Catching Up with Some Old YouTube Follows

It’s fascinating to see how much YouTube has changed over the past eighteen years. At times, it’s hardly recognizable from the short clips that elevated that platform upon its launch.

Recently, I’ve been digging through some old blog posts, and I was delighted to find some references to old YouTube videos and channels I once watched. I thought it might be interesting to see what happened to these creators and their series over the past ten-to-fifteen years.

Once More with Ling-Ling

Let’s start with the one channel that no longer exists, Once More with Ling-Ling. This was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer themed channel that featured episode breakdowns, toy reviews, and convention trips. I was a huge fan of this channel and exchanged quite a few messages with its creator and even won a contest she held.

After doing a little digging, it seems that around the same time as she was running this channel, she created a short film called My Mother’s Jade. She also spun off a personal channel called her.magick which still has videos online, although it hasn’t had a new post in four years.

Convos with My Two Year Old

This was probably the first channel I really looked forward to watching each upload. It was innocent and goofy, but never failed to make me laugh.

I often forget about this show, and I had to consult ChatGPT to remember the name of it, but it always pops back into my mind when I’m rewatching old shows like The Flash or Supernatural, and one of the actors makes a background appearance.

This channel began in 2013 and is still going strong. It looks like they’ve finished up the Convos with my 2 Year Old stories, but the same creators are still churning out short fictional videos a few times a year. I’m looking forward to catching up and revisiting some of their early stuff.

Malukah

Malukah exploded onto the YouTube scene in November 2011, when she released her cover of The Dragonborn Comes from the Skyrim soundtrack. Having listened to that song and various renditions dozens of times, if not hundreds, I went back to listen to her version and it still causes chills. There is just something about her voice that elevates the song, and I’m happy to see her still creating and having gotten the opportunity to perform on some video game soundtracks.

COPS: Skyrim

This is exactly what it sounds like, it’s like watching COPS, but if it took place in Skyrim. These short videos were always good for a laugh or two, and I’m happy to see it ran for a total of five years, from 2012-2017.

The Doubleclicks

The Doubleclicks are/were? a two person group that wrote and performed various geek/nerd themed songs. In 2013, they released a series of catchy songs like Lasers and Feelings, Cats and Netflix, Nothing to Prove, TableTop Games, Ennui, and Love You Like a Burrito (that if you watch closely, you can actually catch me in taking a huge bite out of a burrito).

It looks like they have gone through some life changes over the past twelve years, and so has their music. I caught up on some of it, and I still standby their earliest songs were the best. I really thought they were destined to take off back in 2013, but I’m glad they’re still around doing what they love.

Vlogbrothers

Arguably the most popular of this list, the vlogbrothers consist of John and Hank Green, who record weekly videos to one another on a variety of topics. While I stopped watching weekly probably around 2013-2014, I will still run across a video here or there that I’ll check out. I also was a big fan of John Green’s books, and I really need to catch up on everything he’s released post-The Fault in Our Stars.

Mental Floss

Closely connected to vlogbrothers, Mental Floss was a magazine I used to buy often and when they launched a YouTube Channel I was over-the-moon. John Green hosted a regular show that covered all sorts of edutainment topics and it was incredibly well done. Once other hosts started stepping in, I stopped watching and from my research his final episode was sometime in 2017. I’ve checked in on the channel several times over the years, but it’s a shell of what it once was. Same goes for their website.

The Guild

Just seeing The Guild mentioned in one of my old blogs made me want to binge the entire show. This was the first web show that showed me that good stories could be told on a smaller budgets online. Created by Felicia Day, The Guild told the stories of the different people who made up a guild in World of Warcraft type of game. The characters end up meeting in real life, and all sorts of craziness begins. What is essentially a nerdy sitcom, The Guild was a lot of fun and it’s a shame that we never got a follow-up series. The Guild ran from 2007-2012, and I’ll still some of the cast on random insurance commercials or in shows like The Good Place.

A couple of fun facts about The Guild’s influence on me:

1. Despite having no interest in World of Warcraft or MMOs, I installed WOW and gave it a try thanks to The Guild. I enjoyed what I played and sometimes think about giving it another try.
2. In one of the videos you’ll see below, there is a line about Star Trek: The Next Generation. I had watched a few episodes of TNG on Christmas a kid, but that was the only time I’d ever watched it. I was a Star Wars kid, through and through. Thanks to I’m Now I’m The One Who’s Cool, I ended up giving TNG a shot, which sent me on a several year quest to watch everything Trek and I became a huge fan of the franchise.

The Guild also gave us these two great songs, which I still listen to every now and again.