This was inspired by my girl, Molly, who is always sick of me saying "this is one of my favorite _____". She can't ever keep it straight and she thinks I just sling that around all willy nilly.
Well suck it, I made the list, now you know I'm for real. I used to write about music but music is dead, long live the Youtube video.
Moving forward with actually picking the videos was tough, and I wasn't sure what criteria to use. Do they have to be limited by original content? Should they only be originated on Youtube? Do music videos count?
Ultimately I decided to take it easy on myself because the reason I'm doing this is to avoid death at the end of a towel wrapped around a shower nozzle and I didn't want to make it any harder on myself.
My criteria ended up ultimately to be.
- A video I saw originally ON the internet
- Anything primarily hosted/kept alive on the web, even if it ORIGINATED somewhere else.
- And most importantly, a video I find myself returning to year after year, a lasting favorite.
And lastly, these are just my personal favorites, don't get shitty about it.
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ANYWHO NUMBER 1.
A video I came to call "Everybody Luhvs Buttah, but the more accurate description of it really lies in the original title. The gist of this thing is a man's two dogs are in the middle of making puppies and they get stuck together and then turned around...
But that's not what makes this video amazing. What makes it amazing is the narrator is, I can GUESS MAYBE some kind of South Asian, maybe Vietnamese and he DEFINITELY has a bad cold. Maybe. I'm not too sure.
The hilarious voiceover combined with the preposterous situation leads to one of the most quotable vids of this whole list, with classics such as "Soah sick mang" and "Are you hurting". I owe this guy forever for giving me those lines to use in my everyday life.
A video I came to call "Everybody Luhvs Buttah, but the more accurate description of it really lies in the original title. The gist of this thing is a man's two dogs are in the middle of making puppies and they get stuck together and then turned around...
But that's not what makes this video amazing. What makes it amazing is the narrator is, I can GUESS MAYBE some kind of South Asian, maybe Vietnamese and he DEFINITELY has a bad cold. Maybe. I'm not too sure.
The hilarious voiceover combined with the preposterous situation leads to one of the most quotable vids of this whole list, with classics such as "Soah sick mang" and "Are you hurting". I owe this guy forever for giving me those lines to use in my everyday life.
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NUMBER TWO!
This is a video of a Scottish man traveling from Edinburgh, Scotland (yeah suck it UK) to his hometown Dunvegan, roughly a 250 mile trek. He takes his bike with him.
On the way he does some of the most jaw dropping stunts and maneuvers this intrepid reporter has ever seen on two wheels. Granted I am not in tune with the world of badass bicycling but fuck it, it impressed the hell out of me.
Set to a pair of gorgeous songs (Wax and Wire, by Loch Lomond and A Little Piece by The Jezabels) which I bump in my car to this day, Danny MacAskill travels the jaw dropping English countryside, and rips the shit out of it with his bike, and presumably his 50lb testicles.
Something about the urban/suburban environment and tricks really touches with me, I think because I have a real life frame of reference to the size and scope of the objects and set pieces he's doing his moves on/against.
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NUBMER THREE!
I will never stop coming back to this video. I will be 106 years old and the memory of Elementary School music class recorder practice will have long faded, and I will still re-watch this video.
It's as simple as it can possibly get, and the reason it's so great is that it is simple. Everybody knows the 20th Century Fox title card, and everyone was tormented by the worst fucking instrument ever created as a child.
The rest writes itself. The shrill horrible sounds of the devil's woodwind, against the brass and timpani of the world's most well known production studio.
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NUMBER FOUR!
The man that many people, including myself, have called the "greatest politician ever to serve in office" started a revolution in 2008. By bringing attention to the disastrous wars and continuous plundering of American wealth by the Federal government, Ron Paul rallied a nations worth of people, young and old, to his side.
This clip is part of his FINAL speech to the House of Representatives, where he served the State of Texas for 23 years.
A champion of peace, and the prime reason the word "Libertarian" is still even mentioned in the political sense at all, Dr. Paul asked a series of questions about the US and the world at large. Questions which the general populace has forgotten to ask themselves, as of late.
Anyway political ramblings aside, this is super inspirational and one of the reasons I line up the way I do at the ballot box.
(Also, please try and get past the douchey font and the fedora-clad uploader, I chose this version cuz of the badass Metallica song, but you can find the clean version yourself if you wanna be boring)
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NUMBER FIVE!
Whew that last one was a bit much, so let this next video be your cathartic reprieve.
I love Nicholas Cage. Not in an ironic "The Room is the greatest movie ever" kind of way. I GENUINELY love Nick Cage. That man has run the gamut of films 100%, he's done every type of movie you could imagine, and for, whatever reason, in a SIGNIFICANT CHUNK OF THEM, he freaks the FUCK out.
Nick losing his shit has become a party favorite of mine, perhaps moreso than any of these other videos, because.
A. most people haven't seen his lesser known works and therefore haven't seen the contents of this video
and B. I can recite EVERY CLIP WORD FOR WORD. It takes every ounce of strength not to shout along with the maestro as he yells things like "I'M A VAMPIRE, I'M A VAMPIRE" or "DO YOU THINK I'M A FUCKING RETARD MAN, HUH???!?!?!"
