A Wascally Ghost Site

From Ghost Site correspondent Joel Schlosberg comes a set of forensic notes pertaining to a derelict Web page whose subject will be familiar to many cartoon-lovers. Thanks much, Joel!

Here's a prototypical ghost site I just found: a website devoted to classic Warner Brothers cartoons called The Non-Stick Looney Page, at

http://www.nonstick.com/

It's a bit hard to determine just when the site was abandoned, but it seems to have been a long time ago: the front page says, "Last modified: 09-Mar-2000"; the latest addition to the "What's New?" page is the addition of Windows 95/98 desktop themes in December 1998; the FAQ page lists "several enhancements" that "are planned for 1998/1999"; and the last change recorded to the front page by archive.org was back in 2002.

The page http://www.nonstick.com/mgm/ has some vintage link buttons: for Netscape 3.0 and a 1996 button for the EFF Blue Ribbon campaign.

A page of public domain cartoons in RealVideo format has some very advanced minimum requirements: "The following cartoons require Real Player 5.0 or higher and a 56kbps internet connection or higher."

The credits page has a list of ancient web awards from 1996-7, and also mentions that the website was included in the 1996 book "World Wide Web Top 1000" by R. F. Holznagel.

Many of the pages contain one of three banner ads, which are broken links to one of these sites: http://www.nonstick.com/looneytrivia, http://www.looneydisc.com/, and http://www.cartease.com/.

There's a link on the sounds page to the old ibiblio address when that venerable website's name was sunSITE (it changed its name from sunSITE to MetaLab in 1998 and then to ibiblio in 2000: see http://www.ibiblio.org/history/, at sunsite.unc.edu.

One wonders why this site died. Did Cease and Desist letters appear in the night?

Even though it's dead, the nonstick site offers much to the Warner Bros. cartoon fan, especially by offering such wonderful public domain cartoons as Robert Clampett's 1943 classic, Falling Hare, in Real Video format.