The talented folks at JibJab made this one last year, but it feels as fresh as a new stack of 100 dollar bills. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Ian Worrel is the mastermind behind Second Wind, his brilliant senior thesis from CalArts, which emerged on the web last August. It got another release on Vimeo this week to rave reviews. Since school, he’s been hard at work at JibJab, where he makes fun projects like this Flash animated wedding greeting below:

The NPR radio show All Things Considered aired a segment yesterday about the importance of Flash in the birth of the internet. How Flash Brought The Internet To Life by Guy Raz mentions a number of topics related to character animation including JibJab, Tom Fulp and Newgrounds.

Here’s the transcript from the bit with Tom Fulp:

It definitely made the Internet more fun and more lively. It would have been a much more static and quiet place if not for Flash… Whether you’re good at drawing or good at programming or good at music, you can inject that talent into Flash in some form to create something.

When I worked at JibJab, one of the funniest people in the building was Andy Ochiltree. Between his production management duties, he was just getting his first opportunities to display how damn funny he was. Today, Andy is the director of development at JibJab, and he’s helping make stuff like this Starring You short, Jowls!, which spoofs the original Jaws movie. That’s Andy providing the voice-over, and I suspect he had a hand in writing it too. For more on Andy, check out this interview here.

I wouldn’t read too much into this as a political statement about President Obama (or is it O’bama?), but I do suspect the US Treasury is looking a little bare these days. Below is JibJab’s St. Patrick’s Day Sendable short, which you can reskin with your own photos and send to your friends. There’s at least one wink in this short – the pub at the beginning is named “O’Brians” which I suspect is a nod to JibJab’s neighbors in Santa Monica – O’Brien’s Irish Pub & Restaurant.