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By Ryan Smith
Senior Pop Culture & Entertainment Reporter
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Skibidi Toilet, an animated YouTube series that has taken social media by storm in the months since its February debut, has proved to be as popular as it is bizarre.
In a plotline that sounds better suited to an unsettling hallucination, an army of toilet-dwelling villains—depicted as singing heads peeping out of the bathroom mainstays—has taken over the world.
Each episode sees the baddies battle it out with a group of adversaries that, at least in the Skibidi Toilet world, look a little more conventional: people whose heads consist of such hardware items as cameras, speakers and televisions. The series sees each side gain the upper hand, before power and control is wrestled back by the enemies. And all of the action takes place without any dialogue.
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While it would be tempting to dismiss the series as a bizarre niche enjoyed by few, it has quickly become a bona-fide viral success. Clips of the series, already on its 15th season, are uploaded by YouTuber DaFuqBoom, whose account's subscriber count stands at 19.8 million as of press time. Videos tagged "DaFuqBoom" have been viewed more than 2.2 billion times on TikTok.
"I am not kidding. Gen Alpha [the first generation born wholly in the 21st century] watches this for hours a day," wrote one Twitter user in a post that has been liked more than 15,000 times. "This is their Slenderman. Look up Skibidi Toilet on YouTube and see for yourself."
"I've been binge watching the Skibidi Toilet episodes and now I'm invested in the lore," commented another, who drew a slew of co-signing comments.
'Skibidi Toilet' Inspiration
The series was created by Georgia-based animator DaFuqBoom, whose real name, Alexey, was revealed in a June interview with gaming and entertainment media group Dexterto.
As well as its eerie visuals, one of Skibidi Toilet's most distinctive features is the theme music, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, heavily features the word "skibidi." The song was popularized by a TikTok meme in 2022. User @yasincengiz38 was seen dancing a jiggling his belly before being served a large platter of food.
However, DaFuqBoom's inspiration for the series was another TikTok user called Paryss Bryanne, who became known for the quick cuts and frenetic movements in her clips.
"I did a parody of her take on the 'skibidi dop dop yes yes' meme," DaFuqBoom told Dexterto. "[The] Skibidi Toilet video was a random thing, just based on [an unexpected] head popping out of the toilet."
The animator, who has nine years of experience under his belt, created the series using Source Filmmaker, a 3D computer graphics software tool. The characters are made up of assets from the classic video games Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source.
For a number of weeks, DaFuqBoom was putting out a video each day. However, he told Dexterto of his plans to scale back the frequency of the uploads to once every "[two] days because the quality of the videos has risen."
Addressing the popularity of the series, DaFuqBoom told the outlet: "It gained bigger views from the start, but I was not expecting to have it that big. It started to blow up huge somewhere during the release of [episodes] 8-9."
With the views increasing, DaFuqBoom said that the series will be here to stay for "a while."
"[The] main plotline is all planned out already, but some in-between episodes are added sometimes," he added. "It will continue for a while."
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