The Downfall of Disney's Virtual Worlds (PART ONE) Toontown, Club Penguin, and Pixie Hollow
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- čas přidán 17. 05. 2024
- So, you know how I said I was going to make a video with all of Disney’s virtual worlds? Well, you’re still getting that, but in two parts. This first video tackles the three biggest players of the Disney virtual world sphere, Toontown Online, Club Penguin, and Pixie Hollow Online. In this video, I detail what these games were, why people loved them, why people didn’t-so-love them, and why they ultimately all kicked the bucket. and And one of them is something…. A little different.
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Toontown Preservation Project: toontown.online
Disney's Online Worlds Wiki: disneysonlineworlds.com
Izzzyzzz's Club Penguin video: • The Rise and Fall Of C...
Intro: 0:00
Toontown: 2:20
Club Penguin: 25:37
Pixie Hollow: 41:03
Conclusion: 1:01:43
Credits: 1:02:56
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the Disney corporation; this video has been created for the purposes of historical education and entertainment. This video is intended for an adult audience and contains mild language and references to adult themes.
Keywords: Toontown Online, Toontown Rewritten, Club Penguin, Club Penguin Rewritten, Pixie Hollow Online, We The Pixies, Disney, Virtual Worlds, 2000s nostalgia, 2010s nostalgia
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Congrats!!
yay~ I'm so happy how fast you're growing
congrats!! :D
That's incredible! I'm so happy you're finally big enough to get sponsorships :D
Please please do a video on stardoll 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻
Love this video!!
Actually Tinkerbell wasn't upset about being a tinker fairy! She was upset about the fact that tinker fairies weren't allowed to go to the mainland to help with the changing of the seasons despite creating all the tools that the other fairies use during it! She only wants to change her talent to get to the opportunity to go the mainland not because she didn't like being a tinker!
PERIOD
I just watched the movies yesterday and there was a point where she said she could do more then a "stupid tinker"
@ashquest259 that is forever embedded in my brain 😂
she didnt liked it from the start, you can even see that she sees the hammer when she was born but didnt even touched it, she was not interested
and when she looked in what place they work she was dissapointed bcs everyone else's power looked really cool
Its a little sad that it was some kind of predestined thing ans it dosnt matter if you like your talent or not
totally
Fun fact about the Cogs: They were originally called Suits and were real businessmen, but the Disney execs didn't like that, so they turned them into robots-but they didn't tell the execs they were BUSINESS robots.
What is a business robot lol
@@clownEfactory robots that do business idk, that's what cogs are
that's incredible
fite toontown
@@ooops8415 holy shit ooops toontown
Pixie Hollow was, and still is, my all time favorite game ever. I genuinely was so upset when it ended. I remember printing all my fairies out and putting them into a binder and writing out backstories and doing in depth research. It was what I spent most of my time doing. I never talked to anyone while playing, just grinding in game. My favorite game was the Silvermist tadpole bounce. I’d spend hours reading and fixating on any aspect of the franchise and near exclusively discussing the changes in canon and how said canon changed from the books to the movies.
I was obsessed with Rani especially due to her being the first flightless fairy and how disability was shown and represented within the world. Honestly, it’s interesting how within the books, a lot more representation of marginalized communities was shown, but within the more mainstream, marketable movies, Secret of the Wings is one of the few instances I can really think of where they discussed fairies with what is considered ‘out of the norm’. It deals with stigma in a way that, while not perfect, is good to show small children that just because people are different for one reason or another, you shouldn’t fear.
Putting this into words, I feel like this should have been an early sign I was autistic…
If your favorite mini game was the tadpool bounce thing I have exciting news for you!!! One of the fan recreations of pixie hollow actually has that mini game as fully functional!!! I don’t remember the name of the site, but there’s only 2 fan recreations so it isn’t that hard to find!!
@@sprire2840 I know! I found it sometime in 2021 and it made me so unbelievably happy!!! I should check it out again! Have they gotten more sections up and running? I remember a lot weren’t accessible yet!
@@sprire2840 I know! I found it sometime in 2021 and it made me so unbelievably happy!!! I should check it out again! Have they gotten more sections up and running? I remember a lot weren’t accessible yet!
I also used to print out my fairies too! I actually would take screenshots of the clothes that I liked but didn't have the diamonds or membership to buy and make paper dolls of them instead so I could mix and match the clothes/
I remember finally getting money to actually buy membership and stuff only for the servers to shut down a week later
the world healed when you posted this
Dude I feel the same, her videos are refreshing somehow
@@Calcet1nSan forreal!!!
the quality of the channel is insane, even if it's been only been a few months since the first upload, she srsly has talent 😭
Nature is healing once again.
If I remember correctly, the Toontown Online team more specifically Jesse Schell, did mention that they used corporate names to name these cogs and secretly named them in reference to Disney's corporate workers through their files. Funny thing is that the Toontown Online team has shaded Disney many times.
It gets deeper. Corporate Clash made The Chairman Canon and named him after Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney.
@@daniexists6I'm so used to him being referred to as Bob Iger that I was confused for a second there. "Wait, we had two Iger's??!"
@@daniexists6 personally i would name him after Chapek.
ToonTown is literally just a metaphor for itself and corporate disney lmao. They actually got yelled over the first iteration of cogs because it was "offensive" to hard-working businessmen that built Disney
I hate how the state of children's monetization is normalized... It's never okay to aggressively target them with FOMO, manipulative emotional investment, etc. when they have no concept of money and trust everyone. I think it'll severely mess up their worldview (worried about looking poor, bully others for not being able to afford something) and Pixie Hollow is an egregious example of that. Thanks for making this video! It was informative and entertaining
I will forever stand by the idea that FOMO is not only an extremely predatory "game mechanic", but that it is also a major killer of many online games (because many grow wise to it or outright refuse to buy into it). It's just unethical and gross.
