In social networks actively discuss the series Skibidi Toilet and its literally monstrous popularity. For example, the 57th episode has gained 19 million views in two days, the others include up to 220 million times.
We will make sense of this phenomenon and tell you what is known about the author, how the show is made and why it is more properly called Shtibidi’s toilet.
What happened?
On youtube and other social media, the Skibidi Toilet series, which comes in shorts format, has been going viral in recent months. The plot tells the story of a war between skibidi toilets and agents, sometimes reaching unprecedented proportions.
The series is published on the DaFuq?!Boom! channel with nearly 25 million subscribers (and dubbed in tiktok with over 1.9 million viewers), and each video gains between 13 and 220 million views. The channel was registered on June 6, 2016 and did not reach the one million subscriber mark until November 2021. On February 7, 2023, the author poured the first Skibidi Toilet video. Over the next two months, DaFuq?!Boom! published nine clips of the series, after which the channel began an explosive growth – in the first month of spring and part of the summer, more than 20 million people subscribed to it.
According to the statistical site Tubefilter, from July 31 to August 6, DaFuq?!Boom! ranked sixth in the world in terms of views – it has been on this chart since the end of April.
DaFuq?!Boom! clips are discussed both in the Western segment of the Internet and in the Russian-speaking segment. For example, in July, a Twitter post by user @AnimeSerbia, who called the series “Slenderman of Generation Z,” and tiktok discusses that the show will make the zoomers “the next generation of old people” whose jokes will be mocked by the alphas. In the Twitter, users are asking why none of the younger ones can explain what’s going on in the show, and talk about trying to figure out the plot on their own.
Meanwhile, on youtube make tops of the strongest characters, put forward theories of the appearance of the antagonist and create fan-art: in the style of Minecraft, lego, super-realistic animation. And some bloggers play out the plots of the series in their own shorts.
How it’s done?
Each episode is a clip lasting from 5 to 15 seconds, during which the heads in the toilets perform a mashup of the tracks “Give It to Me” and “Dom Dom Yes Yes Yes” (virused thanks to Turkish big-bellied tiktoker Yasin Cengiz), and the cameramen silence them. The toilets, by the way, are more correctly called Shtibidi-toilets rather than Skibidi, since that’s the word the lead singer of the Turkish band Biser King chants.
The series was made by Russian motion designer Alexei Gerasimov, who now lives in Georgia. In an interview with Dexetro, he says he has been doing animation for nine years, and the idea for the show was born when he decided to create a parody of tiktok with the skibidi dop dop dop yes yes sound. In it, a girl performs sudden movements in which the dance of heads emerging from a toilet bowl is easily recognizable.
“The video was random, just based on a head popping out of the toilet unexpectedly,” says the artist.
The blogger creates the videos in Valve’s Source Filmmaker program, and the images for the animations are taken from Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike games.
What’s going on in the show? Watch it so you don’t have to
The series starts off innocuously enough: the first episode features a head in a toilet bowl singing the aforementioned mashup. Later on, the plot picks up momentum. YouTube speculates that the song works like a virus and starts turning people into toilet men, but whether this is the case is unknown.
By the end of the season, the “infected” already feel like masters of the unnamed city and suppress the will of the citizens.
In the second season, the Toilets continue to terrorize the settlement, attack the locals and establish their power. However, a hero emerges, a cameraman who can kill the toilet heads, but he unfortunately dies.
In the third season, the skibidi toilet heads erect monuments to the first casualty of the war, and the first cameraman develops followers. They break into the service of the holy toilet and flush it.
In season four, the battle between the cameramen and the toilet heads escalates. The G-man, a giant toilet, constantly intervenes in the war. The cameramen get tech, but the toilets keep up. In the fifth, the Cameramen wage guerrilla warfare against the toilets.
In season six, a large cameraman appears and easily defeats the “infected”, including a three-headed toilet and toilet spiders, but the toilet train sacrifices itself and helps the G-man defeat the giant.
In the next season, the Chamberlains battle the G-Toilet and find out that it can’t be flushed like the regular toilet men. Those, in turn, find the big cameraman’s hideout.
By the ninth season it begins to look like the war is about to end with the cameramen having managed to acquire a sonic weapon, but a speedy skibidi toilet comes into play, capable of destroying the giant cameramen.
The following seasons follow a similar pattern, with both sides acquiring more and more serious weapons and fighting against each other.
Over the course of 19 seasons, characters such as a regular skibidi toilet, a giant reactive skibidi toilet, a five-headed skibidi spider, different variations of the cameraman, a vantuz-man, a camera spider, a speaker spider, and others have managed to take part in the battles.
How the series will end is unknown. However, viewers paid attention to the appearance of a new character on the side of the skibidi-toilets, whose prototype was probably the author of the series himself. Perhaps he will put a decisive point in the battle.
Why is the series so popular? Frankly, it’s a mystery
The phenomenal popularity of the show is one of the most debated issues among the Zoomers. We assume that the interest in “Skibidi Toilet” arises because of the absurdity, unpredictability and grotesqueness of what happens in the videos.
The authors of Cartoonbrew wrote that one of the reasons for the virality is that the viewer is offered funny, well-animated and produced one-off movies. But most importantly, as the story progresses, the series has developed a large fan base that tries to make sense of what is going on and picks apart each episode in great detail.
In addition, some viewers follow the series because of the intense struggle between the protagonists and antagonists and hope that the cameramen will cope with the onslaught of skibidy toilets and save the city.
In the end, it is a fascinating and disturbing story about a collective struggle against a repressive regime.
