Albino Blacksheep

Albino Blacksheep

The Official logo.

Maker:	Steven Lerner
Type:	Website
Release date:	January 4th, 1999

Albino Blacksheep (albinoblacksheep.com) is an animation website created by Steven Lerner in 1999,

The website was originally created in Toronto, Canada on January 4, 1999. The website provided movies, animations as well as games: Mostly created with Adobe Flash, there is a "prank" section which contain screamers, The website also features image galleries, audio and text files. in addition, there was a mobile section that provided ring tones, screensavers, and wallpaper for mobile phones.^[1] they also sell plushie of the sheep as well.^[2]

The site now emulates flash after the shutdown of the flash plugin.

History[edit | edit source]

The website was registered on January 4, 1999 by Steven Lerner, the website used to promote his band of the same name, there is a little bit of information explaining the band Albino Blacksheep exists. In 2000, Steven redesigned the website. This design contained graphical images, and a video stream from his video camera.

Albino Blacksheep is also famous for being a major portal for Flash animations (a Flash animation style created by Neil Cicierega in 2001). The game: Musical Lantern can be found here.^[3] in addition, The website also helped the band Tally Hall gained some popularity after posting their music video Banana Man.

On April 1, 2007, the site has later turned into a sjoke homepage, it was designed to trick people think that the site had been bought by the company: "Google" and turned into "Google Animations". The joke was reinforced by a fake blog stating that "Albino Blacksheep has been acquired by Google Inc. for roughly $32 million in stock options. The deal was discussed over a casual breakfast in Mountain View, California between the Canadian-born founder of Albino Blacksheep and the Google co-founders and CEO. Plans are underway for Google Inc. to tie its services and software into the former Albino Blacksheep website which will go by the new name Google Animation."

As of March 2020, the site changed the logo with the same sheep but wearing a face mask.

Etymology[edit | edit source]

According to Steven Lerner, the name is an intentional oxymoron; by definition, a black sheep cannot be an albino because it quite obviously possesses skin pigmentation. He also points out that "black sheep" can also be interpreted as "outcast" and that the site's title could be interpreted to refer to an albino outcast.^[4]