Saturday, February 09, 2008

The Best Video on Youtube That You Can Find By Searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”

The Best Video on Youtube That You Can Find By Searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”

The babies are finicky eaters these days.

I have a laptop.

Those two facts do not seem to go together at first, but they do when I add in that the babies eat better if I let them watch cartoons and the like while they eat—it distracts them so I can get some food into their mouths.

I use the laptop for that; I park it near their chair and look up stuff on Youtube for them to watch. They primarily like “Mahna Mahna” and “Laughing Baby” – these two:





You can see how much Mr F, at least, likes Mahna Mahna here:



But I get bored just watching those over and over again, so I throw in other things that I think they might like – mostly nostalgic videos from when I was a kid. But the plethora of stuff you can watch got me wondering – what would be considered The Best Video on Youtube?

And how would you find it? I don’t want to work my way through 10,000 “dramatic look” reinterpretations – the only good one of which is “Curses!”


Because most of the videos will be bad, right? And because I’m lazy, right? So here’s what I hit on: My incredibly scientific method would be to search for “The Best Video On Youtube” and then watch some of those.

Surprisingly, out of the 100 mocha-zillion (a number I made up that is equal to how much I dislike people who order fancy coffees at places like Starbucks when everyone knows that the more you pay for coffee, the worse it tastes) videos on Youtube, only 111 of them can be found by searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”

Here’s the number one most popular of those, titled “Sexy Student Goes Wild 4 Sex.” I wonder why this one is so popular? Let’s watch:



Ha! They tricked you, didn’t they? Tricked you so bad that you will never ever buy Bristol Boys. That video is the Youtube equivalent of chat lines – you think you’re going to end up having a wild, sexy time, and instead, you get some direct-to-DVD movie.

So, clearly not The Best Video On Youtube. The girl’s not even pretty.

Then there’s something called “Free Running – Le Parkour.”



That actually is pretty cool. But here’s the thing. “Free Running” is what it sounds like – it’s a sport that involves just running as fast and hard as you can in some direction no matter what obstacles are in your way. It actually seems dangerous and exciting. But danger and excitement are very hard to capture in still pictures and quick cuts. That’s where you MTV generation kids will miss out - -your inability to pay attention to something for more than 2 seconds will ultimately mean that all your movies and TV shows will look like this.

I saw this trend coming when NFL highlights stopped showing the whole play. Instead of the 70-yard touchdown run, we saw the last 2 yards. Because, hey, we’re busy people with our iPodding and Wii-ing and stock trading on our iPhones and second marriages and all, so we can’t watch the whole run.

So they took a cool idea and made it Not The Best. And, in case you are wondering how to make your videos popular, you should note this: “Sexy Student Goes Wild 4 Sex” has 1.5 million more hits than “Free Running—Le Parkour.”

And when I noticed that, I thought of a little experiment. Remember that video of Mr F and Mr Bunches watching “Mahna Mahna?” I put it on Youtube and called it “Mahna. Mahna.” As of today (February 9), it has 54 views.

So I, today, retitled it “Sexy! Sexy! Sexy!” I will check in and tell you how many views it has next week.

Anyway, back to our quest to find The Best Video On Youtube That You Can Find By Searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”

Number three on the list was “How to Levitate Anything Light,” which would not seem to be, strictly speaking, necessary, given that the things are, well, light – so how hard is it to lift them? But I gave it a run:



So the kid was pretty good at it, and had the presence to explain his own mistake on the video. But, while I’m sympathetic, I didn’t think this was the best. What is impressive is that he’s third on the list with over 100,000 views and his video features no Sexy Students Going Wild 4 Sex, and nobody about to break their fool head.

I then skipped over “Corbin Bleu Interview,” and Evanescence video, a “Titanic Deleted Scene” that promised a leper colony – hilarity is bound to ensue, right? – and something called “depende huevos cubanos.” My Spanish is rusty, but I think that means “Cubans need eggs” and it didn’t sound promising.

This one did, though, which tells you something about me: The next in line was “A Shark Attacks Naked Strog.” How could I skip that? It has one of the necessary elements of being the best – sharks – and a second – nakedness. And it had a “strog.” What’s that? Let’s find out:



I try to stay positive here, but I can’t always. That might be the single worst video I’ve ever seen. How high is the guy filming it that he’s laughing at it?

Plus, that’s a dolphin, Naked Strog.

Then, whoa—it’s “Sexy College Student Goes Wild For Sex.” Same student, it looks like, only this one only has 21,000 views. Maybe spelling out “for” instead of abbreviating it “4” meant that people lost interest while reading the title – it was too long?

Maybe I’ve been doing this wrong. I thought that more hits = higher quality, but if the public knew anything about quality, “Futurama” would still be on the air and Jessica Simpson would be the kind-of-pretty girl working at the convenience store. So let’s go to the end.

There are exactly TWO videos there at the end of the list that have zero hits. Two videos that nobody, before today, had ever watched. One of them is 3:48 long and featured a guy named “Randy Orton.” I don’t know who that is.

The other is 0:08 seconds long and is actually named “The Best Video On Youtube Ever.” So I watched that one first, and, frankly, the guy who made it is right. (I’m assuming it’s a guy, because this kind of video is a guy thing. Only a guy would bother doing this.)

And frankly, I can’t believe this isn’t more popular, because I almost spit coffee through my nose when I watched it, and then almost did it again when I watched it a second time. It’s perfect. The timing is perfect. The graphics are perfect. The music is perfect. It all came together in one sublime experience that only takes 8 seconds to watch. So, “Bigtigers4life,” I bestow upon your effort the title of The Best Video on Youtube That You Can Find By Searching for “The Best Video On Youtube.”


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

guess who?

if you guessed bigtigers4life, you would be wrong! it's bigtigers4life! i thank you for all that you said about my video.

and i find it very ammusing that when you saw my video, you spat coffee out your nose!

Jay Fragnito said...

Hi, my name is Jay and I am the guy who originally made "the best video on youtube ever" I closed my bigtigers4life account a long time ago and as a result, lost the original video. However, I recently made a new HD version. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XljrznYj8o&feature=youtu.be