B
y October 2025, Boom, the mysterious creator of Skibidi Toilet, was heir to the YouTube throne. He had grown his twisted brainchild into the world’s most popular animated web series. It was a Happy Meal toy away from irreversible domination.
The Skibidi Toilet story had started just two years earlier. On Feb. 7, 2023, Alexey Gerasimov, a Russian-Georgian animator known as Boom, uploaded an 11-second clip. Shot like a video-game cutscene, it saw the head of a bedraggled, grinning man emerge from a toilet. “Skibidi dop dop dop yes yes,” the man sings over a bouncy, Eurotrash techno beat as his face crudely spins. “Skibidi double u reeh reeh.”
That nonsensical microdrama took off. By late 2023, the series had racked up 65 billion views, earned Gerasimov more than 30 million subscribers and was named YouTube’s top trend of the year. In classrooms and living rooms across the globe, crazed children parroted its maddening theme song to the dismay of teachers and parents.
It was widely seen by these exasperated adults as a prime example of “brainrot” — but over the next couple of years, the meme became a multi-dimensional series with a cinematic universe. Slightly older fans entered the fray. The intellectual property, or IP, had the potential, as a character animated by Gerasimov once joked, to make “Skibillions.” A network of Skibidi Toilet “analysts” emerged, making fan edits and, in some cases, their living.
