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This Week: The Internet Part One: Salad Fingers
Note: Graphic. violent images and disturbing descriptions
Born in 1992, I grew up on bulky ivory computers in basements with their dial-up lullabies.
People mock the ‘random’ culture of the 2000’s, but I think it was an offshoot of the randomness of the Internet itself. Not everybody was on it, but some weird and niche topics were really on it.
At first, I visited the websites designed for kids, taking care to feed my Neopets, which took one hundred years with painstaking page loading times. The website still exists, but last I heard it was taken over by scientologists and the NFT craze.
Much of the old internet is lost, or the best parts of it sawed off.
When I was a little bit older, it was all about the “funny” videos - quoting them with friends, calling it an ‘inside joke.’ How amazing it felt as a preteen to be the one to show someone Potter Puppet Pals, Shoes, or Charlie the Unicorn.
But someone had to show us Salad Fingers.
Salad Fingers
The first episode dropped on the website Newgrounds on July 1, 2004, a year before YouTube was created. Creator David Firth divulged that the title came from the way his friend described him playing the guitar.
Salad Fingers’ method of speaking is heightened, with overtly formal language, the tendency to anthropomorphize anything, dark sexual themes, and references to 19th century living.
“Mother always said The Scarlet Fever would be my final departure”
The massively quotable dialogue, contradicting world rules and deep-cut references make it feel like a bastardized Spongebob; a boyish creature made for the dark bowels of the Internet.
I watched David Firth’s 90-minute compilation video of the 13 episodes, which are interspersed with advertisements for Salad Fingers merchandise.
Below you’ll find a plot description of each episode with what is, to me, the most disturbing or iconic moment if you don’t feel like reading it all.
Episode 1 - “Spoons” (July 1, 2004)
A creepy diddy plays on a barren wasteland, as our protagonist in jeans and a long sleeve top faces the audience. He has green skin, a bean-shaped head with large eyes and red pupils, no nose, yellowed teeth, and three long fingers on each hand.
“Hello. I Like rusty spoons. I Like to touch them. The feeling of rust Against my salad fingers is almost ORGASMIC.”
He speaks in a child-like voice as the dialogue is animated on the screen in hand-drawn lettering with unique capitalization.
Salad Fingers seeks the perfect spoon for the perfect textural feeling. He rings a door looking for spoons from a little yellow creature that shrieks and lets him in. He moans and caresses a rusty kettle.
Key Moment: Salad Fingers introduces us to his greatest perverse pleasure, the feeling of rust against his salad fingers.
Episode 2 - “Friends” (July 15, 2004)
Salad Fingers has a get-together with his finger puppets Hubert Cumberdale, Marjory Stewart-Baxter, and Jeremy Fisher. He smacks his dry lips together and nibbles on the first two puppets who taste like “sunshine dust” and “soot and poo.”
He mentions a fish in the oven and then speaks another language.
He cries for help and a creature in a letterman jacket enters, frightened. Salad Fingers asks the creature to reach for the fish in his oven, citing his “supple little frame.” The terrified creature does so, and Salad Fingers can’t help but be distracted by a rusty nail.
Salad Fingers pokes his finger on the rusty nail, and goes pale before passing out from blood loss.
“I Like it when the red water comes out”
He awakes in a meat freezer, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, where he runs into Hubert Cumberdale. He awakens in a pool of blood and the camera pans to the closed, smoky oven, alluding to the death of the creature.
Key Moment: We meet his friends, the three finger puppets who may or may not be conscious, that he likes to nibble on.
Episode 3 - “Nettles” (August 1, 2004)
He divulges the pleasures of nettles, and comes across a rusty baby carriage he deems a nettle carrier, before placing a nettle in the spot of the baby.
An armless creature in a BBQ apron grunts and follows him to a home with broken windows. Salad Fingers rubs the nettles on his nipples, eliciting a white substance. The nettles make him think of “Happy Times” and it pans to him and Hubert Cumberdale at a hair salon.