I get wanting whales, but I question hunting for child whales.
@@Bezaliel13 in most cases it targets mommy's credit card. not that that makes it any more credible or okay, but the term "child whale" made me chuckle and i doubt there aren't that many 7 year old nigerian princes playing the game
@@mac_sour
When will parents learn to guard their credit cards? Seriously, if that is what these games need for children to be whales, they should have gone extinct by now.
"Manipulative emotional investment"
Looking at you Webkinz...
I was in a Mint in Cashbot HQ and a toon was saying I shouldn't have come in if I hadn't maxed out the sound gag. I told him I had a job and a wife and he asked me "does your wife know you're bad at Toontown?"
I can't even be mad that's one of the funniest gaming experiences I've ever had.
“Does your wife know you’re bad at toontown” is genuinely the funniest sentence I’ve ever read in my life. 10/10 no notes
but did she know? this is really important.
"your wife should get with me, someone who's actually good at Toontown"
after my pixie hollow membership expired, I remember the utter shock and heartbreak I felt when I logged in to see ALL my membership exclusive furniture in my home was automatically put back into my inventory and can't be taken out w/o subscribing again
Woah, that's low
damn that is cruel!!
animal jam did this too iirc!! it's why I never logged in again after my last membership ended
@@colorbar.s such a scummy move, it was my final straw too
Literally fantage and club penguin did this
Fun fact: Toontown makers were actually TOLD BY the working executives that they couldn't be called 'bosses' or 'executives' which was the idea in the OG planning of Toontown Online. So, the creative team said 'why don't we just make them robots?' the execs said 'sure!' and the creative team didn't specify about all the cogs (robots) being workmen still
I loved the baking part of Pixie Hollow, as well as any images of baked goods in that game. Something about illustrated food (especially pastries) makes me so happy.
Yesss
I’m so sad to this day that Pixie Hollow has closed 😢if there’s a reloaded game or something that anyone can alert me about id be appreciative ❤
@@rach3092 There are two! One is "We the Pixies" and the other is "Fairy ABC." One allegedly glitches and doesn't run as well as the other. I don't remember which, but it'll probably be easy to find out since there's only two of them.
Edit: I feel like this was mentioned in the video but I can't remember.
If you’re burnt out by Disney, I think Poptropica could be a fun topic to talk about soon! I loved that game so much
Wow I haven’t heard about that game in a while, feels nostalgic
Omg poptropicaaa
A poptropica vid would be awesome, I always wanted to know all the lore on that but wasn’t ever able to piece it together myself.
I miss Poptropica so much, it would be great to see a video on it. It was a really upsetting day when i came back to it and suddenly most of the islands were subscription only, but i haven't been back since
@@LunarRaevyn they also removed the ability to use the costumizer unless you’re on one specific island, & even before that, I feel like they started kind of phasing out advertisement NPCs with unique costumes.
I miss the days when you could steal a pair of oversized wings off a Monster High ad.
It’s sad how the Pixie Hollow franchise essentially discontinued after the NeverBeast movie in 2015. I loved watching this series as a kid and still love it now. In fact, it actually had influenced the world-building of my own fantasy series as well.
I remember playing Pixie Hollow Online but I was so little. I did remember being locked out of majority of activities because of the membership though. It sucked. The classism in Pixie Hollow smh
club penguin owned my life for a solid 5 years. pixie hollow was another one i loved, never played it that much. i never played toontown because i was convinced that fully 3d games would blow up my computer 💀
idk with the quality of some computers back then it may have been possible haha
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Since I was a kid I always felt connected to the tinker talent. I’ve always loved tinkering with and making things, taking things apart to see how they work! The first movie sparked my love of music boxes and taking them apart and putting them together. I’ve also always loved tiny objects and making tiny things out of acorns and pebbles and twigs, and the tinker bell movies sparked that interest even more! Now I’m older and I still long to be a tinker fairy but instead I make clay art and costumes, EVA armor, elf ears, flower bloom hats, fairy wings, mushroom earrings! It’s like beta version goblin core cause I collect found objects and little trinkets that I make into things and jewelry! Being a tinker is the best!
THATS SOUNDS SO COOL
It's basically being an engineer and inventor but with fairy vibes it's so cool honestly. Other than that the light and water fairy talents were the coolest to me. IDK it was fun to watch
I am more of an artist than a craftsman myself, but I always loved the spirit of what tinker fairies stood for. That their purpose and source of joy wasn't ever to be *good* the first time, every time, but instead to discover and learn through experimentation. It's in their name! I found great comfort in that as a kid who struggled with perfectionism and the pressure to have something you were immediately good at to be committed to for the rest of your life.
ooooh i was a shallow kid i only chose tinker talent when making my fairy because that was tinkerbell’s talent and ofc as the main character she’s the coolest and i wanted to be cool 💀
most times tho i chose water cause water was the coolest talent, moreso than being a tinker, and silvermist was my favourite character. Also same with the music box thing.
Hey! So, longtime Toontown player, starting all the way back in 2003. I can help with a few of the things:
-Yes, Disney was ultra aware, apparently, about the Cogs. The original plan was apparently just average businessmen called Suits who would turn into clowns upon defeat. This was a cancelled plan after Roy Disney, the nephew of Walt and the dude in charge of the animation department, came to talk to them about how it was disrespectful to the businessmen who founded the company. So they said "we'll make 'em robots!" and they okay'd it not knowing they were still planning to keep them as robot businessmen.
-A lot of the basis for Toontown was a mix of Roger Rabbit (where the concept of Toontown came from), the Scrooge McDuck comics and Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes. It's why speech bubbles are used as the dialogue overall.
-In short, while Disney was paying the server costs, all things considered the folks making the game said they treated it as this other thing and didn't come breathing down their necks much, trusting them fully with their IP. After all, this was an experiment created by some former Imagineering folks.
