2002 — On August 4, 2002, Lenwood S. Sharpe, of an eight-person, rural, working-class household, living in Bumpass, Virginia, founded Apalon Co., Ltd. (later Thrill Land) without any initial monetary investment. Sharpe was fourteen years of age. A singularly-operated and fully online venture, Thrill Land opened its website to the public on October 31, 2002. Before the year’s end, Thrill Land produced several animated shorts along with some graphics work. At the time, short animation was a highly influential and incredibly popular form of Internet media.
Apalon was established in the wake of the dot-com bubble collaspe and was divided into three main sections: "cinema shorts" (video and animation), "apalon art" and "e-library." Apalon's orginal homepage can still be viewed at its orginal URL here.
EARLY TO MID-2003 — Apalon gave continued focus on short animations and more shorts continued to be produced. Whereas most online animation of the day utilized Flash Apalon was one of the first to release animations in the form of video files. However, sites to freely upload unlimited video, such as YouTube or DailyMotion, were nonexistence at the time. Consequently, Apalon relied on various free hosting providers such as Tripod Lycos, Members.AOL, Angelfire and 20m.com to accommodate the large space needed for online video content.
LATE 2003 — The difficulty of finding space to host Thrill Land's media content was greatly eased due to the discovery of Bravepages, which offered 100 MB of free storage. However, in late 2003, Bravepages deleted all of Apalon’s content from its servers on the basis of “hotlinking.” Hotlinking referred to the linking of non-html files (video, image, PDF, etc.) from an external site. As the hard-drive containing the original files had already become corrupted, this resulted in the lost of most of Apalon’s early content. This, coupled with the declining popularity in online animation, discourage the production of further projects.
2004 — Due to the lost of almost all content, Apalon was largely absent from content creation in 2004, excepting for a couple of efforts to develop fan fiction, and did not return to production until April 2005.
2005 — Apalon revamped its website in an attempt to rebrand itself. One lost animated short was rediscovered, Miscreation, which remains the only of Apalon’s early animated shorts surviving today. Apalon also continued in graphics work such as a series in public domain clip art hosted via Yahoo GeoCities.
2006 — Apalon found renewed focus being the first to release William T. Cox’s 1910 work, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, in electronic form. This resulted in the introduction of an entirely new subject matter to the Internet, that of “fearsome critters,” tall tale animals of North American folklore. This propelled Apalon into the realm of folklore and finally provided the enterprise with the niche subject matter needed to greatly boost its audience.
2007 — Finishing high school, Sharpe, Apalon’s founder, enlisted in the U.S. Army thereby providing Apalon with its first stream of real funding. Consequently, this year saw the introduction of paid hosting, Netfirms, to Apalon and the purchase of two domain names: fearsome creatures of the lumberwoods.com and bumpassvirginia.com, the latter, a new site, was inspired by the founder’s hometown. Military life relocated Sharpe from Bumpass, Virginia to Mannheim, Germany. Consequently, Apalon found a new home on another continent.
2008 — Apalon purchased the domain thrillland.com. Apalon had been searching for a new site that was broad in scope and one that could serve to host any type of subject matter. The name was inspired by an old, discarded, carnival admission ticket reading, “fun land.” As well, Apalon returned to online video starting a YouTube channel entitled, “BMPS-TV” for bumpassvirginia.com.
2009 — Throughout the year, Apalon produced numerous videos for YouTube. However, these works are more akin to YouTube videos of the day rather than Apalon’s early animation work. The same year Apalon started making a list of fearsome critters, which would culminate today into the Fearsome Critter Database (fearsomecritters.org), the most comprehensive catalog on the subject to date. From October 10, 2009 to October 10, 2010, Sharpe began a deployment in Kuwait and relocated Apalon’s operations to yet another continent.
2010 — Apalon added Fearsome Critters (1939), by Henry H. Tryon, alongside Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, thus coming to form a reimagined site called “Lumberwoods” (lumberwoods.com). Along with other resources, this began a transformation of the site from a single e-book to a virtual library that would be expanded over time. Consequently, Apalon’s focus shifted towards Lumberwoods, and video production on YouTube begin to wane. As well, on or around November 11, 2010, Apalon began the process of changing its name, switching from Apalon Co., Ltd. to Apalon Company, TLA.
2011 — As Lumberwoods’ transformation neared completion, with occasional stylistic adjustments, Apalon’s production of YouTube videos increased. As well, in June, Sharpe finished his term of military service and returned back to the United States relocating to Belmont, North Carolina. At the time, the Thrill Land website operated as a virtual “cabinet of curiosities” offering an online gateway for visitors to discover various subjects of interest.
