October 15, 2015

103 Best Table Tennis Animated Images

It took quite a long time to search down and shamelessly steal all of these from whatever pages I could find them, but it was fun. (Hey, I'm in there – twice!) It was a tough job, but someone had to do it, and now you don't have to. So instead of a regular blog this morning, we'll go with this. (They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so that makes this my longest blog ever at 100,000 words. Or is an animated image worth 10,000 words?) You can spend some time exploring these and perhaps put them up on your table tennis web pages. (I found a lot more than 100, but I only put up the ones that I liked.) 

I was a bit disappointed that no one's created an animated gif of a few seconds of this octopus table tennis (perhaps when he smashes near the end?) or this energizer battery table tennis (perhaps when he's playing alone at the end) – hint hint! The first ten are roughly my top ten, but after that it's not really in order. Have fun! (Note - I've since added more, so we're over 100 now.)

  1. Minion pong
  2. Ghost pong
  3. Alien vs. Predator pong
  4. Speedy Gonzalez pong
  5. Godzilla pong
  6. Hospital pong
  7. Snoopy pong
  8. Behind back counter-smash
  9. Belly Pong
  10. High-toss serve hits partner (from movie "As One")
  11. Wang Liqin rips forehand (most spectacular)
  12. 91-shot lobbing rally
  13. Loki pong (from The Avengers)
  14. Trick pong
  15. Baby smashing pong
  16. Wang Hao multiball
  17. Body-spinning counter-topspin
  18. Behind back counter-hit
  19. Chinese exhibition
  20. Minion paddle pong
  21. Forrest Gump
  22. Forrest Gump backhand
  23. Tom Hanks street pong
  24. Bruce Lee nunchucks pong (it's not real!)
  25. Arnold Schwarzenegger dancing pong
  26. Tommy Lee Jones pong
  27. Daniel Radcliffe ("Harry Potter")
  28. Barack Obama and David Cameron (British Prime Minister)
  29. Derek Nie vs. Manny Machado
  30. Derek Nie and Manny Machado reaction
  31. Larry Hodges flip kills winner (hey, that's me!)
  32. Larry Hodges forehand (I didn't even know about this one!)
  33. Baseball clubhouse pong (I think this is the Dodgers; not sure who the main player is)
  34. Dance pong (starring Adam Bobrow)
  35. Pigeon pong (this is real!)
  36. Forehand loop
  37. Mousetrap pong
  38. Penguin pong
  39. Lizard pong
  40. Puppet pong
  41. Head pong
  42. Plate pong
  43. Cat smash
  44. Cat pong
  45. Cat rally
  46. Cat watching pong
  47. Cats watching pong
  48. Cat and mouse pong
  49. Cat bouncing ball
  50. Kitten cartoon pong
  51. Kitty cat pong
  52. Jumpy dog pong
  53. Bird playing tetherball pong
  54. Timo Boll vs. robot
  55. Robot pong
  56. Man vs. robot
  57. Man vs. five robots
  58. Cartoon robot pong
  59. Cartoon drawing pong
  60. Breaking table pong
  61. Ping pong gun shoots ball through paddle
  62. Ping-pong ball smashing through paddle (from a ping-pong gun)
  63. Ping-pong ball smashing through cucumber in mouth
  64. Exploding ping-pong balls (boom!)
  65. Never-ending rally (watch person walking on top right to see the break)
  66. Woman in orange
  67. Ball bouncing on paddle
  68. Backboard pong
  69. High-toss trick serve (funniest one?)
  70. Lob bounceback pong
  71. Smack in head
  72. Man vs. cat (that's Steve McQueen from the movie "The Great Escape")
  73. Dog pong
  74. Paddle in pants pong
  75. Jesus vs. Devil
  76. Big paddle pong
  77. Big paddle vs. big paddle
  78. Big paddle and two balls
  79. Ping-pong balls in space
  80. Armless pong (racket in mouth)
  81. Spinning armless pong
  82. Solo pong
  83. Smack in face
  84. Child bouncing ball
  85. Ping-pong ball eyes
  86. Crazy action pong
  87. Toy cowboy and indian pong (this one hurts my eyes!)
  88. Speed women (this hurts my eyes too!)
  89. Speed pong (another one that hurts my eyes!)
  90. Forehand and backhand
  91. Anime forehand smash
  92. Anime smashes
  93. Anime smash in red
  94. Anime rally
  95. Anime kid rally
  96. Anime serve
  97. Anime ball toss
  98. Anime angry jump
  99. Anime penhold vs. chopper
  100. Anime smash and win
  101. Anime girls and paddle in face
  102. Anime slow motion
  103. Player catching ball on racket, smashing