-The cogs sharing some design choices were a necessity due to space on harddrives at the time.
do u know why ppl call it secret friends vs true friends? :-)
@@isabellacraig3168 It's simple. Secret Friends was the version of chat in the early days that you had to give someone a code for it to work because it was the only way you could talk because speedchat+ didn't come in until much, much farther down the line. Then when Speedchat+ did happen came the truefriends system which was the same but made no difference in the long run.
@@daniexists6 tysm!!
@@isabellacraig3168 It was originally called Secret Friends. Then it was called True Friends.
I LOVED Pixie Hollow, especially the mini games. I was so sad when I found out it was shut down… :(
Edit: Since I was young and likely unable to ask my parents for membership, I don’t think I came across or even remember any paywalls or microtransactions madness…then again I’m pretty sure I played this game pretty lately.
pixie hollow's music was so beautiful too
one of my most vivid memories of playing pixie hollow is very randomly getting 24 hours of membership and then BEGGING my mom to pay for one for me because without it i wasn't allowed to keep my pet firefly 😭
one of my fondest memories of Pixie Hollow (and to extent Club Penguin and even littler me and ToonTown) was using my grandparents computer to play it upstairs in their computer room. I dont remember the paywalls for PH as well, either I played it before they were added OR late into the games lifespan like you did. They even still have ToonTown downloaded on that computer to this day.
Hey! There is a pixie hollow remake called we the fairies! You can play the game again!
@@DawnStar. it's not even close to finished though 😔
As someone who has played corporate clash it is so amazing what they have done. They basically ripped up the entire game from the ground up and made something new with the body parts. Reworked gags, new gags, more strategies to come up with, entirely new and interesting bosses, better animeted enemies and better graphics in general, and so much more. I think it is a testament to how strong the love for toontown as a whole is by its community. Honestly disney forgetting about toontown was a blessing if it gave us this.
toontown online was literally my life for a handful of years! I was fortunate enough to attend an irl toonfest hosted by the toontown rewritten team in 2019 and I had so much fun. Also off topic, but if anyone played toontown around 2010, do you guys remember the hacker Freckleslam and his weird colored gloves??? That scared the hell out of me.
EDIT: IM SO GLAD PEOPLE REMEMBER FRECKLESLAM HE SCARED ME AS A KID BUT I ALSO SHIPPED MY TOON WITH HIM???
Woah thats so cool! If you don’t mind, what was Toonfest like? I’ve never heard of it and it sounds like a really nice time!
@@musicinmymind623 Toontown rewritten's toonfest was really fun the year I went! They had a whole bunch of replica gags, computers for people to play toontown on, and a lot of little goodies! It was sharing an existing con space with other events but all of the cast members were super friendly. They did a few panels too which was even more fun! As a kid i longed to go to the original toonfest, so being able to say that I went to toontown rewritten's version makes my inner child really happy.
oh my god i used to be so scared of freckleslam, i was convinced i had to plot some escape plan in case i ever saw him. good times
I used to obsessively watch freckleslam videos and I was both terrified of him and saw him as like an evil sexyman and shipped my toon with him
Granted I was like 10 or something but it reminds me of the people selfshipping with the animal jam creepypasta hacker guy
@@CAPES4CHRIST I USED TO DO THIS TOO LOL
This unlocked Pixie Hollow memories I didn’t know still existed in some far off corner of my brain
That rollypolly painting brought back memories I didn’t know I had
i can't even describe the chokehold club penguin had on the social scene when i was ten. having membership was like being a member of the royal family.
Given the fact that many Disney TV Animation workers and Disney Park Castmembers regularly take pot-shots at Disney as a corporation (thus the common belief among people in or adjacent to the industry that few people hate Disney more than Disney employees) I'm almost certain that the people designing ToonTown Online were aware of the irony and I hope they were having some cathartic fun with it lol
I played Pixie Hollow religiously from the very beginning. My family could never afford a membership or diamonds but I had fun with the free-to-play options anyway. I remember literally crying on the day Pixie Hollow shut down. I knew it was because kids like me weren't paying money to play; I wasn't stupid. RIP Pixie Hollow!
I have great nostalgia for Pixie Hollow because it was such a pretty game, the backgrounds, the music, the beautiful plant inspired outfits! But I played it since beta, which was not the case for me in any other mmo, however I do remember I used to get bored with it pretty quickly because I never paid for anything
you don’t understand how much i rejoiced seeing the thumbnail and video title 😭😭😭 pixie hollow was Integral to my childhood and I’m so so so thankful someone and especially you finally covered it !! 🥺😭😭 I and fellow pixie hollow players are forever indebted
I agree
I loved pixie hollow SO MUCH. It was, as you said, a relaxing sensory experience- I don't think I ever did anything more than fly around and collect items but the beautiful visuals and music were just so captivating.
Also, highly recommend digging into the Pixie Hollow fairy lore, because there's a ton of books and they get really deep. The story that stands out to me most- there was a water talent fairy who desperately wanted to be able to swim, but fairies are unable to because of their wings (they can't get wet for some reason, I don't fully remember). And it starts out with the usual story gimmick of her trying out different methods and comedically failing, but then eventually she *cuts them off*. And I remember being both horrified and fascinated as a child, reading about the emotional pain and trauma of her basically 'mutilating' herself by fairy standards because she wants this so much. Fairy wings can't feel pain but it's clearly depicted as body horror to the other fairies, like cutting off your own leg under anesthetic would be to us or something. I think it was also wrapped up in a larger quest? Anyway, she's a reoccurring character and is still able to fly with the help of a bird, and on her own she's able to explore the underwater world and there's some fascinating mermaid lore and interactions she has too.
I really want to re-read the books now haha, they all went pretty hard on exploring these characters that are very 2-dimensional by the movie standards.