The creature bangs his head against the wall until it bleeds. Salad Fingers, with his inflamed nipple, names the creature ‘Milford Cubicle.’ He plays a delightful diddy on the flute and offers a glass of milk to the deceased.
Key Moment: “Uh, oh. It seems nettles have made the milk drop out from inside my teat.”
Episode 4 - “Cage” (August 19, 2004)
In a beret, he tells us he’s going to find France because he’s always wanted to go there. However, he’s worried about the little boy that’s been watching him for a while, a creature with one much larger eyeball. The eyeball squirts, and as indicated by the use of cartoon hearts, the creature loves Salad Fingers.
It licks Salad Fingers’ hand, who is terrified. A “grubby tap,” a rusty sink faucet, is gifted to his door, and he dreams of flying amongst the taps, who all cry “tap.”
He follows the tap on a string until he steps in a bear trap and passes out. He wakes up in a cage and caresses the rusty bars in ecstasy and increasing speed, a “treat for the fingers.”
The creature arrives and proposes with a ring with a tooth. Salad Fingers says he doesn’t like this game and will go home now. The creature with its sharp teeth makes screeching sounds.
Salad Fingers pulls a red tassel, revealing a red curtain. It goes down and up to reveal he is gone. The creature sobs with sad music playing. Salad Fingers rides a tap into the clouds.
Key Moment: “I just want to marry all of you gorgeous taps.”
Episode 5 - “Picnic” (November 25, 2004)
Salad Fingers sits on the floor of a room and uses an old rotary phone to try and call a friend, Charlie. Screeches come from the phone, and he replies he’s holding a picnic with gypsy creams and other goodies. He makes Humbert Cumberdale a friend hat.
The music becomes uplifting and he emerges in a wedding dress, crying from beauty to his reflection.
A roughed-up red-headed doll creature he calls Mable arrives at his picnic, where he offers confectionary. She eats loganberry crumble, and Salad Fingers replies for Mable. Salad Fingers claims his tummybox feels broken and feeds Mable pease pudding with a rusty spoon.
A crow squawks and takes the spoon, with a reverberated sound. The doll giggles and speaks, sending Salad Fingers into a mental break.
Key Moment: The acute sense of foreboding when Mable speaks.
Episode 6 - “Present” (July 24, 2005)
The familiar music begins with a shadow in Salad Finger’s house of a puppet on his finger, Jeremy Fisher. Jeremy Fisher has a plastic horse and his mouth taped shut.
Salad Fingers eats Jeremy Fisher and denies it.
He walks outside and comes across a broken toilet, with enough water to wash his petticoat along with the bad thoughts.
He goes back home with the horse to find a carbon copy of himself in a chair, and he becomes Jeremy Fisher.
“I’ve seen you tailgaiting my daughter with aspirations of deflowering her rose.”
The two stare down and Jeremy Fisher untapes his mouth to reveal green bubbles. Salad Fingers says, “I never did get to sample the delights of your flavor” calling back to when he tasted the other two puppets in “Friends.” Then it cuts to him eating his own head.
Key Moment: The first of many doubles, Salad Fingers eats the brains of another Salad Fingers.
The following episodes are new to me.
Episode 7 - “Shore Leave” (January 28, 2006)
Salad Fingers eats sand with a spoon and Marjory Stewart-Baxter.
“The floor sugar does taste rather queer in this area.”
He comes across Hubert Cumberdale and a hole where he discovers a dead corpse he calls Kenneth, back from the great war. He goes to fix Kenneth a bath, then dresses him in a dirty white tuxedo. He eats a dinner of brown and green sand blobs and as the rotting torso falls over, Salad Fingers calling him sleepy.
At night, Salad Fingers brings Kenneth out and back to the ghastly trenches; he cries, asks for “our creator to return you unspoilt from the cruel hand of war.”
He then sings We’ll Meet Again by Lora Lee in a white dress on a stage to a blurry audience. He tells the accompanying piano man - a shadow - they are not playing in the right key and dejectedly walks off the stage.
