General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Weebl and Bob

Weebl and Bob (full title The Everyday Happenings of Weebl and Sometimes Weebl's Friend Bob) is a British Flash cartoon series created by animator and musician Jonti Picking, known online as Weebl or Mr Weebl, about two egg-shaped characters who share an obsession with pie.¹^•² The first episode, "Pie", was uploaded on June 6, 2002, before YouTube existed, and the series became one of the defining British web cartoons of the Flash-animation era.³

Key fact	Detail
Created by	Jonti Picking (Weebl); co-scripting is credited to Chris Vick by Know Your Meme and to Picking and Skoo by earlier accounts³^•¹
First episode	"Pie", uploaded June 6, 2002; the most watched episode on Weebl's site, with 2,612,660 views as of April 30, 2007³
Premise	Egg-shaped Weebl and his smaller friend Bob in short, often gross comic interactions, usually centered on their desire for pie²^•³
Television	MTV UK licensed the web content and new material in August 2002; broadcast and DVD versions were titled Wobbl and Bob over fears of a lawsuit from Hasbro, maker of the Weebles toy¹
Output	Over 100 episodes, licensed MTV idents, and a made-for-DVD special⁴
Original home	weebl.jolt.co.uk, a subsite of the UK gaming host Jolt, with free hosting⁵^•²
Peak interest	Search interest peaked in mid-2005 and then declined³

Spoilers

Characters and style

The series focuses on the misfortunate and often gross interactions between Weebl, a white egg with a gray outline, two gray eyes, and a gap where his mouth is not, and his smaller friend Bob, usually set against a dark pink background.²^•⁶ Many episodes center on the characters' desire for pie and their quest to find it, and phrases from the series such as "you bringed [sic] back pie!" and simply "Pie!" went viral on their own.³

Speech and sound. The characters' speech is deliberately slurred and difficult to understand, with the actual dialogue carried by speech bubbles; the shifting tone of voice, made less important by the garbled words, is part of the setup.⁶ A supporting cast grew around the duo, including a monkey who arrives as a freebie with pie-scented cleaner, speaks in a very English accent, and makes a point of never visiting the toilet, and a donkey with whom Weebl finds true love in the second episode, "Donkey".⁶^•⁷

Episodes and later history

As of January 2005 the series had over 80 episodes, including five MTV-only cartoons, typically about two minutes long.¹ Early episodes established recurring elements: "Hairy" introduced Hairy Lee, the pie stealer; "Bull" introduced Weebl's arch nemesis Wee Bull; and "Yarr!" featured Chris the Ninja Pirate doing a murder.⁷^•¹⁰ The duo also appeared in their own documentary parody series, The History of the World According to Weebl and Bob.⁶

The series ran alongside Picking's other viral Flash work, most famously "Badger Badger Badger" (September 2003), which brought him to the attention of MTV Europe, for whom he produced Weebl and Bob.¹¹ On January 11, 2007, an episode was released featuring the name and likeness of Dan De Zille, a fan who had bid for the honor in a charity eBay auction in aid of Oxfam.⁹ In 2010 Picking took a year's break from submitting Weebl and Bob on Newgrounds, returning in mid-2011 with the characters' "Goovies".¹² A "20 Years of Weebl and Bob" retrospective appeared on his Patreon, marking two decades of the series.¹³

Production constraints

The minimalist look was a technical decision. Picking explained that PCs of the time were slow, Flash slowed down when moving many shapes around, and most viewers were on 56K modems, so everything, including the characters, was made simple to keep file sizes and processor usage down; the episodes streamed without loading screens.⁸ One thing that never changed, he noted, was the characters' love of pie.⁸

Picking had started working on the web in 1997 to promote his music, after tinkering with animation packages on the C64 and Amiga; a breakthrough came when he submitted work to b3ta.com, whose newsletter built interest and allowed him to start weebls-stuff.com in 2001.² He cited the UK comedians Vic and Bob, Don Hertzfeldt, Monty Python, The Simpsons, adverts, and Japanese design as influences.²

MTV, DVD, and commercial work

Shortly after the series began, MTV UK discovered it and in August 2002 licensed both the existing web content and new material from Picking, who described himself as "overwhelmed with a sense of trouser-filling excitement".¹ The cartoon aired on MTV and was sold on multi-region DVD under the name Wobbl and Bob because of fears that Hasbro, maker of the Weebles toy, would sue.¹ The Guardian later described the run as taking the two wobbly eggs through over 100 episodes, onto MTV in licensed idents, and into a made-for-DVD special; Picking was also hired by Anchor Butter to make adverts featuring cows rather than eggs.⁴ Weebl's Stuff, the site hosting the series, also provided animation services to clients including E4, Yellow Pages, and Anchor.⁹

After Flash

The series belongs to a period when lightweight Flash files, spread by email forwarding, forums, and aggregator sites rather than any platform algorithm, defined how animation circulated online.¹⁴ When Adobe discontinued the Flash Player plugin on December 31, 2020, browsers blocked it entirely, and much of that era's output became difficult to play; archives such as the Internet Archive use the Ruffle emulator to make old Flash files viewable, with incomplete coverage.¹⁵ The Guardian's 2015 retrospective on the death of Flash listed Weebl and Bob among the era's notable British creations, alongside Salad Fingers and Homestar Runner.⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Early English-language web series (1997–mid 2010s)

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?