BY: ALLEGRA FRANK
When headlines with the words “Skibidi Toilet” and “Michael Bay'' started popping up unwitting social media feeds this week, they probably prompted one of two immediate reactions: “What the hell is Skibidi Toilet?” and/or, “Oh god, cinema is dead, isn’t it?”
Asking the latter question requires answering the former, which I’d guess most Washington Post readers could not. Yet, a feature boasting of the massively popular, Gen Alpha-beloved YouTube series’ franchise potential appeared in the legacy publication following the head-turning announcement from a Variety interview, bearing quotes from Bay that sent aggrieved and confused readers into the comments section.
Bay told the Post that he saw a Marvel-esque, Transformers-style future for Skibidi Toilet, rife with TV, film, and toy opportunities. Toys are heading to stores soon; meanwhile, Bay is working on the TV and film projects. Despite his earnest proclamations, the notion that one of the most successful filmmakers of the 21st century was hitching his expensive wagon to something called [Insert Made-Up Word That Didn’t Exist 10 Years Ago Here] Toilet was undeniably bizarre to the casual observer.
But actually, Michael Bay is a perfect fit for this ludicrous endeavor. Like the average Bay film, Skibidi Toilet can be reduced to a story about robots and things going “boom.” And like many Bay films, it’s almost shockingly popular, especially considering it bears little-to-no dialogue yet features glossy animations borrowed from a video game and a wide-eyed villain whose head protrudes from a lavatory. This viral meme is so popular that installments of the series have been viewed more than 65 billion times. There’s really no other director that comes to mind as more prepared for the shamelessly capitalistic challenge of adapting this material for mainstream audiences than Michael Bay, but there’s still the question: What even is Skibidi Toilet?
What’s So “Skibidi” About Toilets?
For the uninitiated, Skibidi Toilet is a YouTube series created by Alexey Gerasimov, whose channel DaFuq!?Boom! has more than 43 million subscribers and 17 billion total views. Since debuting in February 2023, Gerasimov has dropped more than 70 episodes, ranging in runtime from under 60 seconds to nearly 10 minutes. Skibidi Toilet’s early entries seemed purely random: short, absurd jump-scare videos told from a first-person perspective of someone surprised by a creepy head popping out of a toilet and singing. (The song inspired the series’ name; a meme-favorite mash-up of Timbaland’s “Give It to Me” and a Bulgarian song called “Dom Dom Yes Yes” that repeatedly uses the word “Skibidi.”)
Gerasimov animates each installment using PC game-maker Valve Corporation’s Source Filmmaker, a graphics engine that lets animators stage and record stories using the tools of high-quality game development. Between the retro art style and the brain-off comedy, Skibidi Toilet quickly found an audience of teens and tweens who grew up on games like Five Nights at Freddy’s and loved toilet humor. Literally.
Skibidi Toilet won over fans with both its brazen, surreal randomness and aggressive posting cadence, with new videos released multiple times a week. These early clips were the epitome of shitposts in motion, the TikTok generation’s version of YouTube Poops, mash-ups of random media clips that transform them from innocuous to inane. But as they amassed viewers and viral status, the series took a proper, complicated shape. One-and-a-half years later, Skibidi Toilet is now a YouTube show with an overarching, complex plot line. The hyperactive heads popping out of toilets have taken over the human race, replacing their heads with cameras, TVs, and speakers while causing chaos with their gigantic, high-tech toilet bodies. A war has now broken out between humans and toilets, as the cameramen and speakermen fight back against their monstrous porcelain captors.
The world of Skibidi Toilet has evolved from purely goofy meme fodder to something terrifying, and it’s only continued to get more and more bizarre. Skibidi Toilet’s Earth is overrun with murderous toilets big and small, with oversized, erratic, forever-singing heads sprouting out of the bowls, typically wearing a menacing grin. They hover over cities, shooting lasers from their eyes to destroy buildings, and casually murder hordes of humans. Some toilets even develop metal spider legs to climb walls. This is some messed-up, creepy-ass stuff, the kinds of things you might see happening in a fever dream. Most episodes are told from the first-person perspective of a cameraman who follows the action, as they and other electronics-headed heroes resist their titanic enemies to the tune of increasingly over-the-top explosions. But the best way to beat a Skibidi Toilet? Flush it.