2012 — Apalon stopped video production on YouTube. The platform had changed significantly in the past four years, and the channel was not gaining enough traction to warrant continued use of the platform. Lumberwoods, however, proceeded with expansion by adding Lakeshore Kearney’s 1928 book The Hodag and Other Tales of the Logging Camps and shorter works by folklorist Charles E. Brown. Furthermore, Apalon moved from hosting on Netfirms to iPage and, on or around February 11, 2012, Apalon officially changed its name to Thrill Land TLA to avoid confusion with another company also named Apalon.
2013 — Lumberwoods continued to grow in popularity and even was featured by the contemporaneously popular internet spoof, “Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.” At this time, Sharpe was starting his bachelors, and the decision was made to drop bumpassvirignia.com as a domain. This was a result in the need to prioritize coursework, available finances, the stagnant YouTube channel and lack of fresh content ideas for the domain.
2014 — Lumberwoods was linked multiple times as the primary source for an article published by Wired magazine. Following the article’s publication, public interest in fearsome critters steadily began to shift from a passing curiosity to a continued area of interest, as evidenced in Google Trends data. Lumberwoods’ landing page was also giving a more modern update. Furthermore, Thrill Land TLA officially became “Thrill Land” on or around May 14, 2014.
2015 — Lumberwoods started producing blog posts and released Art Childs’ “Yarns of the Big Woods” strip in eBook form. Likewise, the Lumbewoods landing page received multiple makeovers. Also, Thrill Land added WeirdHalloween.com to its repertoire of domains marking a return to fictional character creation in over a decade. The Weird Halloween brand also experimented with t-shirt design via cafepress.com. Around the same time, Thrill Land started experimenting with social media. Accounts for Lumberwoods were created on Tumblr and Facebook. However, the social media accounts were used more as a tool for promotion rather than an arena to build a platform as had been the case with YouTube. Still, in these efforts, Lumberwoods pioneered the concept of hunting for tales of the strange and supernatural in historic newspaper archives as a continual source of web content (other sites would later follow suit). This sort of material was conjointly published on the Lumberwoods main site under the heading of “Weird News” alongside social media.
2016 — Thrill Land created a Facebook page for its Weird Halloween brand, and, in doing so, briefly introduced what would become the brand’s flagship character, Autumn Rose. Meanwhile, Lumberwoods started chronicling the development of a tabletop role-playing game on its blog and proceeded with regular Facebook and Tumblr posts. As well, more experimenting was done with Thrill Land social media via Twitter.
2017 — Thrill Land created a Kickstarter campaign based on Weird Halloween. While unsuccessfully this campaign lead to further development of original characters and the brand. Posting on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr waned as too much time and effort was being diverted to these platforms rather than diversifying content for Thrill Land sites. Accordingly, this enabled Lumberwoods to add “Marvelous Critters of Puget Sound” to its growing collection of folkloric texts as well as a new collection on the fantastic, unrealized designs of early inventors.
2018 — With the withdrawal from social media, Thrill Land was able to free up time to return to and complete its 2016 initiative in creating a tabletop role-playing game based on North American folklore. The lengthy titled About Old Storytellers or a Game of Campfire Lore contains a ten page rule book and fifty page story guide along with character sheets. This was Thrill Land’s first foray into gaming. Meanwhile, Weird Halloween saw a rebound from its failed kickstarter campaign. Thrill Land released “Queen of Ginseng Creek” a fully-fledged and illustrated short story that brought depth to the characters outlined in the original campaign. Not to be outdone, in October, Weird Halloween, via Facebook, presented a campfire story each week adapted from tales of told by earlier generations. These posts were accompanied with artwork featuring Weird Halloween characters. As well, in a return to innovation, Thrill Land added an electronic fortune teller, Zurtænya, to the Weird Halloween site created through an original JavaScript program.
2019 — Thrill Land undertook a complete overhaul of Lumberwoods. The process, which took eight months, drastically redesigned every page and transformed the project into a virtual museum (lumberwoods.org). The project launched on August 17, 2019, and Sharpe, who worked taking reports, completed almost the entirety of the work between calls. This restructured all content into broadly defined collections. The lengthy “weird news” page alone produced hundreds of pages of content, and this transition also marked the establishment of the Fearsome Critter Database. Also, a completely orginal text was added to the Lumberwoods library entitled, "Lenwood's Lexicon of Lumberwoods Lore," written entirely in alliteration.