I remember I'd play Toontown all the time as a kid, and I'd turn my closet in my estate around so that when I opened it I'd be in The Gray. I'd chase my friends around in there for such a long time. Great memories!
I remember doing that too.
when i was like 9 i wrote a letter to disney after toontown closed and wrote “you guys are the real cogs”😭😭😭
@Acid love ur pfp
I played Pixie Hollow at the very beginning when it was basically just "fairy maker" and had no idea how long it stuck around and how much they added! So cool to see. Half wish my younger self had been there to play it more but I know they would have taken my money so probably for the best lol. Thanks for the nostalgia!
As a child, I absolutely loved the idea of being a tinker fairy. Having to build tools to aid others in their duties is both challenging and fun - Bob the Builder, Ironman, Megamind, and every other super villain were inventors and they all seemed really cool, I genuinely struggled to grasp the plot. The only way I ended up relating to her was because I genuinely would be upset seeing how Rosetta, Iridessa, Fawn, and Silvermist got to wear really cute and cool outfits while I had to wear a crappy monochrome green dress LOL - hell, Vidia, who is basically the main antagonist has a far more interesting outfit than poor Tinkerbell... I would've cried.
I know that isn't the point of the video at all but I never realized other people actually thought her job was boring!
i love seeing people talk about toontown! i feel like it was always overshadowed in popularity by club penguin, but its always been one of my favorite games. i even played tt rewritten before it was widely open in 2014 (also i love the bgm choices)
toontown started to feel like a mirage to me with how little people talked about it. that game felt legendary to me!
Pixie Hollow was severely paywalled by the time I played it. I remember pretending to be an angry parent and emailing support about it, lol
Finally got the time to sit down and watch this. As someone who played both club penguin and pixie hollow in its peak, this video really did feel like such a good look into the games, and even jogged some memories I forgot I had. It does make me sad that Pixie Hollow's preservation efforts weren't as developed as Toontown or Club Penguin, as I feel that once its in its complete state, while being completely free as rewritten projects are, it would be 10x more fun than it even was in its prime.
There's actually a group of people trying to restore it right now, if you google "pixie hollow" it's one of the top results
I adored Pixie Hollow! I was always a fantasy kid and the game was visually stunning! In my opinion (and maybe this is my nostalgia speaking), the gameplay was good, there wasn't quite as much to do as some other games, but it was enough to at least entertain me for hours on end back then.
I do find it interesting that the game had a *ton* of currencies, instead of the usual 2-3 in virtual worlds. I also really appreciate that you could gather most of the currencies just by exploring the world if you chose to. The fact that they acted as both currency and crafting materials was also neat.
The extent of the monetization of the game was unfortunate. Luckily, I had never noticed any of the elitist behaviour when I played, but I did have a membership very early on which may have helped me avoid that attitude.
I do recall being a little salty when I found out that early game customization was so limited suddenly (I had joined near the beginning of the game's life and therefore got to experience the better customization), there's no need to restrict players that much.
I played the game on and off throughout its lifespan and I remember how bad the nickel and diming got progressively over time. My family would always tell me no whenever I tried asking for memberships so I got to experience everything first hand. I do recall later in the time I played the members I would interact with got a lot less nice and definitely acted elitist. I even remember an old friend of mine showing me her account after I had long left playing the game who had it and straight up told me she wouldn’t dare to interact with non members. Literally said that the members were the ‘popular kids’. I obviously don’t think she’s this way now but it’s quite sad that these sites would often subtly encourage cyber bullying just because some people couldn’t afford a membership. I’m at least glad with we the pixies all features are not going to paywalled so when the game is done everyone can equally enjoy it.
oh dude, being a nonmem was ROUGH. people wouldnt look at you unless you dyed your clothes. it even extending to its dating scene, i think i only got a bf for a week because i went to a party with a water talent welcoming belt (?)
I remember VERY well how rough it was to be a nonmem. My parents always refused to pay for online games so I never had a membership but for some reason I got a few days of trial where I basically could do everything a member could but without having a badge. That lead to me having a few of the clothes, hairstyles and a pet that only current or former members had. And the difference in how I was treated before and post "membership" was astonishing. People were actually trying to be friends with me instead of avoiding me at all cost. I remember vividly crying after I lost my privileges because I couldn't play with my pet bee anymore and my parents again refused to pay lol. Still people thought I used to be a member so making friends was easy, but before that the segregation was REAL.
@@Julia_Unofficial Yuck, that stinks. I'm glad that people still attempted to be your friend afterwards, though. The elitist attitude in those kinds of games was really weird.
I would love to see you do a video on the MMO of build a-bear! I loved that game as a kid and barely see anything of it since it shut down :)
I wish someone would remake it.
I I somehow remember trying to get into, but I was to young and stupid to do it 💀
Build-A-Bearville! I loved playing hide and seek on there, that was so fun
BEARVILLE WAS SUCH A KEY PART OF MY LIFE. Kinda helped me cope with the fact that I could never get a build-a-bear plush when I was a kid :') The Christmas events they had were so cute and cozy, I loved it. And my avatar was entirely dressed in purple and white. I miss that game sm and I wish a remake would happen soon.
PLEASEEEE DO THIS VIDEO OMG😭 build a bear webkinz pixie hollow and poptropica were literally my entire childhood lol
The fact that I recognize all the songs you've used for all your video essays make me feel like a total nerd.
doesn’t that also make me a total nerd
Oh my god whenever I watch one of these videos I always will recognize the songs in the background but can't remember where a majority of them came from so I just slowly go insane throughout the course of the video trying to figure out where the songs come from
@@lispeaks If I may give you one suggestion, please put a song list in your description or pastbin or smth so that I don't lose my mind trying to remember where the background music comes from
@@splendidsimp she has the song list at the end of the video
My sisters and I played Pixie Hollow SO MUCH when we were younger. Like it’s was to a degree where we would beg for VIP and didn’t get it until it shut down. We had so much currency and spent time talking to folk there so much. The games were so fun too :( we were devastated when we found out it was going to shut down
I missed so much with Pixie Hollow and Toontown smh.
