Wednesday, October 25, 2017

David Hasselhoff - Hooked on a Feeling





I got thinking about the Golden Age of YouTube, and how fun things were then, when bizarre old videos popped up out of nowhere. I have fifty-odd assembled in a playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv59M8aSlCSbliH1XhGnK_S3bAhBN6KQM

These include such standards as Gay Boyfriend, the Diet Coke and Mentos rocket, putting a cell phone in the microwave, Jan Terri, Mr. Trololo, John Daker, and (of course) the Double Rainbow guy (who actually got a playlist of his own).

YouTube has changed, and not for the better. It has gotten very slick, and very crowded. It's full of noise, noise, noise, noise. Everyone is hustling and trying to make a living and begging us to subscribe, like, thumbs-up, click, click, click. There is still nice stuff in there, but you really have to comb. My own stuff gets hardly any views at all, no matter how many hours I put into them, but appalling half-minute wobbly out-of-focus pieces of junk get hundreds of thousands.

Not that I care! But it would be nice to think someone, some day, might want to look at them.

It was nice and reassuring to be able to find most of the ones I remembered, though there are a few stragglers. I remember a band consisting of three incredibly old women, a singer, a pianist and someone on a drum kit. Their music was astounding, Lawrence Welk played on the wrong speed, and the audience was even more surprising in that it looked as if most of them were dead. If this video is still up there, I can't find it because I don't have the right search terms. It may have been a cable access program, which many of these are (including the Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson videos, which are beyond my powers to describe). I don't know if I included the Screaming Preacher or not. Maybe he should have his own playlist. Maybe his own planet.


Bible Teaching Gone Wrong





This is one of those YouTube Gold/cable access programs from the early 2000s. I hear he has revived the show, but the new ones are pretty much the same. Indescribable. I'd say it was the weirdest thing on YouTube, but YouTube just keeps on surpassing itself, or hitting new lows. There are a few dozen of these videos up there, if you dare. The confusion just grows.