I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the passing of Geocities. This coming Sunday, October 26th, Yahoo! is shutting down the site for good. I am not going to tell you I learned HTML with Geocities, or wax nostalgic on how awesome it was that they let anyone have a website for free, and I’m not going to reflect on Geocities’ idealistic “geography” where site owners sorted themselves by concept into communities of interest.

And really, I don’t expect to do anything about it either - Yahoo! claims the Internet Archive is working on making a copy, but the effort I’ve heard about is by angry historian Jason Scott, who, along with the Archive Team (tagline: “We are going to rescue your shit”), has been crawling and archiving every Geocities URL they can find since Yahoo! made the announcement in June. The fact that they aren’t done tells you a lot about how much Yahoo! is throwing away.

It all sounds like some cartoon scenario, contrived to be solved in 30 minutes on a weekday afternoon, with plenty of time for commercials. And that’s what I’d like to focus on today.

My two favorite Geocities sites are now, and forever will be the Home of the Animaniacs Cultural Reference Guides and Stanley Lui’s Transformers On-Line Encyclopedia. If you’re reading this after October 26, 2009, don’t worry, you’ll find both sites in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

I began paying attention to these sites, along with non-Geocities entities such as The Bagpipes go to the movies as references of dubious value. To some extent I considered their value dubious first because fans lack authority, but I don’t think I believed that even then. I did believe, and still wonder, just who would be referring to these sites.

ACRG is a list of jokes in the Animaniacs cartoon:

** Show #28 ** 

"Moby or not Moby" --
  +  "Captain Stuebing" was of course the captain on "The Love Boat."  (WBB)
  -  The Ernest Borgnine comment probably refers to the sitcom "McHale's
     Navy", where he played a Naval captain in WWII.  (MB)
  -  Amazingly, both Gavin MacLeod (who played Stuebing) and Borgnine
     co-starred in "McHale's Navy".  (ML)
  +  The Warners mention *Star Trek IV* in their song to Ahab.  Whales had a
     large part in saving Earth in that movie.  (WBB)
  +  The "Don't Kill the Whales" song is sung to the (familiar?) tune
     "(What Shall We Do With A) Drunken Sailor".  (SS)
  +  Dot's "High C on the High Seas" is a tribute to Louis Armstrong. (BrettM)
  -  Starbuck looks a lot like Scotty of Star Trek.  (RJR)
  +  The "stroke" bit -- as in "stroking one's ego", the sycophantic things
     that Y,W,&D were saying to Ahab.  (SS)
  +  Ahab sees Pinocchio in the whale because in the movie, Pinocchio had to
     rescue Gepetto from being stuck inside a whale.  Saw that one coming a
     mile away.  (WBB)
  +  Ships are:  SS Minnow, the Titanic, and the Edmund Fitzgerald.  (WBB)
  +  "The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald" was a song in the 70's, by
     Gordon Lightfoot.  About a Great Lakes ore ship that sank and
     everybody died.  Tres depressing material for a hit tune.  (SS)

Like Wikipedia, ACRG is a group effort. Each contributed reference is credite to an individual (and sometimes groups), with pluses and minuses by the editor of the work saying whether the fact is verifiable or not. Unlike Wikipedia, disputed and dubious contributions are included.

Oddly, sometimes obvious references are excluded - we can tell from context here that this vignette is a parody of Moby Dick, and the title is a pun on a line from Shakespeare. Animaniacs fans presumably all know this. Likewise, viewers of the show (and readers of the Internet) will know that the SS Minnow (Gilligan’s Island) and the Titanic (from the film Titanic) are famous shipwrecks. The Edmund Fitzgerald is a less famous wreck to the audience, so it bears explaining.

To my question of what the value is of this work, the answer is (to me, now) clearly that contributing to it was rewarding. In a community of Animaniacs fans, you could gain standing by contributing to the collective knowledge about the show, but I don’t think it was only about prestige. People loved this show, and by adding to the ACRG, they expressed that love.

Transformers is the editorial work of a fanatic, Stanley Lui, who along with some other contributors wrote biographies of robots and other characters from the Transformers universe, documenting differences between the US and Japanese TV versions, as well as the US and UK comic books. There are graphical and text-only versions of the site, reminding us of the good old days of dial-up. Look closely and you won’t see much difference between the two. I could be mistaken, but from what I remember, the site used to have images taken from TV scans - there are some from comics but not nearly what I remember. Ah, the good old days of corporate cease and desist letters (I speculate).

A typical entry, gives a character’s biography as it appears in each Transformers “continuity”. Here is the beginning of the entry for Bumblebee, who was a playground favorite:

Bumblebee (Goldbug)

Function: Espionage. Transforms into a Volkswagen Beetle (”Bug”). At some time in all continuitites, he changed his name to “Goldbug” following a major body rebuild. In the comic continuities, he has since changed his name and body back to “Bumblebee.”

Cartoon Bio (US):
Bumblebee was one of the Autobots on the Ark when it crashed into Earth. He was involved in many battles, but was mainly known for being a friend to the humans Spike and Sparkplug Witwicky. He fought in many battles but was not immensely useful very often because of how small he was. However, his conversion into a supercharged Volkswagen Beetle made him a useful Autobot spy. He was changed to Goldbug when the Quintessons rebuilt him during the madness plague.

Cartoon Bio (Japan):
None submitted.

Comic Bio (US):
Shortly after being awakened on Earth, the Autobots decided that they needed to make contact with the Earthlings as quickly as possible. As a result, a number of them, led by Prowl and including Bumblebee, entered Portland, Oregon. There, they mistook a group of cars at a drive-in movie for the dominant lifeforms of the planet, not realizing that the humans inside were actually the species they wanted to meet. In enthusiasm, Bumblebee attempted to make contact with an “Earthling” by bumping into the back of one of the cars. It turned out that the car belonged to Buster Witwicky, who immediately got out to find out why the accident happened…

Contrasted with Bumblebee’s Wikipedia entry, the Transformers On-Line Encylopedia is very light. Perhaps because it is the work of fewer people, or because the Transformers story continues to be told, but I also noticed that Lui created the site with a specific scope in mind, attempting to represent the world of Transformers in a limited way:

“In the spirit of the Star Trek Encyclopedia, a reference source solely about the “official” storylines, categorized by characters, technology, places, etc. I have no episode synopses, tech specs, or toy information.”

The encyclopedia is then a completely descriptive reference to the the Transformers “continuities” as perceived by the viewer or reader. There is no analysis, no ancillary texts, no merchandise, no artists or actors. It is a reference to the stories only, for fans of the stories and the Transformers Universe.

What is most astonishing to me about Lui’s site is that roughly half of the sites he links to are still active. For example, on his page for “links to toy information“, there is one link to an official Hasbro site, one to a top-level domain (with a fancy Drupal site that is “best viewed with Internet Explorer”), and six to fan sites, all hosted on user pages at various colleges or internet service providers. None of the 4 with a tilde-fied username in the URL are still active, and of the last two, the only one that is a valid URL is hosted at Geocities competitor/knock-off FortuneCity.

So in other words, if your site is going to be on the internet for any amount of time, you had better figure out how to pay for hosting.