Earlier reports of geek culture cartoon studio Rooster Teeth Productions’ demise turned out to have been premature.
But now, the Time-Warner subsidiary’s general manager has issued a statement confirming that the animation company has indeed given up the ghost.
Dear Rooster Teeth,
Since our founders created and uploaded their first video on the then-called World Wide Web in 2003, Rooster Teeth has been a source of creativity, laughter, and lasting innovation in the wildly volatile media industry.
We’ve read the headlines about industry-wide layoffs and closures, and you’ve heard me give my perspective and updates on the rapidly changing state of media and entertainment during each of our monthly All Hands meetings.
Since inheriting ownership and control of Rooster Teeth from AT&T following its acquisition of TimeWarner, Warner Bros. Discovery continued its investment in our company, content and community. Now however, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that Rooster Teeth is shutting down due to challenges facing digital media resulting from fundamental shifts in consumer behavior and monetization across platforms, advertising, and patronage.
Rooster Teeth’s descent into wokeness can be traced as far back as 2020, when they made this announcement:
“Laney Ingram, our Head of Legal & Business Affairs, has expanded her responsibilities to include Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI). She is partnering with Senior HR leader Stephanie O’Connor, who comes to us from Fullscreen,” they continued.
Rooster Teeth then added, “We have also hired an outside DEI consultant, Ingrid Hadley. Together, Laney, Stephanie and Ingrid are laying the groundwork for our DEI strategy and initiatives going forward.”
Less than a year later, the company was sold.
Now, less than three years after that, they’ve been shut down.
A lot of folks in our thing are celebrating Rooster Teeth biting the dust.
But dig back through the strata of time, and you find a tragedy.
Maybe this is – finally – an instance of a woke company going broke. But it should have happened to Time-Warner instead of just a fan startup from Texas they’d bought.
Don’t get me wrong. Any company that alienates its audience and pays Death Cult witches to enforce woke dogma while subtracting value is asking to go under.
But anyone who remembers these guys from their days of dubbing over Halo gameplay footage can’t help but feel a pang of sorrow.
The saddest part is how Rooster Teeth and its corporate masters have disgraced the memory of visionary web animator Monty Oum.
This guy started out making video game mashups and busted his hump until he earned the right to make his dream project.
That project was the animated web series RWBY, which contrary to the name, has mainly Japanese, and not Welsh, influences.
By all accounts, Oum was a master of influence management. Which is why the industry gave him a turn in the driver’s seat.
And he got his shot at a time when every weeb and JRPG fan had an idea for his own anime series that he fantasized about getting made.
Monty Oum was the Fanboy Who Did Good. But tragedy first struck in 2015, when he died at the age of 33, having completed only two seasons of his masterwork.
Bereft of the creator’s guidance, Rooster Teeth fumbled with the show’s influences, losing subtlety for on-the-nose references.
Perhaps the studio’s closure is a severe mercy.
But let all creators take warning: Selling the rights to your work in the current climate will eventually deliver it into the hands of companies that hate you.
Much better to take the alternative path of Neopatronage.
Let me show you the way.
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When Monte died, they should have taken what notes he had and wrapped up his original vision. Instead, they wore it as a skinsuit and merchandized the hell out of it while making the story worse and worse. They even gay-ified two of the main characters as clickbait, cutting off one of the main character arcs Monte had laid down in the original trailers.
The production value went up, and the actual content went down.
We see this pattern everywhere- movies, games, books, you name it.
Big budget production is not a replacement for quality stories.
If you want the perfect example of an organization with zero morals and a laser focus on profit, look at the mob. The minute anything threatens their money, they make a brutally honest assessment and do whatever it takes to keep the cash flowing – even if it means blood.
Cults, on the other hand, are devoted to a set of beliefs they pin their identity on. So any disconfirming information is totally ignored. Instead of correcting course to avoid the consequences of bad decisions, they double down.
That’s how you can tell the puppeteers behind these skinsuits are fanatics, not greedheads.
By all accounts the only notes Monty had pertained to fight ideas, which makes sense. Story was clearly not his focus, it was the fight animation that was his bread and butter
RT was forced to keep RWBY going, as, until that point, they had no property to replace RvB, no matter how hard they tried. The only things keeping them going between RvB seasons were Achievement Hunter and dumb skits, both aimed around the personalities of RT and not actual stories.
I count myself among those who feel some sorrow. Putting myself in their position, I am not so sure that as a regular schmuck I could run a large entertainment company any better. I have some fond memories of early RvB and even RWBY when it was still helmed by the late great Monty Oum. I can’t help but ponder on how ephemeral everything is. Perhaps youtube channels, like rock bands, empires, and people all have a set shelf life. We’re born, mature, hit our peak, decline, and eventually die, and trying to escape or outrun that only makes it sadder in the end.
I can’t help but wonder though, when the original founders were either sidelined or left entirely years ago, was RT not already effectively dead? How far can you ship of Theseus a group so dependent on the personalities of its original founders and still meaningfully call it RT?
We have it on good authority that the average YouTuber’s shelf life is 5 years.
When you consider that they really were a youtube channel started by a group of schmucks, 21 years isn’t a bad run I guess.
Well above the norm.
Rooster Teeth and RvB actually started in 2003, predating YouTube itself by about two years. They were a big early pioneer in web video. They actually resisted putting their stuff on YouTube for years because they thought YouTube was their competition before it became the monolith it is in modern times.
One day, conservatives will learn the importance of infiltrating HR departments.
What is particularly fascinating about Rooster Teeth is how every single series they had (yes, every single one) was destroyed by ejecting the original creator/creative team for one reason or another and handing it off to fanfic writers to do what they wanted with it. In the process, every single one was injected with terminal cancer and died.