Have You Practiced Your Serves Today?

Here's my article on Practicing Serves the Productive Way. And here's my Tip of the Week from last week about Serving and the Snowball Effect. C'mon people, next to receiving, serving is the most under-practiced aspect of the game.  

World Men's Cup

It starts tomorrow, in Halmstad, Sweden, Fri-Sun, Oct. 16-18. Here's the ITTF home page for the event where you can get results, articles, pictures, and video, and here's the ITTF Preview video (38 sec).

Two Decades, Two Careers Later, Appearance Number Two for American

Here's the ITTF feature story on Jimmy Butler attending the World Cup.

Fill the Club

My blog item from Tuesday is now a feature article at Butterflyonline.com, Fill the Club. It's about three important principles for successful clubs, especially full-time ones. Here's their news page, with lots of other items.

Zhang Jike Injury

Here's the article.

Dimitrij Ovtcharov: A Closer Look

Here's the new video (2:52). And here's 13 seconds of him already in Halmstad, Sweden, preparing for the World Cup (which starts tomorrow, Fri-Sun). Check out that backhand serve!

The Power of Lob 2.0

Here's the new video (20:45). Here's The Power of Lob 1.0 (7:52, from 2010).

Crow and Dog Play Pong

Here's the video (1:44) as the two play with a ping-pong ball – especially the crow.

Ping-Pong in Virtual Reality

Here's the very weird video (52 sec) from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who wrote, "The craziest Oculus experience I've had recently is playing ping pong in virtual reality."

Newlyweds Mickey Rooney & Ava Gardner Play Ping Pong 1942

Here's the video (3:41) of the two famous actors. Rooney was once a junior star in California. In fact, it was his table tennis that got him his big acting break, as described in this bio of Mickey Rooney:

"After leaving the Mickey McGuire series, Rooney appeared in several films, but his career seemed to be leading nowhere. The dreamed of “big break” was to come from the unlikeliest of sources – a game of table tennis. According to Rooney, one Sunday afternoon, he was appearing in an exhibition table tennis game at the Ambassador Hotel. Seeing that he had an appreciative audience, the ham in him kicked in and Rooney began to show off. “I entertained them,” he later wrote, “with a line of picturesque speech and patter and some pantomime that had them in hysterics.” One of those most delighted by Rooney’s antics was the game’s referee who turned out to be none other than David O. Selznick, himself an avid table tennis fan. The legendary producer had not yet reached the pinnacle of his career but was nonetheless an important producer at MGM where he worked under his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer. Following the match, Selznick reportedly tried to convince Mayer to sign his new discovery to a contract with the studio. When Mayer learned it was Mickey Rooney whom his son-in-law was so enamored of he was nonplussed, telling Selznick that Rooney, at fourteen, was a has-been. Selznick was undaunted by his father-in-law’s dismissal and sought to make Rooney a star by putting him in his latest production, Manhattan Melodrama (1934) set to star Clark Gable. That there was no part for a boy in the gangster film did not faze Selznick who called in writers Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Oliver H.P. Garrett to write one. This resulted in new scenes showing Clark Gable as a boy, played by Mickey Rooney, of course."

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