Jacknjellify

jacknjellify is an American YouTube channel run by twins Cary Kaiming Huang and Michael Yiming Huang (born: ), who are better known online by their own respective aliases, carykh and MichaelYH. 
Jacknjellify are best known for their animated web series, Battle for Dream Island (commonly abbreviated to BFDI), which revolves around anthropomorphic objects who compete to win the grand prize of Dream Island, with various luxurious amenities. 
The series has been going on for 5 seasons over the course of 14 years, however only seasons 1 (BFDI) and 4 (BFB) are complete. Season 5 is being actively worked on, as well as season 2 (BFDIA) which was initially cancelled for 10 years. Season 3 (IDFB) is still on an indefinite hiatus. 
==Content==
===Pre-BFDI content===
Jacknjellify's early content consisted of contraption videos, animations, some videos created using Phun (now Algodoo), music videos, and their "Marble Race" videos. However, by 2016, they started to focus on specifically BFDI-related content.
===Battle for Dream Island===
Battle for Dream Island is a YouTube series which follows a group of animated sentient objects battling to win a prize, such as household items (e.g. clock, sponge), food (lollipop, taco), and nature (leaf, flower). Other obscure objects were also introduced in the later seasons. 
The show is structured similarly to television shows such as Survivor and Total Drama. The objects become contestants who participate in challenges while being divided into teams, with the losing team(s) being put up for elimination. Then, they allow the viewers to vote on who they want out. This goes on until there is only one contestant left, who is declared the winner of the show. The prize has changed throughout the seasons of BFDI. In the first season, the prize was the eponymous Dream Island; by the fourth season, BFB, the prize was "a BFDI".
Battle for Dream Island gained significant popularity online and kickstarted the "object show" genre. YouTubers who were fans of BFDI created shows of their own based around the concept, often making their own characters (or sometimes using the same characters as BFDI). Along with the main series, jacknjellify also uploads short animations featuring the BFDI characters.
==History==
===2008–2009: Early history===
The jacknjellify channel was created on February 4, 2008. Their first video, "The BeiBei Squisher", showcased a contraption the twins had built. It was uploaded on February 6. Throughout 2008 and 2009, they uploaded more contraption videos as well as Flash animations and real-life Marble Race videos, one of which gained over a million views. In December 2008, they uploaded an animation they made for pre-algebra class titled "X Finds Out His Value". The two protagonists in this video, Four and X, would go on to become some of the most well known characters on the channel and in its universe.
Since early 2008, Michael and Cary had been drawing comics featuring anthropomorphic object characters. Going under the names Firey and Total Firey Island, their array of comics documented the adventures of the object characters they had created. The latter series was a spinoff of TV show Total Drama, which would eventually inspire the brothers to create a similar show. They began to devise a concept for their own animated reality series, which would involve the objects competing for a prize. The show came to be known as Battle for Dream Island (BFDI). The very first animation featuring the BFDI characters was made in February 2009.
===2010–2013: Emergence of BFDI===
On January 1, 2010, the first episode of Battle for Dream Island, named "Take the Plunge", was released. The show initially had 20 contestants. BFDI would slowly start to gain traction, and a community revolving around these types of shows was formed, with many fans of BFDI creating their own spinoffs of the show. BFDI's first season went on until January 1, 2012, when it reached a winner and concluded.
In June 2012, a second season, titled Battle for Dream Island Again (BFDIA), was launched. Though, this season was short-lived, only reaching episode 5e in August 2013 before jacknjellify announced they would be taking a break from producing the show. 
===2014–2016: AdSense suspension, IDFB===
On March 6, 2014, jacknjellify's AdSense account was suspended.Screenshot of the email jacknjellify received notifying them of the suspension. The email that they received said that AdSense had detected "invalid activity" and that their account had been disabled. Michael and Cary sent several appeals, even attempting to show Google image proof that they were not violating AdSense's guidelines, though they were all rejected.
This subsequently resulted in jacknjellify starting a hiatus from making animated content on YouTube. This hiatus lasted for roughly two years, and the only videos uploaded during this time frame were a short promotional video for a different channel and two videos regarding YouTube's false takedown of BFDI's first episode.
On March 3, 2016, Michael uploaded a video explaining the reason for no recent animations. On June 14, 2016, jacknjellify announced that their AdSense account had been reinstated, meaning that they could continue animating.
