Trivia / Animator vs. Animation

• Approval of God:
  • This fan animation, with both official and fan-made scenes (the latter involving the Dark Lord pulling a Heel–Face Turn and living happily alongside the Stick Gang and the Chosen One), got a "this is awesome!!!" from Alan in the comments.
  • Alan and DJ played a fan mod of Animation vs. Friday Night Funkin' and liked it. Alan also gave a shout out to the one who made the "reanimated" version of the mod in a later video.
  • Another fan animation, "Duel", got the respect of Alan, calling it "pretty smooth", and stating that he "love the ending". (sic)
  • Alan also expressed awe and approval towards the Rivals of Aether Yellow mod, having poured a ton of love and research in adapting Yellow's Minecraft skills into his moveset, complete with the other stick figures as costume swaps. The modder even made a stage based on King Orange's Bastion, set some time after Season 3 and featuring King Orange as the boss.
  • Alan has commented under this animation pitting the Dark Lord against "Agent", the head mercenary, complimenting it and saying he agrees with the outcome (The Dark Lord killing "Agent").
• Ascended Fanon:
  • The "Animation vs Minecraft in Real Time" fan mashups, which weave the Party Scattering moments in Season 3 as they actually happen in the timeline, led to the production of an official one, resulting in a 01:19:30 animated short film stitching them together, complete with in-between scenes to get the timing just right.
  • Most fan works depicting the Stick Gang with actual faces give Yellow a pair of glasses. When Yellow officially gets a face drawn on him in the "Faces" Actual Short, that's exactly what he gets.
• Blooper: A few of them, but the most infamous one is the Baby Ender Dragon's tail and hind legs not disappearing when it enters the End Portal at the end of "The End"^note Try counting the number of "ends" in this sentence. Alan outright said this is his most regretful animation error.
• Colbert Bump: The release of Animation vs. YouTube - where many obscure content creators were referenced by the very popular Alan Becker - caused a lot of attention to be given to those creators, such as the many car videos featured. The list of videos used by the villain, YouTube's sentient digital avatar, can be viewed here.
• Creator's Favorite: Alan's favorite stickman is the Second Coming. His friend DJ, meanwhile, has King Orange as his favorite with Green in second place.
• Creator's Pest:
  • Not actually the case, but it's joked in the fanbase that Alan Becker - the real one - despises Green due to him constantly being the Butt-Monkey in the Actual Shorts. This is despise the fact almost every short was written by Skim - a member of Becker's team - who doesn't seem to actually hate Green either.
  • Out of the Stick Gang, Blue is Alan's least favorite (due to finding him the least interesting) and Yellow is DJ's least favorite (due to finding him a "Walmart King Orange" due to his inferior staff skills, preferring him before he gained the staff); both of them agree on having Red as the second least favorite (Alan due to being so unlike Red, DJ for unexplained reasons). That said, they make it clear they don't actually dislike them; they just like them the least.
• Defictionalization: alexcrafter28 in "Lush Caves" is a real username in Minecraft, that was certainly created by Alan given that the only two players with the skin are the player in question and Alan.
• Doing It for the Art: Thrice for Alan. He explains it here.
  • In the beginning, when his very first flash animation was the sweep of the web, he received an email offering him $75 if he gave the sender exclusive rights to his work. Even though he and his family were struggling at the time, he ultimately turned it down thanks to a guy named Steven L.
  • The setup for the second instance was when a site named eBaumsworld (a site where they'd post images and videos without permission) offered Alan $250 to upload his video. Then they pressured him into giving a testimonial so they could claim innocence, and upon learning that Steven felt betrayed by Alan for giving into the pressure^note Steven and many others saw Alan's animation as the perfect way to fight back against eBaumsworld, Alan decided that enough was enough.
  • The third instance was when eBaumsworld pressured him into entering a monthly contest for $1000 if he won; he wanted to keep his rights to the work, and if he wanted it removed, he wouldn't get the money. So, after talking to Steve, he gave the site the $250 back, demanding that the site remove his testimonial and his video.
• DVD Commentary: Of a sort. Alan comments on his animations while his friend DJ reacts to them on their combined channel Animators VS Games. A lot of the Word of God bits referenced both here and on other sites come from that commentary.
• Flip-Flop of God: Initially, Yellow stepping on the League of Legends icon at the end of vs. Minecraft was just a random ending gag; Alan didn't initially plan to make vs. League of Legends, as he wasn't into the game itself and didn't want to get into it in order to make the animation. Eventually he figured that he could hire people more familiar with the game to help him with the script.
• He Also Did: Alan Becker is best known for his famous work Animator vs. Animation, but he also has done other animated works before that were rather obscure and have featured other stick figures such as Pink Army, The Law Shack, Stick Texting, and Revolt TV Animation.
• Meme Acknowledgement: The common "AvA with faces" format gets a nod in "Faces".
