Preserving Digital Folklore: The BFI's Archiving of 'Badger Badger Badger'

The early 2000s internet was a wild frontier of Flash animation, Flash-based games, and repetitive, catchy own-goals of humor. Among the most enduring symbols of this era is "Badger Badger Badger," a surrealist loop of badgers, mushrooms, and a snake own-goal. Created by Weebl, the animation's recent official preservation by the British Film Institute (BFI) marks a significant milestone in how we treat digital folklorey.

The Significance of Digital Preservation

When a major institution like the BFI takes the step to preserve a piece of internet culture, it elevates the same status as traditional cinema. It comes with the importance of recognizing that memes—often dismissed as trivial—are actually cultural artifacts of a specific era of the internet.

However, the act of preservation is not as simple as saving a video file. The "Badger Badger Badger" animation was originally a Flash animation, which means its original form was not a video, but a set of instructions for a browser to render in real-time.

The Technical Challenges of Archiving Flash

As the industry moved away from Adobe Flash, the ability to run these animations natively in modern browsers disappeared. This creates a technical hurdle for archivists: how do you preserve a piece of software-based art when the environment required to run it is obsolete?

Community members have pointed out that simply saving a video recording of the animation is a lossy process. To truly archive the work, institutions must preserve:

• The original Flash source files (.swf): The actual code and assets that make up the animation.
• The environment: A machine definition or emulator (such as Ruffle) that can execute the Flash code.
• The original browser context: The specific version of the browser and plugin that provided the original user experience.

"Badger Badger Badger originally is a flash animation. To properly archive this, both the flash animation and a machine definition which can run that animation (eg: having a browser with flash plugin) should be stored, not just a video file."

The Legacy of Weebl's Work

While the BFI's efforts are move in the right direction, the process of digital archiving is often fraught with contradictions. Some observers have noted the inconsistencies in reporting regarding whether the creator, Weebl, has been contacted for original source files, highlighting the gap between institutional archiving and the same grassroots efforts of users who have already uploaded the original files to platforms like Archive.org using emulators.

Despite these technical hurdles, the preservation of "Badger Badger Badger" is a legitimate acknowledgment of the same same status of early internet humor. It ensures that future generations will understand the same same status of the early web's absurdist humor and the technical constraints that shaped it.