This one’s going to be a bit of a tangent from the normal (and infrequent) posting, and probably more scattered, but it’s a thing I worked on recently and I figured I may as well post about it.

In 2008, the Australian show “H2O: Just Add Water” released in the US market on Nickelodeon, and watching it became a “core memory” for me. Even now, 17 years later, I occasionally have a moment of nostalgia for it.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a show about three girls on the Australian Gold Coast who end up stuck on a mysterious island after the boat that they borrowed runs out of fuel. They explore the island, and fall into a cave under a dormant volcano on the island. The bottom of the cave has a pool of water directly under the volcano’s central vent, which one of them realizes is connected to the ocean and will allow them to swim out of the cave. It just so happens that this place is “enchanted”, and they get into the pool to prepare to swim out just as the moon passes directly over the volcano. The water bubbles and glows, and they swim out, and are rescued by the Coast Guard. The next day, they all have encounters with water, and they realize that since the incident in the “moon pool”, they now transform into mermaids when they touch water. The show follows their lives and the joys and struggles of dealing with and hiding this from the world. It’s a very trans-coded show.

Every once in a while I’ll go back and re-watch some of it, it’s a charming nostalgic comfort show. It’s on most streaming services these days, but if you want to watch it, the best place to do that is YouTube, amusingly enough. ZDF Enterprises, the distributor, has an officially licensed YouTube channel where the entirety of the show is available for free in full 720p, as opposed to the DVD resolution of 720x480 that other streaming options offer.

When I watch TV and movies, I sometimes notice web addresses. I’ll usually note them down, and look them up later to see if they’re registered. In most cases, they’re registered by the studio or network or whatever and just redirect to their site. AMC, for example, keeps www.savewalterwhite.com up from Breaking Bad (now 12 years after the series ended, as of the time of writing), and www.cometlist.net up from Halt and Catch Fire.

Once in a while, there will be a domain here and there that no one had the foresight to register, or it’s lapsed over the years as whatever studio lapsed or went out of business. I always thought it’d be a fun challenge to recreate fake websites that show up in media.

In 2018, I watched through the show for the first time since it aired (also, fun fact, they didn’t air all of Season 1 in the US, and we didn’t get Season 2 and Season 3 in the US on Nickelodeon, so it was fun getting to see some things I’d missed).

In Season 1 Episode 5 “Something Fishy”, there’s a plot point where a character is looking up mermaids on the internet and visits the imaginary website “mermaidmyths.com”.

Well, it turned out that no one actually had mermaidmyths.com. So I registered it. I sat on it for a few years, not having time or energy to do anything with it, but recently I finally got around to it.

I exported every frame that the site appears in, to get as much as possible as reference material. I reached out to Jonathan M. Shiff Productions in August 2023, in hopes of finding out what clip art library they’d used for the mermaid graphics on the page. They got back to me within a week, but unfortunately they no longer had any of the material that’d been used, and were not sure of the clip art source, and said it may’ve been created by the art department rather than from a clip art assets pack.

I spent a couple of weekends digging through every single clip art library that’d been uploaded to the Internet Archive, as well as searching licensing websites for it, but unfortunately none of the mermaid clip art matched.

In the meantime, I went along creating the rest of the site. The layout used a lot of HTML tables, as would’ve been typical of the era. Some of the page flourishes used gradients, which I guessed at, landing on a linear gradient from yellow to lawngreen to deepskyblue to blue.

The page body text was hard to read, but I managed to track down the original excerpts and identify that it was sourced from an essay by a man I was not able to locate named Anthony Piccolo, called “Women of the Deep - A Light History of the Mermaid”, which was submitted to SEA HISTORY No. 68 (1993) published by the National Maritime Historical Society.

For the clip art, I ended up having the clip art recreated by a friend of a friend who does freelance illustration, and it was the last thing that was finished.

I also have greekmythicalcreatures.com, as it appears in Season 1 Episode 1 “Metamorphosis”, but haven’t yet had a chance to work on it. I have domains that appears in a handful of other shows and movies, and at some point in the foreseeable future I’ll get to recreating those, too, hopefully.

As of May 2025, you can finally visit http://mermaidmyths.com/=php/history, and see it as it appears in probably 10 seconds of the 2006 TV show “H2O: Just Add Water”.

It’s also available on GitHub: https://github.com/juicenet/mermaidmyths.com

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