Okay, I made a lot of icons. But those little 100×100 images have gone from “little” to “miniscule” in the ensuing years as screens went super-high-definition… so there isn’t really much point in presenting most of them. I have, however, kept a choice few for display — most of them from my animated .gif collection, as it turns out — simply because they were so much fun to make and I enjoy showing them off even now. If there are others that you remember and want to see again, let me know.
I mean, I guess it makes sense that if you’re settling on Day-Glo Hoth, you’d beard up and grow out your hair? But who else was waiting for Riddick to shout “you… shall not… pass!” at Toombs and his crew? Okay, maybe that was just me, but it also made me think of the guardian of the Bridge of Death in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and I think if he’d asked this question while interrogating Toombs, the mercenary wouldn’t have survived nearly as long. (Unless he asked for clarification about the type of swallow, that is…)
In 2004 or 2005, I encountered the Dancing Spiderman .gif and (naturally) thought it was hilarious. This was during a period of time when I was experimenting with animated .gifs myself, and was also focused on comedic elements. The thought, “wouldn’t it be hilarious if that was Riddick doing the dance?” set me off on a quest to see if I could make it happen. In this case, it involved breaking the existing .gif down frame-by-frame for a recoloring job that also involved filling the character out a little to make him look more muscular. I think I traumatized several people with the result, LOL!
Also, contrary to prevalent opinions at the time of its debut, Riddick is not doing the dance from “Napoleon Dynamite.” Know Your Meme has identified the dance as being performed by a K-Pop group in a music video. Which adds its own level of hilarity to the whole thing.
Aye-ayes are adorable. Especially the little babies when they’re bald and demented-looking. It looked like a house elf or maybe a goblin to me — this was, of course, back when J. K. Rowling seemed like a much more enlightened person — so adding a classic Dobby quote to the picture seemed like the best way to drive that home. I suspect that this little guy would be more interested in snitching your eggs than preventing you from accessing Platform 9 3/4, though.
Okay, so you may have already guessed that I was a big Buffy fan back in the day, and I also loved the spin-off Angel. (This was back when most of us still thought Joss Whedon could do no wrong… so much for that, right?) But what you might not know is that Illyria ended up being my absolute favorite character. Both for the incredible arc of it all (I could write pages trying to sift through all of its nuances) and for the incredible balm of getting to watch Amy Acker play out her own death scene and then promptly come back as an entirely new character without skipping a beat. So this adorable little octopus, recolored to match her a little more, gets to be the new God-King of our — sorry, her — primordium.
Izza octopuddie! Honestly, I love octopuses (octopi? octopodes?) LOTS, but is there any other creature that can look simultaneously adorable and like an Eldritch Horror? All this baby needs is a tiny pair of wings and she’ll be ready to conquer eternity.
Is he the Energizer Riddy? Or maybe the Necromonger Bunny? If you were conscious of American media back in the ’90s and ’00s, there’s no way this guy didn’t go thumping across your TV at some point. Now here he is in “Holy Half-Dead” (Batman!) form. If you keep what you kill, what do you bet this guy has a dead battery collection somewhere that would terrify any environmentalist? Or maybe he’s just a fwuffy widdle bunny… with shivs. (This image is slightly larger than the others, because I found the original — but still very small — file I used to create the icon. So instead of getting the 100×100 version, you get the “full-size” version. Yay?)