Research For Project: The Origin Of Flash

Today, I spent around an hour researching the origins of Flash.



Flash Animation

The origins of Flash


Flash was originally created by Macromedia in the 1900’s but was later bought by Adobe in 2005.

It was first majorly used by John Kricfalusi, the Ren and Stimpy creator when he made a short internet cartoon titled George Liquor. After the success of George Liquor, Kricfalusi went on to make more Flash animations such as music videos, shorts for icebox.com and adverts. This led to a growth in popularity of the Flash industry and by this point in time, Flash cartoons were popping up all over the place.

Following George Liquor, a new Flash cartoon was introduced called WhirlGirl on February 26, 1999 created by David B. Williams. It was an extremely popular webshow about a girl living in the future and fighting for freedom (a freedom fighter).

In 2001, the first ever to-be Flash full-feature cinema film started production titled “Lil’ Pimp”. For unknown reasons, Sony eventually decided not to showcase it in cinemas despite it having a large budget and known voice actors such as William Shatner and Bernie Mac. Eventually, the film was released on DVD.

Since then, a number of popular cartoons have been produced using Flash such as Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, The Bobinogs, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi and Happy Tree Friends.

Flash is a commonly used program for producing online series such as Off-Mikes by ESPN, Animax Entertainment: Gotham Girls by Warner Brothers, Crime Time by Future Thought Productions and HomestarRunner by Mike and Matt Chapman. These are the popular shows created by actual companies but fanimations are immensely popular among the community as well.

Fanimations are animations made by fans based off a certain franchise. Popular fanimations include the forty minute movie, Nazo Unleashed by Chakra-X based off Sonic the Hedgehog, the ongoing Warrior Cats fanimation by SSSWarriorCats based off Warrior Cats by Erin Hunter and the immensely popular web shorts, Sonic Shorts based off Sonic the Hedgehog which are a number of hilarious clips put together by a number of different animators.

This shows that Flash is a pretty easy program to use as most fanimations are produced by people who only learnt to use Flash by themselves or from other’s tutorials and not by actually attaining Flash as a career.


This research was done via internet however, I'm planning on picking up some books at the library to do some more research some time this week.



Tomorrow, I'll go onto more research such as Flash used in actual music videos, other animating programs and more.