Flubber's Weebo Used Reaction Gifs Way Before Tumblr | CBR

In 1997, Disney’s Flubber predicted the rise of the reaction GIF with the character of Weebo. Leave it to Disney to predict the future of Internet culture. In 1997, it released Flubber, a remake of its 1961 flick, The Absent-Minded Professor. Flubber is a science fiction comedy film starring Robin Williams, Marcia Gay Harden, Jodi Benson and Christopher McDonald. The film’s premise is simple enough — Williams’ character, Professor Philip Brainard, creates an elastic, sentient, green goo called Flubber in an attempt to develop a new energy source and save Medfield College from financial ruin. However, Flubber isn’t the only noteworthy creation of Brainard. That honor goes to Weebo (voiced by Benson), a robot with a wicked sense of humor and an affinity for GIFs. That’s right — Weebo used GIFs to convey her emotions throughout the film before they were invented. Although the history of GIFs can be traced back to the 1970s with the creation of the LZW compression algorithm, which was mostly used on proprietary dial-up services, it wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s that GIFs were almost exclusively used in the creation of website building. At the time, most Internet users were still using a…
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