In 1999 the web was around ten years old, but it still had much of the feel of a crazy place, and fun and weird sites abounded, if you could only find them. One of these sites was the homepage of a fictional children's TV show, called Furnitures, the Great Brown Oaf.
In the history of the World Wide Web, Furnitures wasn't really around for very long. Furnitures was originally hosted on the student web space of the University of Texas. Back then, the Web was still regarded as a great hope for human advancement and realization, and universities were positively anxious to give students room for sites on any topic they wanted to write about. May those days return.
The earliest record of Furnitures in the great Wayback Machine is from around August 1999; its last in February 2002. It survived a bit longer though on Henry Stokes' personal website, from March 2002 to April 2009. To my knowledge, outside of archives, 2009 was Furniture's last presence on the Web.
Although gone fron the living internet, traces and shadows of Furnitures have survived. I know of two remaining links to the empty space where it resided, a list of sites on Tripod and a short collection on Fortune City. There may be links in places like archives of Geocities, but I haven't searched through them.
(Note: these two pages have some insensitive wording. Not everything about the early web was great.)As you could tell from paging though the very long list of links on that Tripod site, Furnitures was just one of hundreds of sites of that nature that could be found on the early Web. And you can also tell, if you try to follow those links, that over 90% of them are dead links now. You might be able to hunt up some of them on the Wayback Machine, but that takes a lot of effort, to enter the URLs, and to find which archives are the real site, and not page-not-found errors or domain squatters.
Of all those lost sites, for an unknown reason, Furnitures has stuck out in my memory. Weirdly, we know more about the fictional backstory of the show than its fictional story. A "benevolent and nameless philanthropist/balloonist" found Furnitures, a sea mammal, in his travels. Despite Furnitures' anxiety, and only vague lucidity, they became the lead in a popular childrens show. Other characters include Gorget the Wolf-Pup, the wonderfully-named pirate Yetso the Fiend, and hand puppets Righto and Wrongo. Each character has a named actor portraying them (about whom we know much more than the character they portray). The show's history is laid out for us, and sightings of the fake show, in the fake press, are presented with the enthuiasm of a true fake fan.
One reason Furnitures is particularly deserving of resurrection is the site doesn't trade in much of the "edgy" humor that became infamous in the Web's first decade. Like its earlyweb sibling Homestar Runner, while sometimes it may be slightly disturbing, Furnitures didn't trade in slurs or anger, and its humor is still pretty accessible. Maybe, if it had been animated or had just a bit more exposure, Furnitures would be as well-remembered as Homestar Runner is today? Who knows?
Maybe you can judge for yourself. So now, prepare yourself to travel back in time to 2002... to visit the website of...
Some models of the Furnitures characters, made by creator Henry Stokes. Click for a better look.
This one JPEG image is larger in size than the entire rest of the Furnitures website.
Furnitures site, text, images, and characters all copyright by Henry Stokes and used with permission.
Edits and any additional material by John Harris.