Hello, a few weeks ago, I tried to find the origins of this iconic .gif (or .swf as you'll later see) right here, there is a huge chance you have seen it in the famous YouTube classic Awesome Face Song. The reason why I am asking the question here is because of the implications that it may have been made by a Newgrounder as inplied by the use of the grunt's torso sprite from Madness Combat.
The Hunt
My hunt begins at searching on Know Your Meme, finding the gif was not hard at all as it is the first thing you see when reading the Awesome Face / Epic Smiley page that they have. The second thing I had to do was to click on the .gif's page which contains information, but unfortunately, none of the information to the right section were particularly useful. The good news is that Know Your Meme's image pages include a comment section, and lucky for me, someone already provided the original, which turns out to be a flash animation, but that's where I hit my first roadblock, as the link provided is dead and has been for a long time, and the Wayback Machine doesn't have any archive of the page either. This paragraph would have been just the end of the post if I didn't find out about the file name of the .swf, which can be found by using the Ruffle chrome extension and clicking on the button that says "Open in a new tab", which in this case leads to a now-dead website called "dafurr.com" with the .swf file name in the url which was called "whatisthisidonteven.swf".
Searching the file name onto google brings a lot of results going back to a website named SWFchan, a lot of which are unrelated because apparently there was a lot .swf files that shared the exact name, but it didn't take me too long to find the one that I was actually looking for. Turns out, this is not the most commonly used file name for this .swf, instead, it was "fresh prince of AWESOME.swf" which used a mashup of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air theme song and Vengaboys' We like to Party!, hence the name. The page was quite useful as it showed the first time that the .swf file was seen which was on 11th of June, 2008, so at the very least, it had to have come out in 2008, but weirdly, clicking on [Wiki page at swfchan.net] which leads to how many times the .swf has been reposted, the first archived instance of it came much later on the 30th of September, 2008. Sadly, this is the last breakthrough and I have reached a much harder roadblock.
Conclusion
This is where my search stands, a possible creation date of 2008, I can't really continue it solo as there doesn't seem to be anything I can do myself, I have tried reaching out to other people, but none of them had any further clue other than some vague hints, if I want to find the true origins of this iconic animation loop and the creator behind it, I would have to talk about it here, a last resort if you will.
I still hold on to the belief that it was made by a Newgrounder or someone who has been making Madness Combat animations as the grunt torso was a very odd and specific design choice of whoever is behind this animation.
