Tree Swing Cartoon Parodies — Super Mario Bros. parody of the tree swing cartoon with ten pixel-art panels

Tree Swing Cartoon Parodies

2003exploitable webcomicclassic

Published October 21, 2026

Tree Swing Cartoon Parodies is a multi-panel exploitable webcomic that pokes fun at how corporate teams mangle a simple project, with each panel showing a different department's bungled version of a backyard swing3. A blog post titled 'Typical Project Life' put the online version up on September 9, 20031. By September 2010, Japanese fans had turned the last panel's caption, 顧客が本当に必要だったもの (What The Customer Really Needed), into a standalone catchphrase on Nico Nico Pedia7.

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Overview

Each parody uses the six to seven panel layout where the first image shows 'how the project leader described it,' moves through analyst, programmer, and sales representative versions, then closes on a humble tire-on-a-rope that was all the customer actually wanted4. Remixers substitute the swing for whatever industry they want to roast, from government software contracts to design agency briefs, with the deadpan captions left intact3. Humor comes from how each panel's drawing fails in a specific way: the engineering version is impossibly overbuilt, the installation version is upside down or in the wrong tree, and the documentation panel is often blank5.

Portability drives the format's long life. Blog posts about agile methodology, PowerPoint decks on requirements gathering, and university lectures on systems engineering borrow the layout to make a quick point about communication gaps5. Japanese remixers focused on the final 'customer' panel specifically, where the simple tire swing stands in for the much smaller feature that users actually asked for7.

Origin & Background

Platform
Personal blog (weblog.cemper.com) / The Project Cartoon (viral spread)
Date
2003

The online version first appeared on September 9, 2003 in an English blog post titled 'Typical Project Life' on weblog.cemper.com, which laid out seven panels illustrating the perception gaps baked into software development projects1. A Japanese translation under the title 'This is How IT Projects Really Work' followed on February 22, 2004 via Dashi Blog, where the author called the strip an accurate description of real IT work (translated from Japanese)2.

Variations of the tree swing joke predate the internet by three decades. According to Know Your Meme, the earliest documented version appeared in the March 1973 issue of the University of London Computer Center Newsletter, and the same illustration was reproduced in 1975 inside architect Christopher Alexander's book The Oregon Experiment3. The career advice site BusinessBalls maintains an archive of pre-internet variants from corporate training booklets and consultancy pamphlets5.

How It Spread

After the 2003 blog post, bloggers in English, German, and Japanese passed the cartoon around for a few years, until The Project Cartoon site launched in 2006 as a dedicated gallery for parody panels and translated versions4. That site lets anyone mix and match panels from a shared library, which turned the format into a loose community template4.

In Japan, the strip picked up a nickname taken from its final panel's caption, 顧客が本当に必要だったもの (What The Customer Really Needed), and it was reposted widely on imageboard communities like Futaba Channel's 2chan6. A July 2008 compilation collected a long run of localized parodies and sector-specific edits aimed at Japanese IT consultancies6. A dedicated encyclopedia article went up on Nico Nico Pedia in September 20107.

By the mid-2010s, the layout was common in presentations about agile methodology and in corporate training decks, with Know Your Meme describing the strip as a satirical take on product development failure akin to All Right Gentlemen and Corporate Logic3.

Timeline

1973-03

Earliest known tree swing project cartoon published in the University of London Computer Center Newsletter.

1975

Christopher Alexander reproduces the same illustration in his book The Oregon Experiment.

2003-09-09

Online version first posted on weblog.cemper.com in a blog titled 'Typical Project Life'.

2004-02-22

Japanese translation posted on Dashi Blog as 'This is How IT Projects Really Work'.

2006

The Project Cartoon site launches as a dedicated gallery for parodies and translated variants.

2008-07

A compilation of Japanese parodies is published on 2chart.fc2web.com, drawn from Futaba Channel threads.

2010-09

Nico Nico Pedia creates an encyclopedia article for 顧客が本当に必要だったもの (What The Customer Really Needed).

How to Use This Meme

Create a comic with six to seven panels, each showing a different team's version of the same product, from the initial brief through engineering, sales, and installation. The final panel usually shows the much simpler thing the customer actually asked for. The Project Cartoon website offers an interface for mixing and matching existing panels into a custom version4.

Frequently Asked Questions