The Speakonia Community
The Speakonia Community is the name given to a community of users that create videos that feature voices from the text-to-speech program Speakonia. Many of these videos usually revolve around characters being sexual deviants and getting into all sorts of swell mischief, chief among them the Barney Bunch. Following their exile from Newgrounds, the group quickly settled onto YouTube, where they have since stayed, thought they have also expanded into other sites like VidLii, Discord, Google+, Tracle, Rumble, Odysee, and, believe it or not, PornHub and XVideos.
History[edit]
The origins of the Speakonia Community can be traced back to 2002, when Newgrounds users Drunkmagikoopa created the Pube Muppet, a disembodied Kermit the Frog head with scribbles around him to simulate pubic hair. DrunkMagikoopa was most well known for his Animutation movies, a style of flash animation in which unpredictable collage of pop culture ephemera are blended together to create absolute madness, but one day, he decided to troll his audience and created the flash movie "pube mupit gos shoping!11" on July 21, 2002, making Pubey possibly the first character in Speakonia or Barney Bunch canon. This flash movie can still be seen on Newgrounds today, and has even been uploaded to YouTube. Even to this day, the Pube Muppet is still used in videos today by the modern community.
Flash forward to August 25, 2005, a group called the Barney Bunch springs forth onto Newgrounds by one BarneyPoop (Tim C.), then 11 years old and one month shy of his 12th birthday. BarneyPoop and another user, StrawberryBarney, both created flash movies featuring children show characters such as Barney the Dinosaur, and Sesame Street characters such as Big Bird, and Clifford The Big Red Dog. These flashes typically featured text to speech voices provided by Speakonia and still pictures, sometimes accompanied with crudely drawn male genitalia, semen, or fecal matter upon the screen. Soon enough these flashes quickly caught the attention of several other users, who quickly joined in with their own animations and flashes, creating a community in a sense. The group also introduced Drew Pickles as being one of their primary characters.
From late August to October 2005, the Barney Bunch committed various file swaps on flash movies, using stolen movies that were submitted on Newgrounds years prior so they could pass and be replaced with BB flashes after they passed judgement. Many of these submissions bore porn-esque titles such as "CLIFFORD POOP SEX" or "DREW PICKLES SEXY PORN' that were generally capitalized and angered the masses, causing Newgrounds users to start threads on the BBS demanding the Barney Bunch never be allowed to visit the website again, whether on their IP address or account. In October 2005, nearly all of the file swaps were deleted by admins hours after submission, though some were deleted instantly after the file swap, while some took at least a day. The submitter's account was usually subsequently deleted as well as part of the process. By 2006, the group seemed to have been disbanded, and several of the original members of the group were blocked from Newgrounds. However, the true story of the group had yet to truly begin, thanks to a small seed Strawberry Barney had planted just a mere year before.
By April 2006, the Barney Bunch managed to migrate to YouTube, where they began making videos and even doing occasional collaborations together, free from some of the restrictions Newgrounds had in place. Many users, including BooNube, Blood, L, Sammyt3hSnake, and others formed the backbone of the Barney Bunch scene on YouTube. By 2008, several video styles began to emerge, primarily the Drew Pickles Goes To videos, which quickly became a hit among the community at that time. Many new members joined and together, they pretty much formed the community as we know it today. They even began using the term "Speakonia Community" to refer to themselves. Over the years, the community has grown in numbers, with several high and low points. As of 2023, the community is still fairly active, albeit on a much smaller scale and very much fractioned.
Branches[edit]
The Speakonia Community is often divided into several "branches". Below is a list containing them.
The Barney Bunch[edit]
Main article: The Barney Bunch
The Barney Bunch pretty much forms the backbone of the entire Speakonia Community, and is the most famous and well known part of it. These users create videos featuring Drew Pickles, Barney, Ronald McDonald, Dick the Clown, and many others as they engage in a variety of swell and random activities, as well as feature the Pube Muppet and his Pubic Family. They tend to stick to a clear and cut formula to videos, whether it is the Drew Pickles Goes To videos, Secret Missing Episodes, Generic Gets Owned, or the Blood-style videos. They continue to be active to this very day, though it is mainly on and off with many members coming and going.
The Foot Fetish Community[edit]
Main article: The Foot Fetish Community
First starting in 2011, the Foot Fetish Community was perhaps the first new branch of Speakonia Community content creators. Much like the Barney Bunch, they portray characters as sexual deviants, though here they are sometimes bisexual foot lovers, hence the name of the group. They are also more experimental, introducing new characters and even groups like the Ketchum Klan and the Repulsa Republic, as well as popularizing the Betty Bunch, as well as using Barney Bunch characters. They also are very well known for their high-effort videos, complex storylines, and affinity for anime and obscure Australian cartoons (DJSwell69, one of the most well-known users from this community, is from Australia, and likely was the origin of this trend). Some members of the Barney Bunch portion of the community have begun implementing more story-driven videos during the 2020s.
Others[edit]
While not technically part of the Speakonia Community, the Text-To-Speech (TTS) Community does a lot of the same content, mostly making videos using Speakonia voices. However, instead of using other fictional characters, they use personifications of Microsoft Sam, Mike, Mary, and the nameless Adult Male/Female voices, with more innocent and inoffensive content such as reading funny Windows errors or going on adventures and ranting on certain topics.
Sammyt3hSnake is a user who created the Sammy t3h Snake series that ran from 2006 until his suspension in 2009 on YouTube. The series follows the adventures of the titular character in his home of Sammy t3h Snake Land, facing off against weird foes to telling stories. While he was not apart of the Barney Bunch, he was very close with them and is considered an early pioneer of the community on YouTube.
There was also the Sonic Shadow and Silver Show (SSS Show for short) where like Text-To-Speech Community have no part of the Speakonia Community it is still worth mentioning here as it follows the daily lives of Sonic, Shadow and Silver getting into wacky adventures with a running gag of Silver saying "Owwwowow how did I not see it coming here" whenever he gets beaten up or have his ass kicked, like the Barney Bunch and Speakonia Community the videos use still images of sprite with real world locations but interestingly enough the voices are provided by Speakonia.. It made some users having the idea of it doing a crossover with the Barney Bunch though none of them ever came to be.