![]() We’d eventually gravitate away from ‘stunts’ towards more structured skits and sketches. Plugging a video camera into a computer and capturing footage directly to editing software is pretty much a given for today’s generation of content creators, but back in the early 2000s, this was revolutionary. ![]() At the very least it also means I have a bizarre, tangible record of my youth that I’ll be able to laugh at one day when I’m old and wizened.īy summer 2004, we had started filming on Mini-DV, which opened up a whole new world of editing possibilities. Looking back, the whole endeavour was entirely aimless, but aside from coming away with mild head injuries from time to time it was an innocuous way to spend my childhood. You either try to fight it and get destroyed, or embrace it and try to cash in. Having not watched any of it in well over a decade, I can safely say that the content contained within those tapes is unequivocally shit.Īll of a sudden you're everywhere and it's out of your control. I still have a box full of VHS-C tapes kicking around somewhere, which can only be viewed on one of those absolutely insane VHS adapters. Inspired by the likes of Jackass and Bam Margera’s CKY movies, our impressionable young selves set about ignoring all relevant safety warnings, hurling ourselves out of trees, riding scooters into curbs, and racing tyres down hills on skateboards.Īt the age of 14 or so, I had envisaged cutting the footage into a chaotic feature-length video of “stunts.” I’d probably have soundtracked it with music from the Tony Hawk games, alongside countless other homemade skate videos people made circa 2003 that probably featured a mix of Ace of Spades or Guerilla Radio. It began in mid-2003, when myself and a group of friends would have been in our early teens. Having spent the best part of my school years filming stupid skits with mates instead of studying, there was something semi-appealing about the prospect of being able to put videos online to share with friends. To understand why, it’s useful to remember that the internet in 2007 was, for better or worse, a very different place. In recent years I’ve come to appreciate and even enjoy its bizarre status as an enduring piece of internet history, but my relationship with the clip in the decade that followed its inexorable rise hasn’t always been easy. Who was the guy who got punched? Why did he get punched? Who punched him? What was he thinking? Why did he react that way? Why did he leave YouTube? We’ve contacted both Weedon and YouTube about the news, and hope the company sees sense and restores the original.It’s been nearly 14 years since I uploaded the original video and to this day it still prompts questions. To add insult to injury, Weedon is currently in the process of making a documentary about the meme, so this takedown at least adds a little twist to the proceedings. After yanking down several other videos on my YouTube channel, I opted for the latter.” “All of a sudden you’re everywhere and it’s out of your control. “At the time, going viral wasn’t really comparable to any other experience and it certainly wasn’t something I could discuss in solidarity with my friends,” writes Weedon. ![]() In an article for Vice published earlier this year, he describes how the clip came out of he and his friends filming each other doing “stunts” in the vein of Jackass, and how he sold the original rights for the clip to the now-defunct and isn’t sure who even owns the IP now. The video has been remixed and re-memed in countless ways since it first went viral in the mid-2010s, and Weedon himself has an interesting relationship with the content. And, of course, countless re-uploads of the clip still exist (alongside the other, legitimately horrible content that YouTube is happy to leave up). Weedon tweeted out the news of the takedown and his unsuccessful appeal, noting that the video had been on YouTube for 14 years, and racked up 12 million views in that time with “no issues whatsoever.” The clip itself is a classic: low-res, contextless, and instantly funny. In the words of Paul Weedon himself, star of and uploader of the original video: Ah, fuck. Case in point, this week YouTube removed the original upload of the “Ah fuck, I can’t believe you’ve done this” meme, rejecting an appeal from its creator (and the guy who can’t believe this was done) and claiming that the clip violates the company’s “violent or graphic content policy.” That makes it jarring when the company acts like what it is: a multinational corporation with no real understanding of this value. Whether it wants to be or not, YouTube is a guardian of internet history, with countless classic videos sitting in its archives.
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