Gone but not forgotten: the best 'dead' websites on the Internet

We take a tour through the Internet Graveyard...

By Chris Jager

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X-Entertainment

Matt Caracappa's love letter to toys and cartoons from the 1980s is essential reading for Gen-X nerds. There's pretty much nowhere else where you can find such exhaustive commentary on He-Man, Ninja Turtles and She-Ra: Warrior Princess (these things are important, you know). Old school soft drinks and breakfast cereals also frequently came under the microscope, along with more vintage television commercials than you can shake a M.U.S.C.L.E figurine at.

But X-E's biggest strength was its hilarious writing style. Who could forget Matt's horrifying expose on kid's movie The Worst Witch, starring Tim Curry? Or his countdown of the strangest Masters of the Universe figures of all time? If you grew up in the 1980s, X-Entertainment was better than porn, frankly.

While X-Entertainment.com isn't officially 'dead', it is perilously close to flat-lining. The main archive has been offline for some time now, and there hasn't been a major update in months. Caracappa hinted at his waning enthusiasm for the website as far back as 2006. A review of artificial intelligence program 'Dr. Sbaitso' contained a photo of Matt's computer with the following message onscreen:
Matt: "Sometimes, I have trouble coming up with the energy to write new articles. I work full time and I'm kind of lazy anyway. …Sometimes, I think people have stopped caring. Or maybe it's worse: Maybe I've stopped caring."

Clearly, the writing was on the wall a long time ago. (Or more accurately, on Dr. Sbaitso.)

The X-Entertainment website is still up-and-running, albeit without an existing archive. You'll need to do a Google search to hunt down older articles.

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