HI FUCKING YAHHHHHHHHH
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NUMBER SIX!
I don't expect you to watch this bad mother, because its a 7 part video series and clocks in at a little over an hour. (Please watch at least the first few minutes) But the Red Letter Media review/takedown of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace is the most masterful smashing of a shitty movie on the entire internet, bar none.
One of the founders of RLM, Mike Stoklasa, developed a character named Mr. Harry Plinkett to use in a negative review of a Star Trek movie, because "his own voice sounded boring". Plinkett is described as "cranky", a "schizophrenic", and "psychotic" whose voice has been characterized as "a cross between Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers and The Silence of the Lambs' Buffalo Bill"
It is in this voice and manner that Stoklasa tears down the most disappointing movie of all time, a film that, at the time, young Jack had been critical of, but never thought about with the depth required to truly despise it. This video helped me achieve that goal.
So if you have the time, and you want a good laugh, enjoy this. It's better than the movie.
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NUMBER SEVEN!
Look, everyone is sick of their one friend on Facebook who constantly shares TED Talk videos, and part of you wonders if they even watch the damn things, or if they curate their likes based on the titles alone.
Well, agent provocateur and banished comedian Sam Hyde was sick of it, and decided to knock 'em down a peg. In this video, Hyde, dressed in a roman gladiators outfit over a maroon sweatsuit, delivers a rambling, buzz-word filled lecture called 2070: Paradigm Shift.
Sam tricked the organizers of TedX, an independant offshoot of the more popular TED talk, into thinking he was a humanitarian who had returned from Somalia on a mission to lower crime rates by teaching the locals to pick up trash. They bought it hook, line and sinker, and soon Hyde was on stage in front of college students, preaching about how the future will look when the world adopts "a trash economy, where everyone uses cubes of trash for money. It will be a gold rush", and "State enforced homosexuality, it's equal!".
When Sam gets everyone in the audience to pat themselves on the back to congratulate themselves for saving the world, the sense of satisfaction is incredibly strong. Of course eventually everyone (probably) catches on to the gag, and starts laughing along with him. But for a while, at least, he got 'em good.
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NUMBER EIGHT!
I fully acknowledge that even the most charismatic, charming, well spoken person could be taken down by a well constructed compilation video. That being said, 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney is truly one of the most awkward, weird, peculiar specimens in the public spotlight in the last two decades.
Mitt, ESPECIALLY in this video, comes off like the robot Martians would create if they internet searched "Human Being" but used, like, Bing or something...
A truly great send off to the one-time possible leader of the free world, "Mitt Romney and the Infinite Sadness" compiles the best moments of Martian software glitches and social weirdness that was the guy Republicans chose to challenge Barack Obama.
So regardless of your politics, I hope all can appreciate that this dude would have made us look super weird.
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NUMBER NINE!
I don't want to say I'm a cynical person, but I definitely have been called that.
In the Academy Awards, there's something known as a "Career Oscar" which is given to someone for their efforts on, maybe not their STRONGEST outing, but as an acknowledgment of their work as A WHOLE.
Consider number 9 here a career placing for one of the most "underrated" and tremendous comedians working today, Mr. Doug Stanhope.
This video, part of a short lived series called "This is Why I Drink", has Doug at his most cynical, prodding self. A short declaration of why you shouldn't get in a tizzy over the negative news cycle, and that you PROBABLY didn't marry who you should have.
I will admit, seeing this video at a young age probably tilted me a bit towards his perspective, but I can't help but come back to his words of "wisdom" and wonder if, I too, will have "probably, statistically high, vegas odds" of nothing significant ever happening to me in my entire life.
There are better Stanhope videos out there, and I ENCOURAGE you to seek them out, but this one will always be near and dear to my half empty heart.
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NUMBER TEN!
This one had to be special. When thinking about a list of favorite internet videos, there's an exclusive section in my brain dedicated to "the before times". Videos that were huge before Youtube existed. It's hard to quantify now, but everyone used to have a handful of 4-5 content sites to pull from when showing their friend videos on dial up internet.
Jib-Jab, Albino Blacksheep, New Grounds, there are plenty of old-golds out there, and, almost depressingly, MOST of the videos you remember passing around, don't hold up.
One does though, in my book at least. The second in a series of videos mocking the then-popular (is David Blaine still around?) magician David Blaine stands out as a favorite.
On the backs of two guys doing early 2000's gay characters, Street Magic Part 2 is infinitely quotable, and still funny to this day. The battle cry of "WHAT THE EFF?!?" is still used in my circle regularly, and the finale of the video is legitimately genius.
The internet of old produced a lot of content, about a third of it was good, and this one stands the test of time,
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Thanks for reading, friends. I hope some of these were new to you, and they make their way into YOUR Youtube parties in the future.
Now if you'll forgive me, I have to watch Netflix in Detroit for another week.
- J
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