This company is probably the biggest example of the modern obsession of brand taking precedence over creator directly killing the creations in question.
If there is a lesson to learn from their failure, hopefully this is among them. Human beings aren’t disposable–brands are.
One of my patrons brought up on Discord how original Red vs Blue VA Joel Heyman exited the show after season 17. His departure coincided with RT bringing on DIE rent seekers. Coincidence? Possibly but not likely.
You make a point that coincides with an attitude I’ve seen in passing (on Twitter) and that’s fandoms have developed an attitude they are more entitled to a creation than the creator. As an artist, this is a scary notion.
I think this is just another feather in the cap of neo-patronage.
Fandoms are atheist, so that checks out.
Fandoms are idolaters.
And given the general trend of postmodern idolatry towards autolatry, it all ties together.
“We the fans are Star Trek”–a fanzine review of the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation
It’s strange because in the 80s and 90s, before the fanfic era, the creator was considered Word of God, as the trope says. It is the rise of fanfics and demystifying creation as merely slapping tropes together in a Lego brick building factory that turned it into what it currently is.
Though, to be clear, I think both the creator and audience are equally important in the main goal of communication in Art. They should both be seeking Truth through the creation, which sometimes requires one to be off in the wrong direction and needing to be told to recalibrate the compass. Setting them up as antagonistic to each other is not doing anyone any good.
Neopatronage, from what I’ve seen, is probably the closest to how it should and can be done.
I still think of Sarge saying “The fact remains, a gallon of gas still costs less today than a gallon of milk” every time I go to the grocery store.
That’s an old Rush Limbaugh meme.
I am more worried about the fate of Death Battle. Get woke, go broke actually does work as a meme when one realizes going woke only works for the big companies who are protected by the government and can print their essentially own dollars. The smaller companies they gobble up gets turned into shit and then dies. Like the Devil screwing over every single person that makes a deal with him but still existing till Judgment Day.
Depending on what Wiz and Boomstick decide to do moving forward will determine the future of DB.
1) They could start anew under a new name, assuming any legal bindings allow them to make DB content in the first place
2) They can spend the next decade fighting to recover their lost content. The guys at Lowbrow Studios have talked about this with their animations. When Machinima disappeared after their parent company went bankrupt, it took many painstaking years just to get Sonic for Hire back on Youtube.
IP litigation gets tricky because you can own the rights to something but not the distribution so DB can still make episodes but RT, a dead company, has the sole right to publish and release it to the public making for a dead end situation.
One of the funniest videos I ever saw was Rage Quit (from Rooster Teeth) doing Surgeon Simulator. Extremely foul-mouthed, but hilarious.
“WHERE’S THE [bleep] HEART?!?!”
In its own way, even that was a good thing in this world that the death cult has destroyed.
I enjoyed the first few seasons of RWBY. Good aesthetics, pleasant personalities, unique modern/futuristic sci-fi setting. It all went wrong with season 3’s ending when the show got too big for its britches. The premise of the show was four kids goofing around at school and going on wacky field trips fighting monsters or supervillains. It would have been fine if RT kept making more of the same. But then Season 3’s ending promises a serious adventure epic where they are going to hike across the world and visit all the nations and fight a mysterious organization and save the world from the big bad… really ambitious. And then it immediately falls apart. After having just introduced a set of four inheritable superpowers that the heroes and big bad are chasing after, the writers then immediately introduced another set of four plot mcguffins that the heroes are villains are chasing after, so now there are 8 key plot devices to be fought over. And then the heroes spent the entirety of season 5 sitting around in a house doing nothing while side characters were moved across the board. That’s where I dropped. It was clear that the new writers had no idea how to plan this adventure epic.
Yeah, when writers multiply plot arcs without closing previous ones, it’s a sure sign they’re making it up as they go along.
“But dig back through the strata of time, and you find a tragedy….anyone who remembers these guys from their days of dubbing over Halo gameplay footage can’t help but feel a pang of sorrow.”
From someone who was introduced to RvB not long after it first came out, thanks for the sympathetic words to those of us who were there for their halcyon days! For all their crassness, the OG Rooster Teeth had comedy chops that put many others to shame with not only RvB, but their early seasons of “Rooster Teeth Shorts” depicting a fictional (crazy) version of their office. Back in the day, they really did give me some genuinely gut busting laughs.
Here’s a link to a favorite of mine that actually has no course language:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfwgKHcguMk
They were also pioneers in web video content; RvB started in 2003, predating YouTube itself by about two years.
Rooster Teeth IS a tragedy of potential wasted. My interest in them fell off hard around 2016 when RvB ignored the perfect send off ending they had crafted for season 13 in favor of continuing the series with more seasons. The seasons that followed were just unfunny and uninteresting, and it was clear they wanted to keep the “cash cow” alive. Also never cared for much of their other content, especially RWBY which dominated their existence since then. The keen eyed will notice this is also the same approximate time that Monty died, and Joel Heyman (the voice of Caboose and non-rabid-leftist political oddball amongst the generally leftist crowd) was forced out. Couple that with several real and imagined scandals, and a rapidly growing zealotry for the Death Cult (which was probably additionally fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome at the time), and the writing has been on the wall for close to a decade now. So it’s not surprising they are closing down; it’s more surprising that it hadn’t happened already.
I lament it’s demise but it has been a long time coming. Honestly I felt RvB hasn’t been good since the Blood Gulch chronicles. Sad to see it go but they got the results they deserved.
Glad you came to that healthy conclusion.