Key Moment: Dressing the rotting corpse in a dirty white tuxedo.
Episode 8 - “Cupboard” (September 22, 2007)
Salad Fingers listens to the radio, for the war and CROXLEY. He turns the knob of static louder and bemoans how he can’t find a clear station. He fills the radio with white beans.
Louder static emits and he wonders if he’s happened upon a strange broadcast. His stomach grumbles.
He moves to his safety cupboard, a rusty square-shaped hole in his house. He finds a long hair and rubs it along his eye. He adds the hair to his collection of 5 different looking hairs.
“A gay little quintette gently singing in the breeze”
The cupboard opens up to a root with a cot, where he sings to Hubert Cumberdale and flicks him into a pot of brown liquid. At night, the radio asks for its hair back, and tells Salad Fingers to clean up his filthy house.
“I shan’t, I can’t, and I won’t”
Salad Fingers rips down his hair collection and eats it. He cries.
Key Moment: The radio becomes sentient and asks for its hair back.
Episode 9 - “Letter” (May 26, 2011)
Salad Fingers sits on the cot in his room reading a letter.
“Dear Beloved we are having the most wonderful time.”
A tree root begins to grow into his house. Salad Fingers eats it and it replies “Ow Charlie that really hurt,” similar to the audio from the famous Charlie Bit My Finger video.
Salad Fingers walks outside to the tree, which claims it’s cold and wants to come inside, calling Salad Fingers ‘Daddy.’ As Salad Fingers walks away, the tree reaches out and squeezes Salad Finger’s stomach like a snake.
Cut to Salad Fingers, pale white on his cot, with his stomach distorted, claiming he may have met his “day of reckoning.”
“Mother always said the scarlet fever would be my final departure”
He seems to die. Then, a black liquid bursts from his chest (👽). It’s a baby-sized black maggoty-shaped thing.
With his gaping black wound, in a wheelchair, Salad Fingers writes in black ink that he won’t be able to return to war today. He hears a noise and goes to the child, which fell over in the hole.
“You’re supposed to be doing your exercise, YVONNE. A lethargic child is a servant to the beast.”
He sings the song ‘head shoulders knees and toes.’ He tells Margery he thinks it’s a duff one.
In a new scene, pale again, he tells Yvonne, who is now in a cardboard box, he cannot care for her anymore. He assures himself, as Yvonne, that he was doing a first-rate job.
He wheels himself and a bucket of black goo to the creature from “Spoons,” who shrieks. He says he’s there to clean the windows, as if he’s forgotten the child. He holds up the black gooey child and uses it to clean the windows, making an inky mess. Cut to: he eats a sandwich, the messy window in frame.
Key Moment: Salad Fingers gives birth in a chest-burster scene to a black maggot-shaped mass.
Episode 10 - “Birthday” (November 24, 2013)
Salad Fingers wears a birthday hat. The corpse of Milford Cubicle hangs in his house. He walks outside to discover a tall white pole reaching up into the sky, disturbing to him for its mystery.
He makes a fist as if to imitate a train, but it starts playing a lullaby as if on a music box, and his rotten teeth move up in down in tune with the music, the way a ballerina might dance. He moves faster, shaking, to attempt to wake up Milford Cubicle and his eyes go red.
He leaves Horace the horse in charge and exits to a large expansive of trees and fog, as if in a graveyard to fetch the doctor. He comes across a dumpster where he finds a new puppet, Doctor Pappernack. It bites Salad Fingers and draws blood.
Salad Fingers throws it, and it burrows a bloody hole into the side of a horse.
“I know it hurts. Just try and sit still whilst the doctor eats your blood.”
Cut to Salad Fingers on a dirty cot in the woods with a tree between his legs. He wakes up and assumes he’s slept for six Mondays.
He returns home, dirty with torn clothes, to three horses in his house. He gasps at Milford Cubicle’s skeleton and blames the horses, the foul creatures. He kicks out the horses and blames the pole.
