but with the help of the Wayback machine I could access a very barebones version of the page where the trumpet skull supposedly appeared now all the image links are dead and I don't know polish but by using the file name provided by tiny ey I managed to figure out that the gift in question is supposedly this box right here a Community member from my Discord server Linked In the description by the way helps me translate the page and we find that it belonged to a 12-year-old boy going by the name drag who in 2008 had this to say about himself about me I like dragons cars like Bosman corpses Etc now mostly dragons and chess and while undoubtedly sounds like a really cool guy I get the feeling that he didn't create this gift and and stick it in the middle of a bunch of other gifts without crediting himself so if this polish kid had access to the gift in 2008 surely it can't have been that obscure before this point but just how popular was it I have no way of knowing Google Trends show a confusing spike in popularity around 2004 but I suspect that their data is incorrect but I know somewhere where we might get some answers remember that ga article I Go Back To Know Your Meme grab the article URL make my way into the way back machine and there we go comes from Microsoft 3D Movie Maker a kids computer graphic software that debuted in 1995 the consensus among skull trumpet cognis Senti is that their hero was initially lifted from a demo within the game Connor Dennis another leut generation moderator that's that that's the the subreddit e sorry uh Connor Dennis another L generation moderator told me skull trumpet was definitely taken from that 2C 3dmm video the author then goes on to explain how they download 3D Movie Maker dig through the files and much like myself couldn't find any trace of a trumpet playing skull the article continues the only other potential line scull trumpet's origin I could find was through wolf puppy a sodony Twitter personality and web comics artist I emailed wolf puppy looking for answers and promptly received an appropriately mysterious response the information you are looking for is best left unknown that's pretty huge right did wolf puppy actually create this gift themselves I mean I know it can't have been around the time that they posted the video cuz you know it was around way before that but what's to say they hadn't made this animation years and years before and just didn't post it until [Music] 2011 well there's only one way to find out I joined wolf puppy's patreon and I send them a [Music] message okay still with me can you feel it the vibrations in the air the smell of Victory or whatever I know it's been a lot to take in but you're you're you're doing great okay so there are a couple of more pretty major twists but before we get to those sorry for the interruption here but today's video is sponsored by my patreon page it's almost Christmas as you can see and also Christmas is my birthday so so maybe you should consider giving me a little Christmas gift or a little birthday present also thank you to these people for helping me edit some parts of this video uh if you want Motion Graphics and stuff there should be links down in the description here's Santa that's insane let's get on with the video despite their previously cryptic response to the author of The Gawker article it doesn't take wolf puppy long to get back to me the person who made the skull trumpet video on my piie puy 89 YouTube account I can say I have seen zero evidence that it came from 3D movie maker I can say I originally found the animated gift for the skull trumpet video from a now defunct site called Heather's animations the site had a big collection of early internet gifts including the skull trumpet one and a gift of a 3D rotating piece of bread which I also turned [Music] into Heather's animations quick Google search defunct way back machine and there he is unfortunately the file name is simply skull one25 which doesn't do much for us right now and despite how this website may look this page is from 2011 so while this initially might look and feel like a more significant find I quickly realized that this isn't much different from the ones that I've already found through tiny ey it's at this point that I start to get desperate the answer feels so close yet so far [Music] away I delete this new download and go to my Archive of Saved skull trumpet gifs mirrored versions transparent versions different resolutions different frame rates within without the repeating start frames okay let's do this I throw each and one of these files into a metadata inspector just in case I've missed something nothing okay next let's take each and one of them and split their animations up into separate frames and then run each and every one of those frames through reverse image surch one by one the logic behind this being that in the same way that the Facebook page turned the animation into a singleframe JPEG which suddenly yielded older results perhaps some other archaic website did the same thing but with another frame but 2 hours of painstaking work later and still nothing [Music] and it's at this point that I can feel the Hope drain out through my body my spirit broken and tired my motivation at an alltime low I've hit a wall am I not supposed to get to the bottom of this like is this mystery simply meant to go unsolved I feel like I've done everything everything I've can and I've gone above and beyond this is this really it as a last resort I thinkink deeper than I previously thought I ever could in the words of nche Beware that when fighting monsters you yourself do not become a monster for when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you you and so it did when I tail between my legs head hanging low created a thread on [Music] Reddit actually no why obfuscate the truth I made several threads okay I made one on internet Bureau of Investigation another one on internet Mysteries one on Wang's sub and one on leot generation okay now these threads continued the trend of not yielding much results someone came in and confidently told me that oh that gift yeah yeah yeah is from RuneScape no doubt about it 100% sure I've seen it with my own eyes and I didn't even get excited instead I just asked for sources on their claims and soon they had backtracked they were mistaken sorry of course they were someone