With the revenue issue sorted out, Michael and Cary resumed work on the series. BFDI's return was announced in July 2016 in an animated skit, officially bringing their channel back on track. On September 1, 2016, the first episode of BFDI's third season, IDFB, was released. The second episode was expected to be published exactly a month later, though the season was promptly put on hold due to Cary going to college. IDFB has not released another episode since.
===2017–2019: BFB===
In 2017, the brothers began developing an entirely new BFDI season with a new hand-drawn art style, as opposed to the use of assets in previous seasons. The new season expanded the cast up to 64 contestants, including many of the failed debutants to BFDIA. Jacknjellify hired voice actors and animators to help run the show. The core crew consisted of Michael, Cary, Satomi and Kenzie; they did most of the writing and animation for the season in its early stages.
The new season, titled Battle for BFDI (BFB), released its first episode on November 3, 2017. This season quickly became very popular and influenced a new wave of object shows using a hand-drawn style. BFB also helped greatly grow the jacknjellify channel, with their subscriber count having doubled by the point around the season's two-year anniversary.
BFB continued to run in the following years. In July 2018, BFB's 12th episode became jacknjellify's first video to appear on YouTube's "Trending" list. In August 2019, jacknjellify released the Firey plush, beginning a line of plush toys for a variety of BFDI characters.
===2020–2021: Split and end of BFB, creation of TPOT===
In March 2020, BFB's 16th episode was released. With this episode came the announcement that BFB would be split into two separate seasons. BFB would continue, with a significantly shrunken cast, while a fifth BFDI season, known as The Power of Two (TPOT), would start with all the remaining contestants.
The decision initially garnered backlash from fans, who were upset at how many of the contestants simply left BFB and how this would alter many aspects of the show. Jacknjellify then uploaded a video dedicated to explaining why they went through with splitting the show. The main reasons involved how Michael and Cary wanted to return to the "whimsical" nature of the very first season of BFDI, though some fans enjoyed the well-written and visually polished episodes. Their standards for BFB continued to rise until they decided to split the "fun" end and the "serious" end into their own shows, with BFB staying fun and TPOT being more serious. It was also noted that the pace in which BFB's episodes were being released was continuously getting slower, and a winner would not be announced for significant time to come.
Over time, viewers would eventually accept the split. Post-split BFB ran throughout 2020 while TPOT was being worked on. TPOT's release date was revealed in BFB 27 to be at the beginning of 2021. Enthusiasm built up by fans just prior to the highly-anticipated release even caused "#tpot" to trend on Twitter. "#tpot" on Twitter, ranking #13 in the Trending section on 9 January 2021. TPOT released its first episode on January 10, 2021. The episode was a major success, and has since become one of the most-viewed episodes of BFDI, amassing nearly 20 million views.jacknjellify - YouTube
The season finale of BFB was released on April 9, 2021. Jacknjellify reached 1 million subscribers in that same month, on April 27.Thanks for 1,000,000 subscribers! (description) by jacknjellify. YouTube. 14 Jun 2021.
===2022–present: Further expansion===
After the BFB finale, Michael and Cary announced that they would be taking a break from BFDI to focus on other parts of their lives. The jacknjellify channel released numerous short BFDI skits over about a year while their team continued to work on TPOT. Though the episodes initially began releasing slowly, Michael said that the episodes would begin to come more often. As of July 2024, TPOT has released 12 episodes.
In January 2023, a Spanish-language channel for jacknjellify was officially launched through Unilingo, hosting Spanish dubs for the BFDI series. In July, jacknjellify opened a temporary office in the Water Garden business center in Santa Monica, California. In the same month, the channel began uploading short-form videos on a daily basis, resulting in a large increase in channel growth.Jacknjellify's YouTube Stats - Social Blade
On September 1, 2023, jacknjellify revived the originally cancelled BFDIA by releasing the season's sixth episode on the 10-year anniversary of its original intended upload date. BFDIA has since been running concurrently with TPOT.