Club Penguin was iconic for me and my sister, I never forget the Halloween parties lmao
I still listen to Ghosts Just Wanna Dance every Halloween hahaha
Omg the holidays were so iconic!
Me and my little sister would do the same thing too!! Every Halloween we would dress up and out do our igloos in spooky decor and then go trick or treating at our iggys first before we would go to other penguins igloos and see their cool homes. And then watch that spooky silent film with the sled. Ah good times.
@@thicc_jackett2797 yasss night of the living sled!! Omg what an amazing throwback
I was fortunate enough because my parents would always buy me the Club Penguin membership, I even got the 12-month one but we would always go to Walmart and buy the 1-month cards after we couldn´t afford it. The Halloween event with the candies and Carnival one ith all the fun minigames where you would get tickets and exchange them for prizes were my favorites.
For Toontown, I remember finding out about its existence when I went to the states. We had the TV on at my aunt´s house where they showed an ad on Disney XD with Zeke and Luther. I quickly felt intrigued seeing the characters on private parties being blasted away from cannons and using gags to fight enemies. The game wasn´t available outside the US but we were somehow able to pay the membership without an American credit/debit card. I still think the game is too grindy and I was never able to unlock the higher-level gags. But I made wonderful memories and got to meet lots of friends who were excited to meet someone from another country.
I can confidently say I had the best experience online. I think the only surviving game that still holds itself as one of these classics would be Wizards101, definitely catered towards us. I feel sorry for this generation who didn´t get to experience the 2000s-2010s online kids games boom.
Every generation feels "sorry" for the previous generation not having their experiences exactly the same. It's silly! We all grew up in our own time and our experiences are equally valid. Boomers feel sorry for us for not licking dirt after all /s
yup Wizard101, Club Penguin, and ToonTown will always be among the greats of MMOs.
To shed some light on the secret vs true friends thing:
- Secret friends is the verbiage the game initially started with for the feature. The chat was mainly uncensored compared to speed chat+. And in the early years of toontown, your only choices were speedchat or secret friend chat. So to be able to speak freely with other toons in game, people would transfer secret friend codes through speedchat by using the first letter of each speedchat phrase as the corresponding code, and anything with numbers was displayed by jumping however many times the number equaled to.
- In later patches of the game when the speedchat+ feature came out the secret friend feature was renamed true friends. So then there were now the three tiers of chat that we now remember. There were less differences between speedchat+ and true friend chat.
I hope that makes sense and can shed some light on things. I grew up playing Toontown all the way until it ended.
Disney will always have a special place in my heart, but quite honestly I find it very sad that we lost all three of the most popular online games. Pixie Hollow is one of my favorites. Now Disney created some apps of some virtual worlds like kingdom hearts union cross (which ended their service last year…😭) And I've started playing Disney cocone’s My Little Doll, Disney’s pop town and finally Disney’s Dreamlight valley for Nintendo switch.
I never played Disney mmos (or any mmos really), so watching these videos always feels like an anthropological exploration to me. It's such a fascinating part of early 2000s culture.
Edit: my younger sister used to play Pixie Hollow I completely forgot about that! I'm pretty sure she left pretty quickly? Definitely didn't have the staying power a lot of other games did.
the movies for disney fairies made tinker bell a different character - the books were fantastic she still had a temper and she was a pots and pans talent fairy, in the books there were soo many niche talents for literally everything, and tinker bell seemed to like her job in the books too
I do love the books, they have a great cast and some really interesting ideas but tbf Tink does enjoy her talent after the first movie. Plus it was probably smarter to narrow down talents for an adaption
The sequel def emphasized her temper and creativity to be more like books
I miss Pixie Hollow so freaking much. I played it through high school. It was legitimately just a great mmo
I played Pixie Hollow almost 24/7 from 7 to 10 years old. I was homeschooled and had no social life, and fairies were the single coolest thing ever to me. I made friends in that game that I still talk to.
There weren't really any closing events, it just went down for maintenance one day in mid-August and went back up with a notice of it's closure. Everything was free to play and wear, and that's all. I think there was a staff-written update posted on the Pixie Hollow News section of the login page that explained the shutdown, but it didn't have any real information.
FairyABC was a total dumpster fire. I played it for maybe a month or two in 2017 and the moderation team was a bunch of in-game players that spied on you and reprimanded you then and there, as another player. One mod was a random girl in her early 20s who argued with me for "supporting insubordination." The developer, Wind Muddle, was almost impossible to reach until he just disappeared. I don't think anyone knows where he is, who he is, or why he dipped.
First I LOVE your analysis of Toontown. Wonderful and in depth and you hit all the main points about the games history!! Second referring to “the grey” and how it’s interpreted to you was the most interesting thing I’ve heard someone say about toontown. The grey was so existential, lol.
Also FORGOT ABOUT POOKIES AND NEVER KNEW WHAT IT WAS CALED. JUST RMEMBER PEOPLE BEGGING TO BE ADOPTED OMG. UNLOCKED MEMORY 😢😅😅
I’m 26 so I’m in the right age range for most of these games but for some reason never got into them (beside webkinz which me and my sisters had dozens of each). So I love watching these deep dives into worlds if only heard about.
as someone who played it from the very beginning, seeing an in depth video on pixie hollow (even the little fashion app) really scratches an itch. these are all so well done & researched!
Always a pleasure to see bigger creators talk about Toontown in the modern day :') Excellent deep dive!
