Summary
It’s been reported that Michael Bay, best known for theTransformersmovies and other films with lots of explosions, isworking on a Skibidi Toilet movie and TV franchise. Variety reported that during an interview with Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman, he confirmed that Paramount is in early talks about the adaptation, and is considering a hybrid of live-action and animation to deliver the story, which will be in the tone ofJohn Wickand District 9.
Are The Kids Alright?
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry, you’re not alone. I’m 28, which by all accounts, is not that old, and puts me firmly in the zillennial demographic, though these lines are completely abstract and made up. I am also chronically online, both because I have to be for my job and because I’m just built that way, and unfortunately, I’m also very in touch with youth culture.
I know all the TikTok trends. I’m the person my friends ask in the groupchat to explain what the ‘kids’ are talking about when they say certain things. I’m the one that accidentally adopts Gen Z brainrot slang into my vocabulary and spreads it to all my friends, making them sound like boomers desperately trying to be cool. I don’t want to be this person, but it’s the role I’ve accidentally taken.
And yet, if you ask me to explain what Skibidi Toilet is, bile starts to rise in my throat in place of an actual answer. I’ve heard the phrase. I’ve heard my equally chronically online partner say it, to a resounding, deafening silence from every millennial in the room. I’ve even seen the videos. But I could not for the life of me tell you in any certain terms what the hell it is or where it came from.
I’m Subjecting Myself To A Deep Skibidi Toilet Dive For Content
So here we are – despite the fact that having this knowledge will probably make my life worse in every conceivable wayandI’ll be more annoying to everybody I know, I’m going to try and understand what’s going on here and explain it in a way that people who aren’t under the age of 15 will understand.
Skibidi Toilet is widely considered to be the first real Gen Alpha meme to break into mainstream consciousness. It originates from a parody video ofHalf Life2’s Male 07 model’s head sticking out of a toilet, singing to a mashup of Timbaland’s 2007 classicGive It To Mefeaturing Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake, andDom Dom Yes Yesby Lebanese pop artist Biser King.
The mashup was supposedly created byTikTok user @doombreaker03, whose profile is full of equally inexplicable mashups. The hole gets deeper, though – TikTok users have been using similar mashups as early as 2022. Whoever is responsible for this, what compelled them to create this extraordinarily catchy, yet awful bastardisation of this banger from my own adolescence? I can’t say. Why do any of us create the cursed things we do?
Fun fact, when you google ‘give it to me timbaland’, one of the first search query suggestions includes the word skibidi.
You can watch all four episodes of the first ‘season’ of Skibidi Toilet on creatorDaFuq!?Boom!’s YouTube channel in just over a minute. It’s surreal, to say the least. In these four episodes alone, we see tiny figures dancing, posters of various things (cats and real people among them), people in coats with security cameras for heads, and heads with grotesque facial expressions in toilets and urinals of various sizes.
DaFuq!?Boom! has 43 million YouTube subscribers.
Further seasons have expanded on this bizarre shtick to depict an entire universe where these human-toilet hybrids, the Skibidis, are in conflict with these other human hybrids, the security camera guys, and yet more hybrids with televisions and speakers for heads. The Skibidis are a threat to humanity, so the other human hybrids form a coalition against them. Every species has a Titan, a huge version of them. At some point, the Speaker Titan got infected with a Toilet parasite and jumped to the Skibidi side.
Look, I could explain the whole lore to you, but I’m getting a headache just watching these videos and reading about them. The point is that Skibidi Toilet is big. It has fanfiction. It has games. It has memes on memes on memes. There are video essays about it.The Russian police are investigating it for ‘harm to children’. The legislative assembly of Saint Petersburg has watched these videos as part of an annual children’s safety report. Several news outlets across the world have made similar claims, citing its violence and potential effects on its young audience.
Why A Skibidi Toilet Adaptation, Then?
Money, obviously. Skibidi Toilet is shockingly popularandhas had longevity, and I kind of see why. You can’t say there isn’t any artistic quality here. The cinematography, the camera work, even the sound design is actually well put together. That’s not why kids are watching it, but while it’s slop, it’s notjustslop. It’s created a huge, bizarre narrative out of short-form videos, and the surrealism seems completely in keeping with the way memes have evolved from memes like O RLY? to… whatever is going on over on Twitter at any given moment.
The latest episode embedded above will show you why Michael Bay is a great choice for director – there are lots of explosions. It looks exactly like the big, chaotic, action-packed scenes Bay is best known for, but more surreal and kind of scary.
I’ve spent too much time thinking and writing about Skibidi Toilet today, so let me leave you with this: maybe weareold. None of us are going to want to see this movie. I got overstimulated just thinking about it. But it’s not for us, it’s for the tens of millions of pre-teens and kids who already see it as a cinematic universe and will go to watch it with their friends, or drag their parents to see it. I have no idea how an adaptation is going to get past ratings boards so these children can even legally watch it, but that’s not my problem. I’m going to go touch grass, now.