==Controversies==
===BFB 16===
On March 24, 2020, the 16th episode of BFB was released. It quickly garnered backlash from fans, with the main reason being that the episode in question announced that the show was being split into two individual ones, with BFB remaining, featuring 14 of the remaining cast. Those being Firey, Leafy, Gelatin, Lollipop, Teardrop (Who eventually joined TPOT in episode two), Balloony, Ruby, Spongy, Loser, Blocky, Taco, Woody, Bubble and Flower. Meanwhile, a new season was created named Battle for Dream Island: The Power of Two, which features everyone else remaining on BFB who left the show to compete for Two’s power. (Liy was also meant to join, escaping alongside Spongy and Loser, however this idea was scrapped). 
Many fans were furious with this decision and stopped watching BFB all together. In a response to the controversy, a video titled “The Secret Behind BFB’s Split” was released, where Cary explained the reason BFB was split up was so that the show wouldn’t last a long time. Showrunner Satomi revealed in an earlier post on X (formally Twitter) before the video, that the split wasn’t even considered early on, and instead the original plan was for those who left BFB to have been permanently killed off altogether.
===Unfair eliminations===
Ever since the early days of the BFB split, unfair eliminations (spurred by what fans have dubbed 'voting wars') have become common in BFDI, which have spurred due to viewers either bot voting, using alternate accounts to save or eliminate certain characters, or someone encouraging their fans to vote someone. 
One of the most infamous examples of this, was that of the elimination seen in ‘BFDIA 4: Zeeky Boogy Doog’. Despite receiving the most likes by fans and winning the prize, Teardrop was shockingly eliminated when she had also received the most amount of dislikes, eliminating her from the game. Many users were shocked at the outcome, and didn't understand how Teardrop could've gotten the most likes and dislikes. It was later found out that AnimationEpic, in particular Adam’s cousin, was the one responsible for the incident. Via imitating a popular My Little Pony YouTuber, she had managed to convince said user’s subscribers to mass dislike Teardrop's elimination video over Coiny's, who at the time had the most dislikes. Despite a majority of the user's fans not knowing about BFDI, they followed through with the request, ultimately resulting in Teardrop's elimination.
Unfair eliminations like this would not spur up again until the vote that followed BFB 19. This intense 48-hour voting period became quite controversial, attributed to GDNacho and his Discord server The Bracelety Inquisition. After the voting had ended and the results in BFB 20 were revealed, people began to call out GDNacho, claiming he intentionally had members of his Discord use alternate accounts for voting in order to save Ruby and eliminate Gelatin with the least votes (the new voting system introduced in BFB 17 now has people vote for the character they want to stay, with the person with the least amount of votes being eliminated). In response to the controversy, GDNacho would make a video where he revealed the true story. As it turned out GD had not planned for the events that took place, and that it had been orchestrated by members of his Discord community. Despite the controversy however, Gelatin was able to survive elimination through a 96 vote difference between him and Ruby, who was subsequently eliminated. However, there was an error scene in BFB 20 that spawned from the vote feud. It depicted Ruby appearing for a quick second due to the behind the scenes uncertainty of who was going to be eliminated.
Vote botting and alternate accounts became much more of an issue later on, as in BFB 22, a four way tie between the remaining members of the Have Nots (with the exception of Woody) had almost broken out. When the votes were counted, Taco and Flower were the bottom two, and the vote margin between the two was through a single vote. This one vote ended up being for Flower, and Taco was eliminated as a result.
The revival of BFDIA is also not safe from voting controversies. When The Beautiful Face Devotion Institute (BFDI) went up for elimination, many fans assumed that Ice Cube would've been eliminated. This was due to extensions that bring back YouTube dislikes showing that Ice Cube had received 13k dislikes, compared to Spongy who had 11K. However in BFDIA 11, it was revealed that Spongy had got the most dislikes. This caused a massive outcry within the community, with many claiming the elimination to be unfair and possibly related to Spongy flooding the grasslands with lava in BFB 14, which canonically didn't happen yet. Many had even gone as far as to accuse Michael and Cary of rigging the votes to eliminate Spongy over Ice Cube. This controversy was addressed by Cary in his BFDIA 11 reaction, in which he would show that Spongy had indeed received the most dislikes, and noted that the YouTube dislikes extension are heavily relied on and are never truly accurate. https://youtu.be/coubo-HFCo4?si=klKYPWx0FoBySNqC&t=476
==Seasons==
*Battle for Dream Island (BFDI): January 1, 2010 - January 1, 2012 (complete)
*Battle for Dream Island Again (BFDIA): June 29, 2012 - present (originally cancelled in 2013, revived in 2023) (ongoing)
*bnɒlƨI mɒǝɿꓷ ɿoʇ ǝlttɒꓭ/Island Dream For Battle (IDFB): September 1, 2016 (hiatus)
*Battle for BFDI/BFB (BFB): November 3, 2017 - April 9, 2021 (complete)
*Battle for Dream Island: The Power of Two (TPOT): January 10, 2021 - present (ongoing)
==Other channels==
==Trivia==
*BFDI raised jacknjellify up to the 4,988th most viewed channel in the world at the time.