He sees a table in the distance of five versions of Salad Fingers eating blood and guts - one from a mug, one with a concave face, one with bloodshot eyes, etc. He sits at the empty seat as the others eat and hit the table.
The ground shakes and the pole shrinks to reveal a present; Milford Cubicle’s body stitched together into a hat. He swears he will wear it to the grave. Fade out.
Salad Fingers sits at a table and thanks the audience for 1 million people (assuming subscribers). Hubert Cumberdale sprouts teeth. Fire envelopes the screen.
Key Moment: Salad Fingers sits with versions of himself who consume blood and guts.
Episode 11 - “Glass Brother” (January 30, 2019)
The animation is more fluid going forward.
Salad Fingers scolds Margory for not getting a haircut and eats all her red hairs, choking on them. He tells Hubert Cumberdale he’ll never be a real boy.
Cut to his basement, where he claims Hubert Cumberdale is ready to grow up; he sews flesh to Hubert Cumberdale with rusty tools until the puppet is now a fleshy pink mound, a “Dazzling Dreamboat.” Hubert Cumberdale says he likes to dance on rooftops and he’s ready for life.
Salad Fingers sees himself in the mirror, and in a reflection, sees a woman he refers to as his mother, with ‘salad fingers’ that drag to the floor, a white dress, and wild hair. He fetches her (the mirror) a bowl of rainbow grey goo and laments how he can’t pass it through the mirror, his eyes growing red in frustration.
Outside, he argues with his reflection in a mirror. Cut to inside, he’s making a recipe from his glass mother’s reflection. She threatens to come through the mirror and poke out Salad Finger’s eyes. He eats the blue-black slop, then vomits it onto the floor.
A hand comes through the mirror and grabs Hubert Cumberdale. The mother in a strange voice says he’ll make a good “broom-lad” and sticks him in the coal shed.
Salad Fingers dives into a puddle, a reflection of his home. He swims into his reflection’s, his glass brother’s, bedroom and finds Hubert Cumberdale in a jar.
Glass Salad Fingers wakes up and Salad Fingers threatens him for stealing the flesh boy. Glass Salad Fingers opens his mouth to reveal worm teeth and Glass Mother glitches and laughs.
Salad Fingers tosses the jar into a puddle and dives after it, back to his world. He breaks the mirror, but his mother is still in every glass shard. He continues hitting the shards. He dips Hubert Cumberdale into the glass shards and licks him like an ice cream cone.
Salad Fingers cuts his finger on a glass shard and wipes the blood over the image of his cursing mother. He lays the shard on a small pillow and slams it in a box.
This is the most cinematic, plot-heavy, and dream-like episode yet.
Key Moment: Salad Fingers slamming the glass shard of his cursing mother in a box - it’s the closest to a satisfying ending an episode has given us.
Episode 12 - “Postman” (March 7, 2022)
Salad Fingers dressed as a postman leaves a a letter on a tree. He comes across a dead tree and leaves it an offering of bones. Then he invites a rotting animal carcass to a ball.
Fades to Salad Fingers in a suit and rat toupee sitting on a rock. He scolds Hubert Cumberdale for tagging along, who asks why he keeps so many secrets. On the date, the carcass bloats and contracts over candlelight.
“You’re not fully dressed without a smile”
They dance and Salad Fingers drags the carcass away.
Cut to the two of them in bed with flies buzzing around the carcass as it seems to speak in garbled language.
Cut to extremely rotten carcass. A dog with a baby face exits the dead tree, as Salad Fingers bemoans his failed relationship.
Key Moment: Salad Fingers takes a rotten animal carcass on a date.
Episode 13 - “Harvest” (September 20, 2023)
Salad Fingers plays with a small tree, lamenting that he’ll be the fool of the town for the pitiful grand feast. A rotted sunflower sprouts and sticks its tendrils into Salad Fingers’ eyes. It reveals eyes for teeth. Salad Fingers eats an eyeball and the sunflower dies.