I laughed a little when I saw ToonTown in the thumbnail, because when I play ToonTown I play CZcams in the back! The private server I play personally is ToonTown corporate clash.
its funny how people constantly say ToonTown doesn't have an anticapitalistic message, "toons of the world, unite!" the line used when toons use a health unite, is a toon version of "Workers of the world, unite!"
The essence of the slogan is that members of the working classes throughout the world should cooperate to defeat capitalism and achieve victory in the class conflict, to the point people who play the game joke or mention that the toons are communists. especially with stuff like beanfests (a ttr specific event)
EDIT: Clash mention jumpscare!! most videos don't mention clash lol, although something interesting this video missed is that the Japanese ToonTown online had FULL VOICE ACTING for Flippy!
oh my god the minigame footage from pixie hollow, especially sewing and baking, just thrashed me with nostalgia!!! I adorrreeed Pixie Hollow Online, as well as this Tinker Bell DS tie in game where you do very similar minigames and quests, but you play as Tinker Bell instead. I'm so excited to find that a lot of Pixie Hollow's production art is online with the Art of Disney Fairies tumblr and Eric Reimer's portfolio site-- as someone who wants to do production art for film and games, these are invaluable resources!
I loved the original Pixie Hollow game and the overhaul broke my heart. I was so enamored with the books as a child, and I adored the world and all the beautiful unique fairy wings (usually covered in glitter on the book covers) charmed me. Then the Tinkerbell movie came out- all the wings were tinkerbell style, the lore was rewritten to spit in the face of Percilla, my number 2 fav, and removed any mention of Rani- my actual favorite character. They actually tossed all the original characters (except Tink, Terrence, and the mean girl ofcourse) but tossing Rani actually made baby me cry because I identified with her so much.
Words cannot describe how much I miss playing ToonTown with my childhood best friend. We were both in second grade, and we'd call each other on the landline while playing. It seems silly, but it's one of my most cherished memories. :')
I was definitely a Toontown and Club Penguin kid! I still remember My cat's name "Lady Lily Gigglecorn" , think My Penguin was Angel with an ungodly amount of numbers in the name lol
I remember playing club penguin & pixie hollow as a kid. I resented the membership system/member players because I would be bullied for not being one & not being able to afford one. I had a pixie hollow account prior to them taking away so many of the customization options. I was so mad when they took those away & changed the system. I actually got banned from pixie hollow for figuring out a way to give myself free items but the game made things so unfair that I saw no reason not to. I also played toontown. I mainly played it to find ways to break the game.
The most reliable way to enter The Gray was by facing your wardrobe backwards against the wall, using the wardrobe, and then popping out on the other side of the wall. My siblings and I used to play around in The Gray all the time. I also liked the "walking underwater" glitch at Donald's Dock. Entirely useless, but fun.
FUCK YEAH TOONTOWN VIDEO
im literally so hyperfixated on toontown this made me scream when i saw it in my subscriptions
I never had a subscription to Pixie Hollow, so maybe that's why I don't remember the gameplay, but I really liked creating and dressing my fairy and decorating their home.
Great video! I loved Pixie Hollow. I was an adult, so the socializing never caught my eye. I liked earning badges and crafting. I wish they would bring it back in some form.
I miss Pixie Hollow so much, I’d forgotten I played it at all because after I got the DS Tinker Bell game it was just a better version of it
Ive been binging your content in the last few days, even though i havent experienced many of the things the essays are about
I love your content
PS: all your outfits are fire
When I was like 12 I got temporarily banned from Club Penguin for using vague stand ins for swears, even though I'd never dared say a swear word irl at that point, and I had to convince my angry parents that I couldn't actually say anything bad because the chat filters wouldn't allow it anyway💀
I remember playing Pixie Hollow and being so upset I couldn’t go into the tea/cafe area because I wasn’t a member
I had lived through the pixie hollow era and my mom, bless her soul, called the site support to get me membership for digital fairies. Well, I grew older and got further and further into the game that I wasn't really looking to increase my collection anymore. So we both decided that it would be best if i cancelled my membership. I mean, after all, the outfits i have is enough to sustain me to just play casually now. WRONG. Once ur membership was cancelled, no matter how much you paid, your closet items were all greyed out and you could not use them
I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say about VMK! I won't "spoil" it for other viewers, but I was obsessed with it growing up. I was never able to play games like Toontown because the family computer couldn't run it, so it felt like a godsend. Looking back, though I had a certain "privilege" that I expect will be brought up. 👀 With the recurring theme of "virtual worlds as shameless advertisements" you have on your channel, I think I can see where you'll go with it.
i was looking for my people in the comment section!!!
I’m 26 years old and I still think about pixie hollow. I remember playing the tailoring and baking games for hours upon hours growing up.
virtual worlds were genuinely addicting
pixie hollow was the only one of these 3 that i played lol. i was lucky and started playing before the big paywall shit happened, but when it did it made the game a lot less fun and i stopped sometime before they began including diamonds. i remember having a light fairy named "xenops" bc that was in the drop down and i had never heard that name before (or since)
i had a clickables charm bracelet too. i think one of my siblings had one as well but they were the only person i knew who played so it was kind of boring. aside from neopets this is the only game i really asked my parents to spend real money on, and i never did get a membership.
can't wait for part 2!!!! vmk and pirates of the carribean were my totally favorites, especially the pirates one and I've never seen anyone talk about it or even met someone else who played it
"HE RUINED MY LEAF JOURNAL!"
"I DID NOT! FAIRY MARY, SEND HER TO QUEEN CLARION AND HAVE HER EXPELLED!"
