Famous on YouTube
Excerpt from a June 2008 interview in Digital Content Producer magazine.
“Internet People” is the first episode of the The Meth Minute, an animated web series that’s winding up its run of 39 episodes. It’s a goofy 3-minute song that wedges in a series of people and characters that have become Internet memes, illustrated in Adobe Flash by Dan Meth of Frederator Studios. And yes, Ryang’s all-work-and-no-play Jack gets a name check.
Interviewing Meth, I realized I’d seen “Internet People” on some blog, somewhere, sometime in the not-too-distant past. It’s about nine months old, and it has garnered about 3 million hits on YouTube alone. Meth, who has been obsessed with Flash since he downloaded a trial version in 2000, told me that my vague recollection was somewhat the point. “It’s kinda what the video’s about,” he says. “When you watch ‘Internet People,’ you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve seen that one. And that one.’ There’s no memory until you’re reminded. Eight months ago is, like, totally ancient.”
Frederator hired Meth based on some of his pre-YouTube Flash work that made the rounds. Company namesake Fred Siebert, a former network exec at MTV, wanted him to pitch ideas for a web series. The result was The Meth Minute, an attention-deficit series of skits and songs animated in a hand-drawn style. Each of the 39 episodes have little connection to each other. Pop culture parody is often the subject, but the series is also a clearinghouse for original characters that Meth may or may not ever animate again.
That’s the beauty of sites such as YouTube, he says: instant feedback from the audience. For The Meth Minute, a relatively unpopular episode might get only 300,000 hits YouTube; popular ones break 1 million. “There’s, I’d love to say, a cult fanbase now,” Meth says. “People who know the catchphrases. If you bring back a character, they comment about that.” Where does this all lead for Frederator? Details are not ready for disclosure yet, but the plan is to release a DVD and spin off one or more characters into a new web series.
