Salad Fingers is a British animated web series created by David Firth in 2004. It revolves around the eponymous Salad Fingers, a thin, green, mentally troubled man who inhabits a desolate world. As of March 2022, there have been twelve episodes published on YouTube and Newgrounds. Since its debut, Salad Fingers has amassed a cult following and has been described as a viral phenomenon. Background Salad Fingers was conceived as an in-joke when one day, while Firth was playing the guitar, his friend and frequent collaborator Christian Webb commented that he had "salad fingers", referring to the way Firth played the C-chord. In 2004, Firth posted the first episode via Flash to entertainment website Newgrounds, where it was initially unpopular. However, the video quickly gained traction once it was featured on the website's front page. Later, once the series transitioned to video-sharing platform YouTube, Firth turned to crowdfunding because he was unable to monetize videos due to the platform's content policy. In addition to writing and animating the series, Firth voices the titular character himself. He claims to have based the character's cadence on a mixture of his grandmother's and Michael Jackson's voice. The softness of Salad Fingers's voice is due to the circumstance that Firth did not want to wake up his parents while recording. While the first episode took Firth "one day and one night" to produce, others took him six months and up to one year. He has cited the works of David Lynch, Tim Burton, and Chris Morris, as well as The League of Gentlemen and South Park as sources of inspiration. Music featured in Salad Fingers episodes includes work credited to Sigur Rós, Aphex Twin, and Boards of Canada. In 2007, the series, then spanning seven episodes, had its theatrical debut at Sydney Underground Film Festival, where all episodes were shown back to back. In 2009, episodes were screened at Glimmer, Hull Daily Mails international short film festival. In 2020, a Salad Fingers tour throughout the United Kingdom was announced. The tour was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was ultimately held in 2021 and 2022. Events featured back-to-back screenings of all episodes released thus far, followed by an in-person interview with Firth. Episodes Reception Salad Fingers has become the subject of a cult following and has generated a number of memes, having "captured the comically demented and strange underbelly of the internet" according