2008 / Video / Flash-style absurdist sketch compilation
asdfmovie
I like trains. The internet liked that this was apparently a complete sentence.
The original is off-site. HAHrchives preserves the story and a route back to it.
What happened
One minute you were meeting a muffin, the next somebody was shouting about trains. The clips turned Flash-animation sketches into a rapid-fire quote machine.
Where it came from
Tom Ridgewell, working as TomSka, uploaded the first asdfmovie in August 2008. Its tiny animated sketches were built around sudden non sequiturs, recurring voices, and jokes that ended before they had time to explain themselves.
Why it mattered
asdfmovie captures a specific kind of late-2000s web comedy: homemade, aggressively brief, and funny because it refused to give a normal setup or payoff.
How it spread
The original traveled through YouTube embeds, Flash-animation fandom, early social feeds, and quote-heavy message boards. Later installments and remixes made the strange little universe a durable shared vocabulary.
Keep going
The same corner of the internet
“I am le tired.” A tiny Flash map turned nuclear panic into permanent internet dialogue.
Badger badger badger badger. Mushroom. Mushroom.
“Caaaarl, that kills people!”
A duck walked up to a lemonade stand and asked the only question that mattered: got any grapes?