StickyFlicks — Original Flash Animation Studio
An original Flash animation studio with its own series, its own characters and its own theatre — built when Flash animation on the web was barely two years old. Four named series, a members' area, a shop, and seven years of traffic logs. **The films were considered lost. All 119 files have been recovered from the Internet Archive and 67 of them play again, with sound.**
By 2000 the web had discovered Flash could carry animation, and a lot of people made banners with it. StickyFlicks made cartoons.
The site was structured like a small studio rather than a portfolio: a theatre with its own
menu, a members’ area behind a password, a shop, and a run of original series with
recurring characters. Mr Pants had episodes. Jarnak ran to at least six. Young Dictators and
Dumbhead had their own menus and character pages. There is a stickygram — an animated e-card
generator — and an animated preloader with the studio’s own bomb-faced mascot.
The work itself holds up. “The Truck Stops Where?” Part Tew opens on a sunset over a roadside diner called the Grissle Stop, then plays out an argument between two men in a truck stop in flat-colour, sharp-lined character animation with full voice and score. It runs nearly three minutes at twelve frames a second — 2,219 hand-built frames.
The films carry their own credits, which is how the collaborators are known at all: Kelly Armstrong directed, Eli Balser produced, David Burke was creative director, Greg Emison storyboarded. The copyright line reads “© 2000 - Stickyflick Studos, Inc.”, typo included.
Flash Player was discontinued in 2020, which made every one of these files unplayable. They were recovered from the Internet Archive and rebuilt frame by frame — the picture exported from the original vector timelines, the audio pulled from the embedded soundstreams, and the two remarried at each film’s true frame rate rather than the rate its header claimed.
What Gavin did
This needs a line from Gavin. The studio is his — it appears on his own résumé as Stickyflick Studio — but the films credit four other people by name in the roles of director, producer, creative director and storyboard artist. His specific contribution is not stated anywhere in the recovered material.
Original IP — four named series: Mr Pants, Jarnak, Young Dictators, Dumbhead
