From animation to meme: kickstarter for a documentary about Dingo Pictures

If you are accustomed to the community of animation fans on YouTube, you probably already heard of Dingo Pictures: the small German studio known for its productions, cheap knock-offs of famous (often Disney) films, with incredibly limited animations and amateur voice acting. These low cost films fit perfectly the “so bad it’s good” category, and for this they soon became object of analysis by YouTube channels and source of many, numerous memes, such as the well-known Yee. Phelan Porteous is the main creator of English content about the Dingo Pictures films (and much more), while in Italy the studio is mainly known thanks to Yotobi and Synergo’s videos.

Oro the dinosaur, protagonist of the Yee meme

Founded in 1992 under the name Media Concept, then Dingo Productions and finally Dingo Pictures in 1996, the studio started with audio narration of fairytales accompanied by illustrations. Later, with a bif of ambition they introduced rudimental animation blatantly plagiarizing many Disney works, entering in their era of mockbuster films production. The films, originally voiced in German, were dubbed (occasionally by the same German actors) in different European languages. The English dub is known for being extremely amateurish and full of errors in the soundtrack, with occasionally overlapping tunes. Dingo Pictures’ last production was completed in 2005, but the website kept existing until it shut down in 2021.

A full wiki is dedicated to the documentation of Dingo Pictures’ history, you can read more here! In fact, one of the main sources of information of Dingo Pictures Wiki, youtuber and musician Simon Bohnsack (known as DJ Kaito), together with artist, film maker, podcaster and current CEO of Dingo Pictures Josef “Beppo” Roderer (Jimmy Beeblebrox) organized a crowdfunding for a documentary about the studio’s history, with exclusive material and interviews called “YEE! -Behind the Meme of DINGO PICTURES”. Here you can support this incredible project of documentation and help writing a page of animation and online pop culture history!