In addition, a fully online, desktop video game, entitled “Haints n’ Hidin’ Spaces,” was published for the Weird Halloween brand. In July, Thrill Land repurchased bumpassvirginia.com. Additionally, About Old Storytellers was moved from Lumberwoods to its own domain: tabletoprole playinggame.com.
2020 — Lumberwoods returned to social media, over Facebook, featuring elaborate doctored photographs conveying folklore and the strange. Lumberwoods also launched both an Instagram and YouTube channel. Likewise, BumpassVirginia.com relaunched and joined Facebook creating similar posts to Lumberwoods. Weird Halloween produced more artwork and original fiction in the form of campfire stories. Contemporaneously, Thrill Land began making regular Facebook posts and Twitter entries while also re-imagining its main site. In this iteration, Thrill Land experimented with sub-projects, under the thrillland.com domain, including a series of travel guides to mythical places (later rebranded under a new domain scurvydevils.com). Furthermore, in December, Thrill Land continued to experiment in video media by releasing its first full length feature. The “anti-movie” known as “Worms 20/20” solely consisted of worm footage and an unreliable narrator rambling the same nonsense about worms for roughly 95 minutes straight. This film was released into the public domain.
2021 — Thrill Land produced another experimental feature film; however, unlike its predecessor, Lamp the Movie (That Really Shouldn't Exist); *A Dracula Film contains a story and plot. However, Worms 20/20 would recieved some special attention as it was selected for inclusion it the 2021 Shockfest Film Festival.
Moreover, Thrill Land added humor to its portfolio firstly over Twitter with three separate accounts: $#!+ Gone Down in Toyland (later rebranded as Thrill Land's main Twitter account), A Pirate in Charlotte ( later rebranded as @scurvydevils) and Gregor the Gravedigger (@weirdhalloween). The last of the three being a humorous take on promoting the Weird Halloween brand. This experiment in humor led to the creation of subdomains for Thrill Land devoted to the same purpose, namely: Jokes at Thrill Land (jokes. thrillland.com) and Nonsense at Thrill Land (nonsense. thrillland.com). Similarly, Thrill Land added Riddles at Thrill Land (riddles. thrillland.com), Rhymes at Thrill Land (rhymes. thrillland.com), and Films at Thrill Land (films. thrillland.com). Furthermore, 2021 saw the introduction of the Superfluous Book of Flim Flam: A Highly Prestigious Journal, a zine that is in of itself a parody of magazines. Over on YouTube, new videos, including a series on “Fearsome Critter Studies,” were produced for Lumberwoods. As well, BMPS-TV found new direction in hosting short videos by Thrill Land plus the two aforementioned feature films.
2022 — Thrill Land started a new section devoted to original tales entitled “Pulp Comics Fiction” (later rebranded "Novel Comics"). This initiative was an attempt to return Thrill Land to its roots in creative storytelling.
As well, Thrill Land expanded the reach of its promotional characters, created though Twitter, adding Instagram accounts for Scurvy Devils and Gregor the Gravedigger. Likewise, the latter character was given new life as a horror host for an audio anthology series entitled, "Fear After Fright: A Horror Rite" along with the creation of The Ghouls' Shed"™ an expansion of Weird Halloween (later incorporated into
Also, Thrill Land's twenty year anniversary saw the creation of The Plaid Fairybook, “The Girl Who Cried ‘Kong’ and a new episode of Fear after Fright.
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Reflecting back on two decades online, it is clear to see that trends come and go. Thrill Land, itself, has seen much transformation in scope and design since its start in 2002, but it has not changed in spirit. Even to this day, its projects are not guided by any real incentive but formed purely from the joy of making something with no further thought than to share it with the world. Thrill Land has endured where so much of the internet has been lost, because it's not based on obtaining likes, ads, sponsors, popularity or influence. If such were the case it would have folded up and closed shop many years ago.
Thrill Land is no big ship, but a one-manned vessel sailing off into the depths of cyberspace. And, in the ocean that is the Internet, it is far more akin to a small row boat than any titan of the sea. But even when storms brought down the ironclads, Yahoo GeoCities, Macromedia's Shockwave.com, AOL, etc., into disuse and decline the little ship Thrill Land managed to weather the current of the times and press on.
And still, in the face of tomorrow, Thrill Land sets a course for new horizons and new adventures to come.
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