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When stick figures fought

animationobsessive.substack.com

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81–90 of 148 posts

Re: When stick figures fought

#81

Post by jb1991 »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #57

I owe my technology career to Flash. Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together. This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate. Nothing has come close since.

The product itself still exists as Adobe Animate, I think (or one of the Adobe CC tools). It's just as good or better than it ever was, with the same workflow. But instead of exporting to SWF now people just export to video and share it on video platforms. Lots of great stuff still being done with it on Youtube.

Re: When stick figures fought

#82

Post by dmacj »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #70

Oh man I knew exactly what it was when I read the title. Xiao Xiao (and Madness) was the best. Watched them over and over again with friends on my family dell. What a great memory.

Loved Madness, surprised it didn’t get more mentions here. The combination of over the top violence, techno music and hints at a deeper underlying story is what made the series stick for me even more than Xiao Xiao.

Re: When stick figures fought

#83

Post by mcpar-land »

enricozb wrote: post #21

I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval. Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".

if you liked toribash, also check out Your Only Move Is Hustle (or YOMI hustle) which is similarly 'turn based' but in 2d. Closest thing I've found to playable Xiao Xiao.

Re: When stick figures fought

#84

Post by aj_hackman »

blacklion wrote: post #54

I remember series of stick man fighting cartoons which starts from simple kung-fu/gun porno in big office tower of (presumably) evil corporation, but progressed to some infernal fights, with Jesus, ghosts, hell, etc. I'm not sure it was XiaoXiao, I (don't) remember some other letter combination in the names of files.

Madness Combat

Re: When stick figures fought

#86

Post by phantasmish »

bovermyer wrote: post #69
Semaphor wrote: post #20

Ah, XiaoXiao. Under the amazingly named `E:\Storage\Old\Fun\old\XiaoXiao` I have fight (xiaoxiao1).avi, XiaoXiao_City_Plaza.swf, and xiaoxiao2.swf - xiaoxiao9.swf

I'm jealous. My files from those days did not survive; too many hard drive failures and lost or destroyed CDs. This is particularly sad to me because I dabbled in Flash animation too back then, since I was in art school at the time. None of my creations survived. Some were even acceptable work.

Archive.org has a lot of the old flash stuff, including Xiao Xiao.

Re: When stick figures fought

#88

Post by SeanDav »

> Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different, according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to copyright. Nike was in the clear.

I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyright in any case ... /sarcasm

I could even cite the original ruling against Zhu as a precedent for extra kharma points.

Re: When stick figures fought

#89

Post by p2edwards »

coryfklein wrote: post #71

Is there anywhere you can watch these old flash creations like Xiao Xiao and Homestar Runner with the original vector graphics? The reproductions I’ve seen on YouTube are terrible, in part because of the obvious video artifacts that don’t preserve the edges, but also because it loses all interactivity .

H*R is up again.

https://homestarrunner.com/main

Using Ruffle. Like the others, it's somewhat recent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner#cite_ref-18

Re: When stick figures fought

#90

Post by observationist »

SeanDav wrote: post #88

> Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different, according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to copyright. Nike was in the clear. I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyrig…

It's not about right or wrong, it's about how many lawyers you can afford. If you can afford lots of lawyers, you can run out the clock, drain your opponents budgets, craft laws and lobby for their passage, and all sorts of creative ways of getting around doing the right thing.

A random creator in China in the early oughts wouldn't have a chance in hell against Nike or any other big corporations, trademark and copyright isn't and wasn't set up for foreign citizens to leverage IP against domestic entities. Without starting with a big legal team and a US corporation and having all the reams of paperwork and registrations and forms in triplicate, he just wasn't playing the same game. He should have been reimbursed or gotten a royalty, from a moral standpoint, but he didn't have any valid legal standing.

A court tried to be generous in the interpretation of the law in order to grant him his first victory, and that would probably have been a good precedent, but the law isn't really designed to be flexible like that - it's very rare that "the right thing" ends up congruent with how the law works in practice.

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