I remember I played the very very beta version of Pixie Hollow back when there were only the water, animal, garden, and light talent fairies (as well as no sparrow man option) and it was little more than a dress-up game. When it was introduced, I had a membership for a brief time, but when it expired, (because I was a "legacy" player I guess (?)) the perks never went away. I also had the little jewelry box, but I can't remember for the life of me what it did. I also do vaguely remember there was a lot of separation between membership players and non-membership players (like Barbie girls) and a common past time was players would have exclusive "fashion contests" in their Pixie Hollow homes (basically just showing off your clothing you could only get with a membership) creating the divide even more. The housing aspect of the game was a BIG part and the decorating was super in-depth too (could place anything, anywhere), which was made even better by how beautiful the artwork was!
The fashion cons were my favorite thing to do in the game!
Aw man, I loved finding spots where I could glitch through walls in Toontown. Not only the Gray but also I distinctly remember that as a kid I knew of at least 2 spots on the streets where you could walk into a corner and come out into the sky - literally just blue and clouds and horizon going on forever. If I recall correctly you could walk back the way you came and pop back out on the street too.
I remember Club Penguin so vividly, still.
I always preferred Panfu, which was almost exactly like Club Penguin but with, well, pandas. That was the only virtual world I could play at the time as my English comprehension wasn't the best. After I was 13 I came back to Club Penguin and grinded the heck out of the ninja mini-games. Club Penguin to a European kid like me was like this... american dream of gaming where all the rich American kids would play. I remember Disney used to host a player submitted gallery where you could send in pictures of your penguin plushies and I SO wanted to be featured there I got myself one second hand. Fun times
22:34 "We are the last toons alive!" cracked me up
Holy shit our queen even put subtitles- prewatch me says thank you very much
I am still baffled about whatever happened to the "disney infinity" games. They were a big part of my childhood, and I distinctly remember playing the 1.0 version on my ipad until one day it just wouldn't work anymore :c
The Disney Interactive studio was shut down and so they canceled everything for Disney infinity :(
I have only read the title but I already can’t wait to watch this video omg!! Three huge parts of my childhood in one video :O I love your channel so much!!!
hearing the pixie hollow background music literally brought a tear to my eye... i miss that game SO much! thank you for this gem of a video
i played pixie hollow everyday when i was young and i made so many good friends on there. i remember being devastated that it was closing and a lot of us moved over to facebook and made accounts for our fairies and shared pics we had gathered when it was open. i still have a friend who’s my age and we keep in touch here and there, she was my very best friend in pixie hollow. it’s nice that we got to be together and watch each other grow up even out of game. i still miss pixie hollow so much and think about it all the time.
Ahhh it's always so nice to see videos covering Pixie Hollow! I was a minimod of the forum connected to the DOW Wiki, so some of the names in the pictures (fellow mods and forum members!) brought back a lot of nostalgia. :')
The monetization really, really sucked. Legacy players were definitely allowed to keep their three fairies, and people who made their accounts early in the game were able to keep some of their old outfits, but they really shrank the game experience down, even locking a lot of achievements that had NO reason to be member locked. They heavily cut down on the variety of hairstyles that new players could choose, which forced players to play the game/spend money for the experience that had been free since before the game even opened. At one point they also paywalled the intermediate-advanced levels of the minigames, then introduced a leaderboard that F2P players obviously had no hope of landing on. lmao.
This really affected the socialization aspect too - only members could host parties, and I remember themed dress-up games being super popular, which naturally excluded F2P players since they were locked on the default outfit. There were huge subcultures around roleplaying as various supernatural creatures (the mermaid vs vampire wars were a permanent feature of Sunflower Gully, iirc), which obviously required outfits to prove that you were a part of the group - and the standards for fashion were intense.
And finally, if I'm remembering correctly, the reason the wiki doesn't have much info on the closure events is that there... weren't any. They opened up all the member-restricted areas and let everyone have access to every aspect of the game, but that just led to the last month or so having a kind of gloomy, the-end-is-nigh, everything-is-pointless atmosphere. I don't remember there being any special events beyond that, but if anyone's curious, the pixiehollowforums site has a ton of archived threads from this time period.
(Actual finally - just my speculation, but I'm pretty sure Frozen was a huge nail in the coffin for PH. Not long after they announced the closure, they started heavily promoting their Frozen phone games.)
Anyway, great video! I really appreciate the deep dives into Toontown and Club Penguin, as I never really got involved in them but knew they were huge in their time. It's awful to see how effectively Disney normalized these kinds of monetization schemes that seem to be literally everywhere today.
Hi! I was also a forum fairy on PHF (popcorn). Athough this is not the greatest place to ask, if you don’t mind answering, who are you?
I loved my water fairy in Pixie Hollow. I created that profile when the site first launched. I remember getting the high score on one of the games and proudly having a badge of that achievement. Later as a teen I was babysitting and the one girl was showing me her fairies. I was upset to find my first profile’s fairies were deleted.
I remember this one time when it was my sister's turn playing toontown and i was watching. She was walking thru Daisy's Garden when we happened upon a BIG group of toons in front of a cog building. Turns out this building was glitched (looking back, it was probably hacked) and in place of the normal door was a GIANT portal to a plain if grey. If you walked thru the portal your toon was super-sized, but would normalize if you walked back to the road. I remember everyone trying to get thru the portal at the same time, but couldn't get in because they were pushing against each other.
man, watching you describe pookies is grimly reminding me for the first time in a decade of how i would roleplay live births at player-made 'hospitals'. AS the baby being born. 😭😭😭😭. and ohhh man. the pookie culture. i didn't know it went so deep so as to garner wiki pages and specific Categories but i'm familiar with the term 'pookie' and the way it works. i was one of those 'Has Bright Blue Eyes!' kids and talked like Capitalizing Every Word Made Me Better Than Everyone Else. definitely remember being one of those cruel pookies that would blame my 'parents' for being neglectful and bullying any other pookies that got adopted into the same household as me when in reality they didn't do anything 😭😭
i just found so much fun in the drama and i just loved peoples reactions to me because sometimes theyd react as over-the-top as i did, almost as if they were playing along. so i found it fun because (from my perspective) we all saw it as this ridiculous roleplay and while we were in our roles, we didn't take too seriously enough to report each other because you would just go back to the pet shop and get readopted again by another family as if nothing ever happened. i also played the role of what they call 'mumu' but more often than not id get really needy pookies that would run away which would make me sad and more often than. i remember once time a pookie and her sister were adopted into my igloo but immediately left because my igloo wasn't extravagant enough for them. so i usually would be a pookie because i didn't want the idea of responsibility or people making fun of me for being poor... lol.
