Who wants to run out after the holidays are over to return gifs?.
The cars look downright hideous and the backdrops look like pasted on gifs.
Unfortunately, the early web was fairly unfriendly to graphics, and often art contributions ended up being simple background GIFs and little more.
Free Fever even has animated gifs that may or may not be useful on your webpage; animated images get annoying very quickly so it's best to keep their use to a minimum.
Animated GIFs were fun ways to put motion on the screen, but users wanted more interaction, the ability to really interact with the data and change it.