Hello. this is a completely serious inquisition, one that has been driving me crazy for weeks now, so i am turning to reddit to hopefully be able to solve this mystery.

I have been on a quest for a long time now. I am attempting to track down the original source for the trumpet playing skull commonly referred to as "mr skeltal".

[PICTURED HERE]

https://i.redd.it/318o85w88k1c1.gif

now, if you try to read up on this anywhere online, you will be met by sea of websites all claiming that it originates from Windows 3D Movie Maker. I have strong reasons to believe that this is not the case, for a few reasons. among them are that:

1. in the trumpet skull gif, you can see that the light is reflecting off the skull and on the trumpet. as far as I've been able to find, 3DMM has baked lighting / unshaded textures.

2. if you look at the trumpet as it "doots", it "grows" but the perspective isn't actually changing, however parts of the hand are effected as well as the trumpet. hence this isnt part of the 3D animation, but is rather an edit made on top of the already exported 3D animation, with something like the "liquify" tool in photoshop.

3. regardless of point 1 and 2, the most damning part is that no one has (to my knowledge) been able to find the file in 3DMM. I have dug through the 3DMM files (and the entirety of the 3DMM customs models archive) and have not been able to find a single trace of this skeleton. there is another skeleton, but it is vastly different.

(i'd love to be proven wrong about this, and if it turned out to actually be in 3DMM I'll gladly post a video of myself eating a sock)

so with that out of the way, let me proceed to share my process so far, along with the findings I've made:

first thing I did was to go through the sources/external references of the know your meme-entry for Skull Trumpet. What I've gathered from this page and its sources is that the meme took off in 2011 after tumblr user/twitter personality wolf pupy posted a now deleted video featuring the gif, which essentially created the meme.

I have reached out to wolf puppy, and they got back to me, letting me know that they got the gif from a website that is now long gone called heathersanimations.com (the page can be accessed through the internet archive HERE). I have emailed the person who ran that website, but have yet to receive a reply.

that is however not a very likely lead to its origins, as they very likely just found it online. and im not trying to track the MEME im trying to track down the original source or even original creator of it.

my next step was trying to locate the earliest traces of it online, and by limiting google searches to specific time periods and trying a lot of different versions of the image, i eventually found a version that when ran through tinyeye reverse image search yielded results as far back as 2008. at that point it was posted to a polish forum for teenagers, and after getting a polish acquaintance to translate the page for me i wasnt much wiser. it seems like this kid just had it uploaded to their profile page along with a sea of other gifs.

this tells me that the gif was already in circulation around this time. I have however not been able to find any earlier traces of it.

a small observation ill throw in here is that the rotation of the skull looks pretty "wonky" to me, and I have a theory that what we are looking at is someone manually rotating a 3D object and taking screenshots of it. this would also explain the liquify effect on the trumpet+hand.

now, at this point I have split the gif into individual frames and separately ran them through tinyeye without further results, I have googled the specific filenames as listed on tineye, I have combed through the metadata to the best of my ability,

and I've essentially hit a wall.

this is, hopefully, where some of you more technically inclined redditors come into this. what else can be done? what else can you find? _everything_ can be of value here, the smallest most insignificant leads can be the thing that breaks this thing wide open.

help me reddit, you're my only hope.

TLDR; trumpet skull gif origins are unknown and i dont like it.