It seems hard to imagine now that the first YouTube 19-second video, “Me at the Zoo,” featuring co-founder Jawed Karim, was only uploaded at 8:27 p.m. Saturday, April 23, 2005, which is less than nine years ago. Karim, and the two other co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, went on to sell YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in November 2006. YouTube (and Google for that matter … who remembers Lycos and Alta Vista search engines today?) seem like they have been part of our pop culture reality forever.
But maybe that’s not so much because YouTube has been around for so long, but rather because it is an ever-growing retrospective feedback loop for our dimly-remembered pop culture from an era featuring something called “network television,” which constituted CBS, NBC and ABC in the United States (pre-FOX 1986) and CBC and CTV in Canada (pre-Global Television Network 1974).
In the days when network TV was king, you watched your favourite shows when they were broadcast, whatever time and day of the week that was and often in black-and-white – or you waited for summer reruns. Simple enough. No iTunes, AirPlay, Apple TV, MacBook Pro, smartphones, no DVDs and no VCRs. How quaint.
As recently as two or three years ago, I remember having to go to some of the “free” services such as MovPod – “Just watch it! at: http://www.movpod.in/” and “Tv-Links: Free Movies links, Watch Tv Shows links online, Anime, Documentaries” to watch such oldies as Dennis the Menace, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Green Acres – and 2009-10’s FlashForward. MovPod and Tv-Links invariably had numerous hoops to jump through in terms of registration and often mindless or just plain unseemly advertising (which I guess isn’t so different than network TV) but they had some old gems if you were willing to pan for the gold, as it were (and perhaps put up with Russian subtitles.)
As for movies – at least beyond the trailer – you might find it on YouTube, but usually in multiple segments of seven or eight minutes each (i.e. Where The Heart Is Part 1/16) sort of thing, rather than the full movie.
Today, my anecdotal impression anyway, is that you are finding more and more full-length movies on YouTube and most of those 1960’s sitcoms you had to go previously to MovPod or Tv-Links to watch have also migrated to YouTube.
It is a rich cornucopia of popular culture. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, over a bowl of Cheetos®, we watched in black-and-white a double-bill of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, also known as The Head That Wouldn’t Die, a 1959 science-fiction-horror film, directed by Joseph Green (made for $62,000 but not released until 1962), and Plan 9 from Outer Space, the 1959 American science-fiction thriller film, written and directed by Ed Wood on a $60,000 budget, and dubbed by some critics as the worst movie ever made.
As well, most, if not all, of the 107 episodes of My Favorite Martian, a television sitcom that aired on CBS from Sept. 29, 1963 to May 1, 1966, are now readily available to be viewed on YouTube, whereas in early 2012 you would have been hard-pressed to find them for free online, including at MovPod or Tv-Links.
Take the episode “Now You See It, Now You Don’t” that was first broadcast on Feb. 16, 1964. Uncle Martin (the Martian roommate played by Ray Walston) explains to Tim O’Hara, a young newspaper reporter for The Los Angeles Sun, played by Bill Bixby, that a trip to the museum will be more rewarding than a golf outing on his day off because “voices from the past have lessons for us if we have ears to listen.” Since I was six years old and definitely not a newspaper reporter when it first aired, I can’t recall whether I saw it first time around in 1964. Now, I think, not bad. Not bad at all.
soundingsjohnbarker 