• Newbie Boom: The first two episodes were already very popular, partly because they came out at a time when web animations were still a relatively recent concept, but the creator himself wasn't really popular since his videos tended to be stolen everywhere. When he started to make Minecraft crossover videos, the series attracted many young fans who didn't know about the early episodes before the Minecraft crossovers became the norm. This gave a huge popularity boost to Alan's YouTube channel and his fanbase since the Minecraft episodes is mostly composed of the young new fans rather than fans of the original Animator vs. Animation videos.
• Schedule Slip:
  • He originally gave the "Animation vs. YouTube" video an estimated release date of Summer 2017. Late in July 2017, he released an announcement video explaining a couple reasons why this deadline wasn't made: First, like "Animation vs. Minecraft" and "Animator vs. Animation IV" before it, he ended up adding more than he anticipated and had to spread it out to keep from being overwhelmed. The second, more unique reason that "vs. YouTube" was delayed was that he's now a father, so that took priority for a while. He then tried to parody the trope by giving an official release date of August 3, 2018, before dropping the ruse and clarifying that it would be August of 2017. And it then released on August 3, 2017.
  • "The Showdown", the fourth part of the AvA Shorts. After "The Flashback" came out, nothing new related to the AvA Shorts didn't come out for a year. Only in the credits for "Texture Pack", Alan said that the episode is coming out Summer of 2020... only for it to not come out Summer of 2020. One day before "Lucky Blocks" was released, Alan made a post saying that he's aiming for "the end of September", but the video didn't come. It was eventually set to release on October 24th 2020, which it did. Justified, as it's said to be "huge", to the point that it got its own poster.
  • "The Warden" was technically almost already finished by the time "The Ultimate Weapon" was posted, but had to be delayed due to insufficient information about the Warden mob. It was eventually released before more information was revealed anyway due to fan demand.
• Series Hiatus: Depending on the amount of work it takes to prepare the assets, it may take a while for the next installment of the series to be released. For instance, Alan's channel wouldn't see another video uploaded on it for over two months after the release of Animation vs. Trash.
• Shrug of God:
  • According to Alan Becker, Purple "just started existing", as the Animator didn't draw him in-Universe. We eventually get an explanation in "Note Block Universe".
  • When asked of the Dark Lord's fate, Alan's response was "still deciding lol". When he claimed he's dead on the Animators VS Games channel, he simply laughed when DJ asked "Is he, though?"
  • During the commentary in the AVG reaction to "Animation vs Arcade Games'', Alan admits that he's not sure what would happen if the stick figures took damage from the arcade game hazards.
• Technology Marches On: It's a series about Living Programs in the real world, so this is bound to happen. Between Animation vs. Minecraft and the AvM Shorts alone, the OS used as the backdrop ended up getting updated, and this trope is further highlighted in Animator vs. Animation V, where a flashback shows the Animator working off a dated-looking plastic computer and a bulky monitor as opposed to their modern-day rig, a PC tower with a glass window to showcase the internals as well as a sleek drawing tablet monitor.
• Trolling Creator: In "The Dolphin Kingdom", it looks like the short will end with the Fighting Stick Figures and the Second Coming on opposite sides of a cave wall, forlornly oblivious to this fact. The scene cuts to the "To Be Continued" text with the ending jingle, then the music cuts out as "..." appears. After a beat, the text turns to "Just Kidding!" and the episode continues long enough for them to reunite.
• Throw It In!: According to the corresponding AvG video, the reason the Titan Ravager was made so big was because Alan followed DJ's concept art, which showed a normal Ravager next to much larger Ravagers of his design, and assumed it was to scale. If DJ's reaction is any indication, this assumption was at least partly incorrect.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The TNT Land episode could have been named The Killer Bunny, but Alan allowed his audience to vote for the title they wanted before the episode came out. Had The Killer Bunny won, it would have been less of a Spoiler Title. For unknown reasons, the episode was renamed to "The Killer Bunny" in 2024, several years after its release.
  • King Orange was originally meant to be grey or light purple. Grey was rejected because he'd blend in with the background, while light purple was rejected because Alan didn't want comparisons to Thanos.
  • In the Actual Short "Hangman", they considered having the hanging stick figure actually start choking once he was completed, but decided that'd be too dark.
  • According to the AvG commentary for "The Chef", Alan almost had the grease fire be put out with just water, until someone on his crew pointed out that that is a very bad idea.^Why?Keeping in mind that oil and water do not mix, at best, dumping water on a grease fire just splashes the flaming grease everywhere as the water goes in. At worst, the water sinks to the bottom, becomes superheated, and causes an eruption. Either way, you now have a bigger problem than you started with. This was tweaked in the final animation to have the grease fires themselves be extinguished with dirt blocks, with water just being used on the collateral fires.
• Word of Dante: Before changed rules on YouTube removed the ability for anyone to add subtitles to videos, the videos (which are voiceless animations) once had fan-created subtitles that made up dialogue for the characters. Other fans mistook them for being official, even though Alan Becker did not write them.