Mandrake Flash-back to 1999

Posted on Sunday, January 09, 2006 @ 23:45 CET

So I was looking through some CD albums yesterday and I came across an old Linux install CD. Specifically the Corel Mandrake Linux 8 CD I had running on an old system many years ago. It was funny because I remembered that when I had installed it I came across a little gem in the docs.

So I popped it into the CD drive to see if I could find it and sure enough, under Chapter 5 (Linux Multimedia Applications) it talks about Real Player. On the 3rd page of the Real Player description (x:/tutorial/Multimedia/pages/multi34.html) it states:

RealPlayer8 also plays flash animations and MP3s.

The shocker was that the screenshot of the RealPlayer app contained a Flash animation I had made!

Let me explain. Back in 1999 I was (still am) a huge South Park fan. I was playing with Flash 3 (moving to 4) and thought I'd try making a couple animations myself, especially since South Park animation style is "crude and simple". So I drew some characters in Flash and started the process of animating these.

This was much harder than I thought. I couldn't find the wave files of the voices anywhere - and the few I did find weren't saying the right thing to follow my mini-"plots" (if you can call them that). So I recorded my own voice and found out I'm really crap at impersonation.

Anyways, I sent the first one, "Watch the Road" (the one featured in the screenshot), to Mr. Hat's Hell Hole - a South Park fan site at the time (now defunct). This was the first addition to their fan-produced Flash section. Turned out to be kinda popular, and at the same time Comedy Central released some "official" Flash cartoons featuring South Park clips on Shockwave.com.

So I went over, grabbed some of their SWF's and ran them through a nice SWF decompiler to get at the graphics. Suddenly I had "official" characters to play around with and animate - and they looked alot better than my drawings.

I made another 3 before getting tired of it (took too long to produce, and the outcome wasn't always what I wanted) - Redneck Blues, Pinkeye 2 and Taco Bell. Of course this was back in 1999 so I've long lost both the FLA source files and the SWF's.

So after seeing that screenshot again I got a touch of nostalgia and decided to get on Google to find them.

Searching for ["watch the road" "south park"] returned 318 results. So I tried ["watch the road" "south park" taco] and lo-and-behold. The third hit was to a South Park fan site in Hong Kong which was hosting the files!

So here they are. Warning, they are really crappy and they were made over six years ago so you have been warned :)

Watch the Road, Redneck Blues, Pinkeye 2 and Taco Bell.

- paulo