UPDATE: This shrine is now its own site!
Further updates will be there but this page will stay for now as an archive. :)
Check out It's Not Stupid, It's Advanced!
Invader Zim. That Nickelodeon cartoon. A dystopian cult classic. The darling of Hot Topic and scene kids everywhere.
And by god, do I fucking adore this stupid cartoon and it's amazing characters and sometimes absolutely ghoulish storylines and it's incredible soundtrack! It's just. so. good. If you're not familiar with the show, just... holy hell where do I even begin??
Per Google: "Zim dreams of greatness. Unfortunately, though, he's hopelessly inept as a space invader. Desperate to be rid of the annoying Zim, his planet's leaders send him on a mission to infiltrate Earth, providing him with leftover, cobbled-together equipment. To their consternation, Zim succeeds in setting up a base on Earth and infiltrating human culture, posing as a human child as he plots the planet's downfall. Only Zim's archnemesis, Dib, recognizes that Zim is an alien, and of course, nobody believes Dib's claims."
Despite being a critically aclaimed, award-winning and groundbreaking animated series, Nickelodeon pretty much set the series up for failure from the start. Putting the series in progessively worse timeslots, times that were aimed for younger kids rather than the older kids the show was intended for, leading to abysmal ratings.
And then they cancelled it, only 27 episodes through an intended 40.
We. were. robbed.
And that was it. Radio silence. For years. There were rumors of reboots, of movies. Nothing ever came to fruition. There were a few conventions. Some bit-parts in various Nickelodeon video games. Eventually a pretty great comic series started in 2015, which did finally assuage the grief a little.
And then.
Then.
It finally happened.
On April 4, 2017, over sixteen years since the series' debut, Nickelodeon finally, finally made an official announcement:
WE WERE ACTUALLY GETTING AN HONEST-TO-GOD MOVIE!
It took about two and a half more years, but finally a movie, with the original voice cast no less, made it's way to Netflix.
And goddamn, was it worth the wait.
Creative, hilarious, beautifully animated, and, in my opinion, pretty damned satisfying in character development and plot, "Enter the Florpus" turned out to be a wonderful, if much overdue, loveletter to the fans.
I mean how can you not love a movie that starts with a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure-esque anime sequence?
The whole movie is so well done, I find myself happy-stimming and laughing like a maniac through the entire thing. Without a doubt it'll be a staple of my entertainment options, along with the original series, for another 20 years at least.
Oh yeah. I have a fancharacter for this franchise. How could I not?
Meet Xet. Her father worked for Membrane Labs, dying in an accident there. Her mother, severely mentally ill, had a psychotic break and tried to kill her shortly after her father's death. After her mother was hospitalized, likely permanently, Membrane himself took pity on the essential orphan and took her in. She's now the new kid in Dib's class, a quick outcast by choice, and more or less fast friends with the very talkative Dib.
I have actually written some stuff with her in it, though some of it needs updating due to being well over a decade old. I am considering publishing it if anyone's interested (let me know I guess?), but I'm a little nervous as I haven't published any of my fiction in years. Also it was started looong before "Enter the Florpus" was even a gleam in Jhonen's eye, so it disregards those events entirely and I don't think I could do much to fit it into Xet's narrative at this point, so oh well. It's an AU anyway.
Also a little tempted to make like an ask blog on Tumblr for Xet... Idk.
There's all of one Invader Zim fansite I know of that's still standing, but it's beginning to break down. Room With A Moose is getting difficult to access and throws errors. So I may end up personally archiving the various content on there over time. But in the meantime, here's a few other goodies to enjoy. Cursors I made myself, a couple fonts that probably came from Room With A Moose in the first place, and the wicked Winamp skin used on this very page, that I've been using on Winamp for many many years!
Audio clips from the show & movie that I like or find useful (for instance, "Incoming TRANSMISSION!!" is great as a text or email notification!).
And here I offer a couple of playlists. The first is a YouTube playlist consisting of my favorite Invader Zim AMVs (amateur music videos), fan animatics, and the like. The second is a Spotify playlist I created for ZADF, in this case standing for Zim and Dib Frenemies. Sometimes they get along, sometimes they're trying to kill each other; these songs hopefully evoke the range of emotions reasonably well. Basically they're songs that have or could be used for IZ AMVs, I guess.
Invader Zim quotes that live rent-free in my head to this day.
* from the comic series
Screenshots and comic panels I enjoy, out-of-context.
Sorta kinda SPOILERS ahead!
Links to other fansites, fanprojects, and general cool Zim stuff.