Inside, he speaks to the mirror, a face emerging from his back. Salad Fingers walks the barren plains composing a letter as a head emerges from his back, singing a sort of Simlish.
Cut to Salad Fingers in bed, the growth detaching itself, now a small fully formed creature and sitting at the edge of his bed. He is named Miniature Mr. Fingers.
Mini licks his lips. Salad Fingers gives Mini a bath of smoke and cigarette butts.
Cut to the same trees from earlier. Mini is almost the same size as Salad Fingers. Salad Fingers cries how difficult it is raise Mini in limited moments. Mini admits to watching Salad Finger’s dreams for decades.
Salad Fingers introduces Mini to a rock. Mini carries the rock back to the house. Over a warm cozy fire, Salad Fingers asks puppets to be on best behavior for ‘Mr. Boyfingers.’
Mini hits Salad Fingers over the head with the rock, knocking him unconscious.
Cut to Mini giving Salad Fingers, now pale with a head wound, a bath in murky bubbling cauldron. Salad Fingers gives regards to the colonel, plays taps on a trumpet, before sinking below the murky bubbling water.
Cut to dead Salad Fingers, chopped up on a plate. Mini bemoans how the guests are late and digs in with his fingers. He converses with the rock while eating Salad Fingers.
Key Moment: Salad Fingers loses for the first time, is consumed by his double.
The Legacy
My favorite moment is early on when Salad Fingers imagines “Happy Times” and it pans to him and Hubert Cumberdale at the hair salon, a bit straight out of the Family Guy flashback formula.
The ‘randomness’ of Salad Fingers and its non-linear storytelling are directly influenced by David Lynch, who once said something along the lines of ‘if stories wrap everything up with a bow, they’re boring.’ Lynch’s influence can also be seen in the aesthetic choices (the music, garbled language, offbeat characters) and themes (like mirror images and doubles).
Creator David Firth hints that if you pay close attention, you can unravel the story of Salad Fingers; perhaps how he came to be, who the Beast is, why almost no one else can speak, or his Glass family tree.
In 2019, a teacher was let go for showing Salad Fingers to his high school class. Was he looking to share a piece of Internet history with Gen Z/Alpha? I’m sure anyone from my age group saw a few episodes or knows the name; does Salad Fingers deserve to be a part of the cultural lexicon?
Is it absolutely iconic or simply a disturbing, shocking animation that spread at the height of Internet sharing amongst preteens with unrestricted access to the computer?
The question comes down to whether it’s worth revisiting, enriching upon a rewatch. As someone who’s just done that, I say; yea, sure why not.
The later episodes are more cinematic, more interesting and closer to Courage the Cowardly Dog, but part of me adores how delightfully strange the early episodes are, despite the imagery and themes that border on fetish content.
Maybe that’s just the millennial nostalgia talking.
Recommended Watchlist
New Segment Alert! I’m adding recommended media for each newsletter.
If you liked Salad Fingers, try: // If you like these, try Salad Fingers.
Twin Peaks
Eraserhead and Blue Velvet are also obvious influences, but if you’ve been putting off David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s two-season masterpiece, It Is Time.
The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy
Tim Burton and ‘very old children’s books’ are an inspiration for David Firth, and this delightfully odd short film is an easy watch.
Spongebob Squarepants
For vibe and plot parallels, try “I Had An Accident,” “Rock Bottom,” and “Idiot Box.”
Courage the Cowardly Dog Season One
Terrifier 1 & 2
Basket Case
Ulysses by James Joyce
If you’re looking for something that appears nonsensical that’s rich and rife with references- ha, I’m just kidding.
As always, thanks for reading, commenting, sharing, and subscribing! Next week, 2024 Releases! A list of the horror media I’m most excited for this year.
xo,
the damp of your childhood basement, allie lembo
Resources:
http://www.semantikon.com/RESaladFingers.htm
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/high-school-teacher-disciplined-after-showing-kids-weird-video/news-story/3ef495d0430cd7891d1b52fdd756e483