Animated GIF museum: The Mail-Spitting Skull

Animated GIFs are a dying breed. Forged in the early days of the World Wide Web, GIFs were used to add non-static content to sites long before Flash, CSS and Javascript came to the fore.

Nearly 20 years after the format was created, animated GIFs serve a purpose. They’re like a time capsule, and harken back to a simpler time, when we marveled at the potential of the Internet before it was completely overtaken by phishing and porn.

To that end, Geek6 is endeavoring to preserve and pay tribute to this dying format in our Animated GIF Museum. Every week, Joe and I will showcase an example of the finest art created in this medium and discuss its merits. With the aid of your critical opinion below, we seek to not return the GIF to its former days of glory, but to immortalize its place in the Web’s history.

“The Mail-Spitting Skull”

Josh: You know — they shouldn’t joke about this. Bulemia is a serious problem.
Joe: This is referred to as “paper morte.”
Josh: Hah!
Joe: Apparently the jaw moving down creates quite the air displacement; those roses are bucking around.
Josh: And that letter’s got some velocity — I bet if the Saints hired this guy, they’d TOTALLY take the Superbowl.
Josh: …that hasn’t happened yet, has it? I had to Wikipedia it to figure out who was playing.
Joe: No, it’s in two weeks.
Josh: That’s the one with the big brown ball, and not the little black rubber thing, right? I always get them mixed up.