Simian Substitute Sites Of The Month - 2001 Archive

January 2001 - Little Red Monkee
Now part of the overly Flash-encrusted Monkeehub, this is one of a whole series of splendidly simian animated shorts. It's the tune that either makes this one for you, or drives you completely over the edge (as it did with RussMeyerGirl). Kids, don't try to work out what the monkey's saying towards the end.

February 2001 - Monkeybone
Henry Selick's film pretty much died on its bottom (going straight to video in the UK), but the official site is a spiffy collection of games and japes courtesy of the title character. There's a particularly fine Flash game where you get to throw monkey poo into the faces of passing children. Joy!

March 2001 - Bush Or Chimp?
Don't forget that these were the early days of the Dubya administration, and questions like this had to be asked. So Bill Feldspar simply obtained lots of pictures of George, lots of pictures of chimps, and matched the two together. Comedy ensues.

April 2001 - HiMonkey.net
The cutest monkey site in the world, as even hardened cynics like Rob D have noted. The small but perfectly formed Monkey investigates arts festivals, bakes yummy treats and even writes poetry, and always provides photographic evidence of its adventures.

May 2001 - Mr Monkey T-Shirts
Another namecheck for the Citizen Lunchbox multimedia portal (see further back in the archive for another two). This time, it's a shameless plug for their rather fine Naughty Monkey t-shirts. I was so pleased with mine that I got a professionalish photographer to take a photo for Mr Monkey's gallery of proud t-shirt owners. At the time of writing they'd nearly run out of this design, so hurry if you want one.

June 2001 - Monkey vs Robot
The original Windows Media Player version has vanished off the net, so you'll have to make do with this one courtesy of scifi.com, which requires Real Player and has all sorts of irritating promotional guff cluttering up the frame. But it's worth the effort, as James Kochalka's musical version of his cartoon book gets the video it deserves. Why can't they just get along?

July 2001 - Monkeyphonecall.com
The perfect last-minute gift idea: give these guys ten bucks, and they'll phone up the person of your choice and make monkey noises at them. Only works in the US and Canada, sadly: the rest of the world has to make do with the site, which includes the weblog of one of the noise-making employees.

August 2001 - Planet Of The Apes
Crikey, it was a terrible year for monkey films, wasn't it? But their accompanying sites seemed so good at the time. This, of course, is the official page for the Tim Burton remake of the old sci-fi classic. Get your trailers, wallpaper and other multimedia goodies here, once you've negotiated your way through the messy Flash interface. (Meanwhile, if you didn't understand the ending of the movie, here's a helpful diagram.)

September 2001 - ChimpNet (dead link)
From what I can remember, it was an internet site about, er, chimps. Except it's not any more.

October 2001 - Google Image Search for 'monkey'
Not a particularly inspired choice, I'll admit. But this was around the time that Google's image search was just starting, and ever since its launch it's become an invaluable resource. I used to get a lot of letters from kids asking if I had any pictures of monkeys to spare: well, here's 24,400 for ya.

November 2001 - Monkey + Festival = Danger (dead link)
Occasionally, this is how it works. I'm trying to find a site relevant to the month, so I'll do a search on 'monkey' plus the relevant occasion - in this case, the London Film Festival - and see what comes out. In this case, it was this piece of Dadaist nonsense. But as the site's subsequently closed down, you'll never know.

December 2001 - Spank The Monkey Shockwave Game
Around the start of November 2001, my daily hit count doubled. It took me ages to work out why: it was because people were searching the web for this game, and it hadn't quite made it onto search engines yet, so they were getting me instead. Now it's on Google, everyone can measure their spanking speed to their heart's content (if they have Flash), and my hit count's plummeted again. Bah.