If there was every any ardent cult fondness for these movies, it has largely been lost to the sands of time. That doesn’t mean you can’t watch all of the Thumb movies on YouTube, but a mention of "Thumb movies" to most acquaintances will likely elicit more raised eyebrows than looks of recognition. Thumb Wars only has 185,000 views on YouTube, and it’s been up there for at least two years. This beagle has 785,000 views, and it’s been up for less than a week. On an IMDB message boards, a user asks, "Anyone else find the thumb movies really unfunny and bad?"

But most of the responses to that post are "No, no one else thinks that." Because here’s the thing: The Thumb movies are not bad. They’re objectively, scientifically, un-bad. And I’m going to remind you why.

By "scientifically" I mean "anatomically," and by "anatomically" I mean "all of the characters are thumbs." Because if you put a face on a thumb — a tiny, pinched visage with giant watery eyes and no nose — anything the thumb says will be a good joke. And for fans, the thumb aesthetic is recognizable enough that certain people start to look like thumbs.

So why have these movies, these monuments of artistic achievement, been forgotten? I think it’s mostly because parody doesn’t have a long shelf life and it’s very easy to hate. There are four Scary Movies now, because as more horror movies come out, the previous Scary Movies start to feel irrelevant, or at least dusty. The films parodied in the first Scary Movie are either a) forgotten or b) classics, like Kazaam and Scream, respectively. It’s difficult to make fun of something nobody remembers, and classic movies tend to defy parody. Have you ever seen a clever Scarface parody?

The Thumb movies manage to avoid these pitfalls, I think, because they’re presented from the start as insignificant. The characters are thumbs, and many of the jokes are centered around the fact that they’re thumbs. Thumb movies are happy being as obvious as possible, they don’t need to try to be anything more. The only character who shows up in every single Thumb movie is a character known as the "Woo-hoo" guy. He says "Woo-hoo" one time per short, and then he leaves. This is objectively dumb, but parody is one of the few formats in which dumb can really shine.

Take The Blair Thumb and Thumbtanic, the stand-outs of the collection. The Blair Thumb stars Stressy, Jish, and Vic (short for Victim), who get lost in the woods while hunting for an evil thing. One night, the trio thinks they hear the Blair Thumb slowly creeping towards their tent, but the intruder turns out to be a shark. A shark in the woods — imagine! Later, when Stressy is alone and crying, she wonders out loud where the rivers of snot on her face are coming from, because she doesn’t have a nose.