Phew! That is probably not the plot one would expect for a low-budget YouTube series named after literal gibberish. Most people, however, haven’t looked past the title to investigate its storyline. The sheer mention of that word—“Skibidi”—ignites pearl-clutching and exasperated sighs of anyone too old to belong to this online group, those who drop in without context and are primed to resent next-generation slang. The concern seems to be that Kids Today are remixing language into something not just unrecognizable, but unintelligible—and now Hollywood has parachuted in and is forcing us all to contend with it, according to a lot of older commenters online.
Skibidi Toilet is too silly to warrant the existential crisis that its name inspires in some knee-jerk naysayers. It’s not a generational threat; it’s a shallow action series whose most admirable quality is its complete absurdity. But what teens see as cool, so does Michael Bay. That’s especially true when this cool thing is riddled with buildings going up in flames and garish robots getting shot down out of the sky. Bay has a history of spending a lot of money to do what Gerasimov is doing for relatively nothing: play with big, scary machines on screen for younger viewers’ delight. He’s a natural fit for something this gaudy.
The Transformers Guy Is the Perfect Candidate
Bay’s 30-year career neither starts nor ends with Transformers, but the franchise has come to define who he is as a director, producer, and tastemaker. He took a franchise known for children and blew it up into something shiny, expensive, and less kid-friendly. Bay’s Transformers desaturated the original cartoon’s color palette into shades of chrome and stocked up on cheesy rock songs, slathering the films in his adult vision of what ’80s kids would find badass today. To make things extra-mature, these fighting robots also took on the military in the Middle East. And, of course, there are lots of stunts, action set pieces, and combustibles. It’s called “Bayhem” for a reason.
Like Bay himself, Transformers takes itself 100-percent seriously, despite its product placement and history as a toy brand. It’s fun to play with your Transformers and ram them into each other, pretending they were exploding. But that is not a laughing matter for Bay—although it is still very cool and he wants things to go “boom” a lot. Whatever Bay’s five Transformers films are about hardly matters. It’s better not to know why Optimus Prime has a sword in one of the movies, and that’s not what any of us are here for, anyway. We show up to a Michael Bay movie for maximalism, destruction, and low-IQ spectacle—a high-octane rush of Bayhem injected into our eye sockets.
Bay is a single-minded master of elaborate action, using special effects to gussy up his shiny world while setting up stunts for aircrafts and vehicles to do damage and get damaged. Like Gerasimov with Skibidi Toilet, Bay’s commitment to his well-honed aesthetic passion is something to behold. It is, in fact, the only thing to behold. Bay is not considered a good director by most metrics, especially when it comes to visual storytelling. Still, he is very good at composing shots that are immediately, identifiably his, crafting a personal style that is enviably distinct even in its crass, hypermasculine, violent nonsensicality.
Skibidi Toilet has yet to cross most of those lines—save for “violent nonsensicality.” And that key trait, mixed in with the fact that the majority of the series is devoted to mass destruction, is enough to warrant the Bay treatment. Hell, when watching every episode in an unbroken streak, you can already start to visualize a version of Skibidi Toilet from the director. Aside from the obvious stuff, even the smaller moments overflow with Bay-isms—alongside its blaring sound design, Skibidi Toilet has a melodramatic score and even uses a Tears for Fears song at a key moment. Gerasimov already has some of the touch.
But perhaps the biggest reason why Michael Bay and Skibidi Toilet are a match made in heaven’s janky bathroom can be boiled down to one iconic Bay quote. In 2003, when asked by the New York Times his thoughts about the criticism that his films skewed “adolescent,” he had this to say: “I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime.”
Twenty-one years later, Bay has stuck to his blazing, exploding guns. Skibidi Toilet will undoubtedly be a major hit with the teen boys whenever it arrives—unless, of course, fickle Gen-Alpha tires of the whole thing before then. Whether or not anyone still cares after Hollywood rolls the dice with this trendy piece of meme-ified brain rot, there will be a supremely weird Michael Bay movie to show for it.