Anyone who is a parent to children of a certain age has to deal with some familiar horrors. Roblox, Minecraft, online “influencers”, and YouTube videos of other people playing video games. Buried deep in these horrors is something known as Skibidi Toilet.
What the hell is Skibidi Toilet, the rest of you ask?
Skibidi Toilet is a machinima web series of YouTube videos and shorts created by Alexey Gerasimov and uploaded on his YouTube channel DaFuq!?Boom!. It is produced using Source Filmmaker.
The series follows a fictional war between human-headed toilets and humanoid characters with electronic devices for heads, known as Speakermen. There are also Titans involved, and the craze has spread to Roblox with skins kids can use to recreate the adventures. It really is as awful as it sounds. I can confirm this because my children are unfortunately right in the target audience.
It is massive. There are nearly 100 official videos and merchandise can be purchased online. Roblox hosts dozens of fan-made games based in the universe, with Skibidi Toilet Tycoon logging over 75 million plays.
There were even questions about the impact of the phenomenon on young people in the Indonesian Parliament.
According to Variety filmmaker Michael Bay is going to bring this to the screen. He is talking to former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman and they have a project in-flight. Goodman said:
“We are absolutely in talks right now, both on the television side and the earliest conversations right now on the film side. But it’s not a be-all, end-all for us.”
The feeling is that Skibidi Toilet is prime to become a cinematic phenomenon. This means that Hollywood is coming late to the party, just as something is fading, and they will kill it stone dead for a few dollars. This is their way.
Now my children have wandered into my office and seen that I am writing about this and are insisting on telling more about it and asking lots of questions. Will the horror ever end?