Dead Links

Nothing on the internet is ever truly deleted, but it can feel like things disappear without a trace.  I was given a good reminder of that recently, when I ran across a Reddit thread parroting an old urban legend about Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."  The claim was that the artists had used real cosmetics while painting Snow White, putting them directly on the animation cels. I knew that Animationartist.com had an article disproving the story - except the site was gone.

Being the nerd that I am, this wasn't much of an obstacle for me.  Following a couple of links, I used the Wayback Machine to track down the original article, link to it, and use it as my proof that the anecdote was false.  However, anyone trying to fact-check the story, who didn't know that article existed, would have had a tougher time. I only remembered it because Animationartist.com used to be one of my regular internet hangouts fifteen years ago, when I was a more dedicated animation fangirl.  Apparently the site went offline at some point in 2018.

I've talked about some of my other old online hangouts quietly closing down over the past few years, like the Rotten Tomatoes message boards.  However, I'm more worried about articles and reviews from the more content-oriented entertainment sites disappearing, the dead links that don't lead anywhere anymore.  One of my favorite movie blogs, Cinematical, went offline in 2011, after its original platform was bought by AOL and a merger with Huffpost resulted in a disastrous reorganization.  All those reviews and thinkpieces posted over six years don't come up in searches anymore. And where are all those articles from The Dissolve? Grantland? Did anyone save all those years and years of podcasts from Spill.com before they went under?  

Even some sites that are alive and well will occasionally just delete content without warning.  My favorite, handy, go-to list of all-time great movie trailers was one compiled by IFC.com in 2009.  It's no longer on the site and the Wayback Machine doesn't have it, though a few articles and forums still have links pointing to where it used to be.  I can't help wondering what's going to happen when the sites hosting those articles and forums also become defunct and close down. They say you never really die as long as people remember you.  Maybe on the internet, you're never really deleted until the last hyperlink to you goes too.

Of course, that IFC list is long out of date in 2019, and there are tons of other trailer ranking features out there.  Of course, there are plenty of other entertainment sites and plenty of new internet spaces for cineastes and film nerds to congregate.  Film Twitter and Letterboxd weren't around back then. It can't and shouldn't be 2009 forever. And yet, I can't get over the sense that important things are being lost - or at least significantly misplaced - as we move forward.  It's not such a big deal that the "Snow White" urban legend gets spread around again, but what happens if we lose the means to debunk the more damaging, less trivial falsehoods?

And maybe it's folly to get attached to these online spaces, but losing them feels an awful lot like watching the downtown businesses in my city close up shop one by one.  The area is gentrifying quickly, and rents are going up too fast for many of them to keep up with. Others are losing business to online equivalents. The travel agency and the Costplus World Market have been the latest casualties.  Others have decided to remodel or expand and no longer look like themselves. It's hard not to compare it to the way Toonzone.net morphed into Animesuperhero.com at the end of last year, and now won't load correctly on my browser.

I guess it's all part of getting old, watching your constants depart with greater and greater regularity.  I thought I'd gotten used to this on the internet, where the speed of information is so rapid, and everything is old news in a flash.  However, I was also operating under the misguided assumption that everything was still easily accessible if you ever wanted to look back.  And I've had reason to look back more often as of late, as online misinformation grows more and more sinister by the day.

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