April Fools: The Top 5 Viral Pictures of YouTube 1911

YouTube has a tradition of celebrating April Fools Day as only the the largest worldwide video-sharing community can. Today, YouTube is highlighting the “Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911.”

The YouTube Blog adds, “Today’s homepage is a reproduction of how you might have viewed it 100 years ago. Check out some of the most popular videos of the time and be sure to try out our new upload mode which summons a horse-drawn carriage to pick up your video submission from your home.”

Now, YouTube wasn’t founded until 2005, so it is remarkable just how far online video has come in six years. You can get a sense of that by thinking about just how far the film industry had come by 1911.

According to Wikipedia, the first feature film ever made was “The Story of the Kelly Gang,” an Australian film based on the infamous Ned Kelly. It was produced and directed in 1906 by Dan Barry and Charles Tait of Melbourne. “The Story of the Kelly Gang” was a silent film that ran for a breathtaking 80 minutes. It was not until 1911 that other countries other than Australia began to make feature films.

The first movie studio in the Hollywood area, Nestor Studios, was founded in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley. In the same year, another 15 Independent studios settled in Hollywood. The area came to be so strongly associated with the film industry that the word “Hollywood” came to be used colloquially to refer to the entire industry.

Fast forward to the future:

• “The Irksome Citrus” (a.k.a. The Real Annoying Orange) is a real hootenanny when fruit get to gabbing.
• “Buggy Intruder” (a.k.a. Bed Intruder) shows a befuddled man has been hijinked into singing about the hooliganism he has witnessed with his very own eyes.
• “Swing Flummox” (a.k.a Fail Blog) shows a twosome of acrobats get their comeuppance.
• “Horse & Buggy Crash” (a.k.a. Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up) shows what happens when a horse and buggy gets into an accident. The result is sure to shock your knickers off.
• “Flugelhorn Feline” (a.k.a. Keyboard Cat) is an Internet meme created by Brad O’Farrell. “Fatso”, a cat owned by Charlie Schmidt, is appended to the end of a blooper video to “play” that person offstage after the mistake or gaffe in a similar manner as getting the hook in the days of vaudeville.

Just imagine what online video will look like in 100 years.