MyIdol, the Chinese 3-D avatar app that has been making the rounds on social media this week, uses a real image of your face to render a virtual character that’s eerily similar to you and yet ever so slightly off, yielding results that are quite disturbing. It’s more like a nightmare version of you.
Max Knoblauch over at Mashable has decided to apply that nightmare effect to popular cartoon characters from the 1990s. But there’s nothing nostalgic or endearing about these throwback avatars. They’re just straight up terrifying. Ashley Spinelli from Recess and Doug’s Skeeter come sort of close to looking like their cartoon counterparts, but Pikachu looks like an actual demon baby, and something about the football-shaped head of Hey Arnold!’s eponymous character just does not compute in the world of MyIdol. Hey, at least they didn’t make any of them dance to “Sexy Back.” That would surely be the stuff of nightmares.