else pointed out that a YouTube comment somewhere says that they think it was made with a silic Graphics Indie a lead that I had already investigated which led nowhere because that's kind of like saying I think this photo is edited in Photoshop someone else mentioned having seen several other similar gifts in the same style they were 100% sure they specifically remember seeing them themselves but as I followed up on this lead Googling flute skeleton guitar skeleton drum skeleton and tuba skeleton I came up empty handed nothing that looks like our friend here so this was the end of the road I thought but then came Amelia likes birds all right so I did some digging myself I don't want to toot my own horn ha but I think I found the source but I'm not entirely sure the Heather's animation site lists the skeltal gif as early as 2004 image metadata of the 2004 image says I stopped reading no no no it doesn't no no Heather's animation that that was in 2011 I I have it here somewhere no because that's way later let let me just wait wait no she's right there he is in 2004 but no he he can't he can't be how how did how did I miss this I checked the metad data of every single image that I downloaded I even checked the meta data of every individual frame I delete this no no no no no no that's not true that's imposs certain of feelings you know it be true no [Applause] no [Music] okay so somehow despite doing everything in my power to be as thorough as possible despite going through the metadata of every single image that I stumbled upon despite going through every single Wayback machine capture of every single website that I found during my research or at least so I thought I for some reason that I can't explain did not look further back into the history of Heathers animation or at the metad data of the gift that I downloaded from that website and that was the one place where I should have looked now full disclosure I'm not trying to take anything away from Amelia likes Birds here by saying you know oh I would have found it with or without her help or anything along those lines she definitely came in clutch with this at this point I had spent way way too many hours going over every detail to the point where I probably couldn't see the woods for all the trees and you better believe me when I say that I've been beating myself up over this because I was so close I I did I feel like I did pretty much everything right I did all of the parts that she did but I just didn't do them in the right place it was like just as I was about to pass the Finish Line I stumbled but my Bruce ego aside we did it it we found the actual origin of doot doot of Mrseltal of skull trumpet or should I say Jaz [Music] skull I'm a wife a training consultant for restaurant managers and a woman who is obsessed by my web page in animations I entered the world of the web about a year ago and started a family web page using ing other people's animated graphics about 3 months later it wasn't long until I started discovering pages that gave instructions on creating your own animated gifts I downloaded GIF construction set and I was [Music] hooked I now work on my page for my Graphics virtually every spare moment I have in fact some moments that aren't so spare according to my husband Kathy jarbo profile presentation GIF artist. com November 27th [Music] 1999 again with the help of the Wayback machine I find my way to Cathy's old website C jarbo tocom and sure enough there he is through this one website I am LED through a sometimes confusing and sometimes outright broken but an always creatively radiating Mace of pages upon pages of Cathy's vast portfolio of gifts and wallpapers a few moments later I find myself on one of her even older websites home one.

gte. net CA which just like its sequel does not disappoint when it comes to the presentation of Kathy's Creative Drve and passion the art styles and motifs are not limited to skeletons or even Halloween themed Creations even if she does have a whole page dedicated to those there are beach scenes Christmas scenes General mystical themes Jazz themes and I can't help but feel a sort of awe granted I don't know anything about Kathy but this is the late '90s and judging by her bio and this witch image featuring the faces of some of her friends I'd say that Kathy wasn't like in her teens when she created all of these images and furthermore she wasn't a professional illustrator I might be overanalyzing here but it feels to me that like somewhere around the early '90s Cathy must have been one of those types of people who very quickly took hold of this new internet thing and Kathy she made it hers this is Kathy's world with Kathy's rules Cathy's Fascinations fixations experiment and art and listen please don't misinterpret what I'm about to say I understand that I don't know this person or almost anything about her but I love Kathy or rather I I love the idea of Kathy I love what Kathy represents because as I'm reading through Page after page downloading image after image Kathy evolves from being just this name connected to all of these gifts into something bigger Kathy becomes for me creative freedom Kathy becomes the fire that burns inside of so many creatives to just do not for the money not for the fame or recognition but simply For the Love of doing it and to imagine that this is where I ended up that I got to feel these feelings that I got to share these words with you at home watching this video to think that all of this is thanks to skull trumpet or yeah right no let's clear this name situation up real quick so Kathy has given this gift several different names or titles the original file was called Jazz skull but on this page she refers to it as Jassie skull and in this section where she also mentions that it once won a prize she refers to it as the Mystic trumpeting skull which to be honest if it were up to me would be the official name but yes as I was saying if it hadn't been for the Mystic trumpeting skull I never would have discovered Kathy or her art and I never would have gotten to share it with all of you and for that I'm very thankful thank you Mrjcal and this is where I was going to leave the video off originally Kathy existing as a sort of representation of the passionate artist the struggling creative but then I reread this last part of her profile presentation on GIF artist.