Smiling Friends is like many of the best animated series in that it looks like it was made for children. Depending on your mood, its name could sound scary or good.
The Smiling Friends employees are given a simple task by their boss in order to make clients smile. In the pilot, the pair try to cheer up a man who is holding a gun to his head. Frowning Friends set up shop across the street by the 7th episode of the show. They're the bizarro versions of us, but what's the end game? "It's just pissing me off now." The new outfit draws a crowd, promising to reveal the brutal cruelties of reality, and it is easy to make people frown than it is to make them smile. Stock footage of military marches and burning trees is what Frowning Friends grotesqueries look like. Charlie says, "Is this really supposed to be?" The internet has been worse for me.
Much of the humor and darkness of Smiling Friends can be found on the internet. The show and the joke are from a time when the internet felt more open and free. Smiling Friends was created in the early and mid-aughts internet animation and humor, a time when colorful cartoons about bopping badgers spread like wildfire and kids had to install the latest version of flash player to keep up. Hadel says that when he was a child, he meant to go to his friend's house and watch the worst video they could find. When kids crowded around a computer and beat up a George W. Bush, they went to shock sites like Meatspin and Lemon Party. It wasRotten.com that was the first website that I ever went on. It must have been seven years ago. It's not great. Do you think it is? Perhaps it is.
Both Hadel and Cusack grew up in this time period. The younger of the two started making cartoons as a kid, but in his early twenties he began watching videos on animation and uploading shorts to the site, and he has produced his own show, YOLO Crystal Fantasy, and a parody episode of Rick and Morty. Hadel, known online as Psychicpebbles and the world's strongest gaming player, was building a following with various online and offline activities.
He was a bigger personality on the video sharing site for animation than I was. Both of us wanted to do TV. Smiling Friends was one of the projects we came up with after teaming up.
Hadel began working on games and animation on Newgrounds. Insiders knew where to find the good stuff, even though Newgrounds was known for its violent stick figures. If the internet was a Wild West, Newgrounds was the saloon owner and flash player was the six- shooter. Hadel says he started seeing stuff uploaded there that was on par with what was on television. The friendly war was inspiring. The cartoons were completed by one person. As excited as I was for Family Guy episodes, I was equally excited for Tomorrow's Nobody. He was excited that both were important in his mind, but one cost millions of dollars and the other cost nothing.
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