*Before BFDI, jacknjellify had only 11 subscribers, but after, their number of subscribers grew by more than a factor of 1000.
*In the opening of the 25th episode of BFDI, Eraser speaks of a "cool coincidence" regarding correlating each episode number with the chronological word spoken in the episode (e.g. the first spoken word of the first episode, the second spoken word of the second episode, and so on). Doing this creates a message, which reads: "Yeah, what is it now? I see you are taking the word with the place of the episode number. This is it: message, no coincidence."
**This coincidence carries onto BFDIA, currently forming the message (as of BFDIA 14): "Don't try that thing again because it definitely won't work this time. Instead say"
*"Battle for B.F.B. - Season 4b (All Episodes)" is the longest video on the jacknjellify channel, being 4 hours and 21 minutes long.
*Jacknjellify has hired new animators to help them create their show, with people in different positions working with them.
*As of October 14, 2019, Jacknjellify is affiliated with Channel Frederator.
*The channel has a total of 65 unlisted videos. 
**These videos aren’t much however, and 60 of the videos are simply the videos used for voting who gets the prize and who gets eliminated in BFDIA, via the like (prize) and dislike (elimination) system.
**Some 5 of the videos are announcements and other videos.
*If including the original comic series, Total Firey Island, the show's history spans from over 15 years ago.
*One of their flash games was featured on NASA's website.
*Michael and Cary are of Chinese descent.
*They have collaborated with TomSka, The Try Guys, Boyinaband, Max Park, Feliks Zemdegs, Kevin MacLeod, and more.
*They both created their first animation in kindergarten, but the first one shared to the public was when they were 9 or 10 years old.
*They and AnimationEpic are the first indie animation channel to be on theatres.
*Episodes such as TPOT 6, TPOT 12 and BFDIA 14 was and will be shown in theatres.
==Channel milestones==
===Subscriber milestones===
===Video view milestones=== 
*50 million video views: June 20, 2014
*100 million video views: August 13, 2015
*200 million video views: November 21, 2016
*300 million video views: January 26, 2018
*400 million video views: December 23, 2018
*500 million video views: December 10, 2019
*600 million video views: August 6, 2020
*700 million video views: February 14, 2021
*800 million video views: October 18, 2021
*900 million video views: June 7, 2022
*1 billion video views: November 16, 2022
==Gallery==
File:Jacknjellify old pfp.jpg|2008-2018 Jacknjellify profile picture. The logo is a spoof of the Homestar Runner logo.
File:Jacknjellify-logo 3263d888-0855-494b-b243-206d3faef92b 200x.webp|Logo
File:Channelbannerjnj.jpg|Channel banner (as of August 2023)
File:Michael2007.webp|Michael Huang in 2007
File:HTwins 2009-10.png.jpg|Cary and Michael in 7th grade
File:MHCHGradution.jpg|The Huang twins at graduation
File:MichaelCary2019VidCon.png.webp|Michael and Cary going to VidCon
File:Battle for Dream Island (logo).svg|The logo of the show
File:Jacknjellify faces.jpg|Michael and Cary in 2023
File:BFDIOFFICE.png.jpg|The Building in September 2023
File:Screenshot 2023-10-28 101619.jpg|Cary in 2018
File:Fnafmichael.jpg|Michael about to watch the FNAF Movie
File:Jacketjailfries.jpg|The whole crew at the 2022 BFDI X II Meetup
==References==
es:jacknjellify
Category:Animation YouTubers
Category:American YouTubers
Category:Users who joined in 2008
Category:One million subscribers
Category:Two million subscribers
Category:One billion views
Category:Hall of Fame