speaking of just weird behaviors: yes, the pretty loose chat moderation allowed for some loons to be loose around the island. id run across people who would roleplay maniacs who are bathing in pools of mud absolutely 'naked' , or just people wearing the most bizarre combinations of items and yelling nonsense in the town square, kind of replicative of real life in a way. however, i think there was a good balance in how club penguin moderated in that it wasn't so restrictive that it suffocating to try to talk to people, but also didn't let outwardly inappropriate things rot my child brain. i fondly remember club penguin being a mix of minigames, events, item collecting and roleplay, but most imporantly as an outlet to be an total weirdo online when i grew up in a really restrictive atmosphere. stuff like that kept me invested in this game for so long
I’d say most pookies weren’t for weird reasons, because kids play house irl all the time, and to be fair, people always seem to want to be younger or older than they are
I’d love to see you cover Bella Sara! At first the cards were in Target for a little bit, then the DS game with the Excelsior card released, and then online website died 💀 it’s a UK based IP so it, at least to 11yr old me in the US, rly seemed to exist for a mere moment before vanishing 😭
I’m v scared of horses irl after an near death experience involving a young horse and a cliff, but the art and comforting words make the cards worth collecting! I still have my DS game too!
Yes! I would skip homework to play on Bella Sara lol
I never played club penguin but I had always heard of it growing up. The pookie adoption in the petshop is very much giving Animal Jam vibes, a game I thoroughly played as a kid! You would be a cute animal like a bunny or seal, sit in the pillow room and say "adopt me". Why was there even a pillow room in the first place...
Congrats on your first sponsor and all of your growth! I would love a video on Virtual Magic Kingdom, another disney property
Obsessively gathering and crafting in pixie hollow as a kid is what got me hooked on final fantasy 14 crafting and gathering as an adult 😅
ive watched a good 10 videos from you and gotta say i utterly love your choice of music in all the videos ive watched, almost been able to identify every track, love your work aswell and its very informative!!! keep it up Li!!!! :D
Great video!
Seeing footage from Team Drop was surreal, as I edited most of the videos on the channel. Thanks for including that. It really made my day, lol
I do remember Pixie Hollow! Maybe I was too young to remember any paywalls, but I do remember my family buying me the bracelet and charms to get items in game. I vaguely remember choosing my own clothing too, but I didn't stick around long enough to even notice it got shut down until much later. The monetization does remind me of Wizard101 (paywall) and Roblox (nearly every game popup with items for robux) though, which is a shame.
as someone who was chronically online in club penguin, I had entirely forgotten about the pookie shit until you brought it up. oh god. so many unlocked memories.
i never participated as even back then I thought it was weird, but ho-ly was it hard to avoid getting roped into at times. I swear pookies would take over entire servers and you'd have to hop to a less busy world to avoid them.
god I loved club penguin. I was way more into the side of CP that would make MV's with hypercam and post them on youtube. 😂
also pixie hollow... I have so many words and feelings for pixie hollow, even though i didn't play it nearly as much as CP. my horrible emachines tower couldn't handle it, so I could only ever play it at my grandparents. but boy howdy did I play the shit out of it when i could.
the toontown glitch i remember most vividly was how if u placed rugs in a certain way u could make a set of stairs leading to a second floor of ur house in The Gray....
Aw come on I always liked the tinker fairies and wanted to be one 😭😭 I always felt like it was nice to see a more down to earth and realistic talent in a fantasy world. As a kid I was obsessed and I mean OBSESSED with things like mermaids and fairies, all things that had to do with elemental powers. But it sucked that obviously elemental powers didn’t exist in real life cause that was like one of the things I wanted most in the whole world lmao. Seeing these fairies have a power that I could actually replicate in real life was so cool man. Plus I was already one of those kids that would pick up rocks and acorns and other garbage all the time lmao so I felt like the tinker thing really spoke to me 😭
It’s great to see someone else with a keen interest in online virtual worlds/internet media. I would love to see your take on Fusion Fall, UB Funkeys or Ms Popular! I was always a tinierme girl.
P.S. your music playlist for videos is immaculate ❤
I used to play VMK, Club Penguin and Toontown! My CZcams name and avi (which I made when I was like 13 bc I was obsessed w VMK and I’m never changing) is homage to VMK in a way lmao. I had so much fun playing these games and made so many friends 😢 good times
HEARING GUZMA'S THEME FOR A BRIEF MOMENT ROCKED ME TO MY CORE OMG??
54:31 omg I remember that... I never got access to any MMO memberships bc my parents were (fortunately?) tech-illiterate and didn't know how to make internet purchases. so I always played only the free version of every MMO I was on. I don't know if I was just a dumb kid who forgot his password OR if they straight up made my Pixie Hollow account inaccessible after the update, but I lost so many items because it said my account didn't exist anymore and I had to start over. felt like I was stripped of everything for being poor.
I was such a big pixie hollow fan that i was a guest author on the blog you mentioned lmaoooo kinda died when i saw my icon but love this video you did such a good job at documenting these games! can't wait for part 2
Other people have said it but having played TTO as both a child and an adult, everything about the cogs is WAY too snarky to not have been deliberate on the devs' part. Especially back then, it wouldn't be too hard for an out of touch corporate overseer to go "ah, yes, evil robot uprising, an inoffensive classic"