The most amazing website in existence has passed into time like a Tibetan sand mandala. Jim Carrey’s riotous and sublime imagination was on full display in a surreal portal which sent the traveler spiraling into alternate dimensions. Loaded with Easter Eggs that opened doors to weird experiences, the actor’s site was completely interactive. A traveler could commune with characters from his cannon of films, snap photographs, fly across strange landscapes or follow tunnels to beatific heavens or burning hells.
More like a roadside attraction than a website, the labyrinth was built in Adobe Flash, the proprietary system once described by Wired as an “ubiquitous resource hog everyone hates to need.” The movement to rid the Internet of this turbulent Flash gained momentum, led by a cadre of heavy hitters like Steve Jobs who penned this scathing letter. Facebook, Mozilla and Google soon followed his lead, calling for termination dates, limiting plugins, or allowing search engines to suspend Flash at will. Basically, all the cool kids took Flash out back and kicked the living crap out of it.
As Flash was slowly phased out, or dumped, depending on your perspective, Carrey’s wildly creative website became a casualty. Now, HTML5 is the new standard and the extraordinary, carnival of poetic madness that was Jim Carrey’s site has dissolved into space like a rainbow memory of pure delight.
I still have trouble letting this one go.
In case you missed it, the site went something like this…
Love him
omg I feel this! I have never forgotten that website! thank you for writing this.
Thanks, seahorse!
Who created Jim Carrey’s site?
According to an old article from Entertainment Weekly, 65 Media created it. https://ew.com/article/2009/11/06/jim-carrey-new-website/
Dear darla jim carrye
Mr Carrey..saw your article/New Yorker…Im a cartoon guy, local, Michigan..
some local success, but like to send you some of my wrk…see what you think…need your E-mail address to send some of my work….I was impressed on what you are doing…ralph
Hey Ralph,
I’m afraid I have no contact information for Jim Carrey. You could try the Internet Movie Database (IMBD.com) and contact him via his agent. Jim Carrey is a brilliant artist and creates amazing political satire cartoons on Twitter. So check out his Twitter feed, I think you might enjoy his work.
Adobe makes one of my favorite programs– Acrobat. I took some Flash software classes back around 2009 and got relatively good at it. But the writing was “on the wall” when Apple, the 1000 pound gorilla, decided Flash was too unstable to use on Apple’s ubiquitous devices. I guess that is the downside of progress and age–we have to give up some of our favorite things.