Show of hands: how many of you are familiar with the whole “Skibiti Toilet” thing? If you’ve been around anyone in Gen Alpha, you’ve probably heard the phrase “Skibidi” before. When I asked my kids what it meant, they rolled their eyes and assured me that it was not a bad word. ”It’s just a singing head in a toilet”, they said. ”It sings dumb songs!”
Obvs, I had to Google it and the phrase comes from a YouTube series that’s indeed about a man’s head in a toilet bowl. It wasn’t just some random weird viral vid, either. The Skibidi Toilet channel has a whole-ass plot about singing toilet-heads being at war with people that have cameras or televisions for heads. This is where Michael Bay enters the chat. He’s not one to say no to a potentially outrageous, big-budget film that involves blowing stuff up. As such, he’s now the man who is going to bring us a Skibidi Toilet movie.
In our increasingly siloed culture, where neighbor is separated from neighbor by algorithm-enforced divides, two screen icons have joined forces to bring peace and unity: Michael Bay, and toilet with a man’s singing head poking out of the drain.
Invisible Narratives, the media company run by former Paramount head Adam Goodman, where Bay serves as chief creative advisor, announced on Tuesday that the Transformers franchise director is officially working on a Skibidi Toilet project.
For the uninitiated, Skibidi Toilet is a mega-viral YouTube series that chronicles a dystopian war between a race of singing toilet-men and a race of humanoid figures with TVs, cameras, and speakers for heads.
Rendered using the crude, publicly-accessible 3D graphics software Source Filmmaker since 2023 by Georgia-based creator Alexey Gerasimov, Skibidi Toilet is the height of nascent Gen Alpha culture. The videos are depraved yet sophisticated, hyperactive yet requiring devotional attention to narrative, and gonzo yet replete with naked emblems of cultural fears around.
Sound familiar? Ever seen Transformers: Dark of the Moon?
Gerasimov uploaded the first entry of the sprawling Skibidi Toilet series to his channel in February 2023. The 11-second video swivels the viewer through a house, past a tiny man in a suit, and into a bathroom, where a man’s menacing head launches out from the drain of the toilet and vamps for the implied camera.
He sings along to an unlicensed mashup of Timbaland and Nelly Furtado’s 2007 “Give It to Me” and Bulgarian artist Biser King’s “Dom Dom Yes Yes,” which contains the lyrics “щи бъди,” or “shti dibi” (“you will be”), which sound like the nonsense word “skibidi.”
Those 11 seconds have mutated within two short years to hundreds of videos comprising hours of worldbuilding.
I will go on record right now as saying that the world does not need a Skibidi Toilet movie. There are some things that are best left as Internet sensations. From the YouTube clips I’ve seen, the Skibidi Toilet brand is made for a pretty niche audience that pays “devotional attention to narrative.” I wonder if they’d leave it as an animated head singing in a toilet bowl or if they’ll attempt to make it live action. I’m leaning towards the animated option.
When we talked about more video game movies coming down the pipeline thanks to the success of A Minecraft Movie, I said that Hollywood should make more of those types of movies aimed at children. I didn’t mean this! With that on my mind, I asked my kids, who are only familiar with it from what they’ve learned/seen from friends at school, whether they’d watch a Skibidi Toilet movie and they both said they wouldn’t. That said, I have no doubt that Bay will pull out all of the stops to make this movie into a blockbuster hit.
Photos are screenshots from Youtube/DaFuq?!Boom! and credit Jeffrey Mayer/Avalon, IMAGO/Avalon
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