I’m going to recommend Occult Demon Cassette. It’s a channel full of weird, old VHS tapes that range from a lot of 90s Satanic Panic stuff to The Grabowski Shuffle. It hasn’t updated in about six months now, but it’s got a fairly decent collection of weird tapes already.
3 Likes
A lil’ different to a lot of the recommendations here, but I’m quite fond of Dan Bell - the majority of his videos involve him exploring abandoned places and they’re usually fascinating and creepy as heck. The Dead Mall Series are the least tense if you’re not big on the scarier content and they’re still really good, if you check out the other stuff be warned that at least two vids I can think of, the first Meat Factory episode & The Abandoned Military Base have jump scares in 'em which kinda sucks imo, but on the whole the videos don’t typically have those sorts of gags and they range from pretty darn tense to being straight up terrifying
1 Like
I really dig video essay-type stuff. Mainly ones discussing filmmaking. Here are most of the ones I like:
The Royal Ocean Film Society
Channel Criswell
Cinefix (on the surface this channel seems like one of those annoying WatchMojo type channels, but they actually have a lot of neat videos)
MUST SEE FILMS
Now You See It
The Nerdwriter
Oliver Harper
Film-Drunk Love
Beyond The Frame
Dan Fox
What It All Meant
Some of these channels are more consistently good than others, and some are better at updating regularly, but I think they all have some interesting stuff to offer if you’re into studying this type of thing.
I guess if I’m talking about this type of channel, I should probably also mention Every Frame A Painting and RLM. Both of those are great, but everybody already knows them at this point, I think.
How about a video series whose entire schtick is reviewing board games and being fun while they are doing it? That’s Shut Up & Sit Down, in which several British people talk about what makes board-games good and what makes them bad. While they do have a Youtube channel, they do text reviews and podcasts on their main site as well as having some videos which haven’t gotten onto the Youtube channel yet.
If you go to their site for videos, I highly recommend their videos on a Megagame (tens to hundreds of players) called Watch the Skies. Many groups of players play as nations and everyone has their own agenda and goals; there are also aliens coming to the planet and no-one but the game runners know what their motives are or even how many different kinds of aliens there are. It is really, really neat!
Shut Up & Sit Down (Youtube Channel)
Shut Up & Sit Down (Main Site)
SU&SD Play… A Goddamn Megagame
SU&SD Play… Watch the Skies 2 (Part 1)
SU&SD Play… Watch the Skies 2 (Part 2)
Here are some of my picks, I am gonna try my best to pick more weirder areas of YouTube that I find fascinating.
80sCommercialVault has videos that are straight up branding from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s. It’s facinating to see what was considered “cool” to kids in the 80s, and the disobedient trend of the 90s, with the EW GROSS
LuckyPennyShop is similar to Unboxing Videos, but they focus on toys and board games, my guilty pleasure is them playing with the old McDonalds Kits
RedCowEntertainment for BoxMac - a series about what is the best Boxed Macaroni and Cheese
TechMoan is the last of my features for the time being, because I love the technical details he gives on old gadgets, and a fascinating discussion on everything audio and visual and the history of each item.
1 Like
HowToBasic is very difficult to explain, but it is a work of art.
There is also Shut Up and Sit Down and Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop. The latter can be a little hit or miss, but these two shows are what really got me into tabletop gaming and i highly recommend them if you’re interested.
1 Like
Dan Bell was mentioned earlier, and similarly another abandoned location exploration group called The Proper People were linked in some Imgur Youtube Recommendation thing a few months ago and since then I’ve become absolutely hooked on their stuff. I must’ve sat and watched like, half of their entire channel in a day once. Good eps to check out: Abandoned Japanese Theme Park, Abandoned Renfaire, Abandoned Prison, Abandoned Mine. They also did a team-up with Dan Bell for Halloween.
Ross’s Game Dungeon from Accursed Farms has become a really good “video game video review” show for me. Ross has a knack for picking out some really weird, esoteric stuff. Lots of games I’ve never even heard of, dredged up from the depths of old DOS catalogs and such. Rama, Construction Bob Goes To Hell, Spiderbot, Contraption Zack, etc. His reviews tend to be pretty long, and almost crossover in to Let’s Play territory sometimes, where it’s less analysis and more commentary and reaction. Pretty funny, though.
People may know Blame Society Films for their old web series “Chad Vader” (which landed co-creator Matt Sloane the life long job as Disney’s official Darth Vader impersonator voice when they can’t get James Earl Jones), but I really got in to them for their “Beer & Boardgames” show. That’s actually grown a little stale for me, but their movie review show, Welcome to the Basement, is the reason I stay subscribed. It’s a couple of film school nerds talking about old movies, but it’s generally pretty fascinating.
Engineer Guy was a great channel for explaining how all kinds of interesting things worked, but the upload schedule is sporadic because I guess he also writes books and gives lectures and whatever else that isn’t spending hours putting together a Youtube show.
Errant Signal is one of the leading channels in the newest wave of game analysis and he always has something interesting to say about games that I’ve usually never thought of before. Along similar (but also completely different) lines, we have Game Maker’s Toolkit, which usually does its best to reverse-engineer a game’s design and explain why it does what it does, and how it does it. And, of course, if we’re talking analysis, you can’t forget Extra Credits.
If you’re looking for more documentary-style coverage of video games, The Gaming Historian and Ahoy should have you covered. Both are amazingly informative and incredibly thorough, though it should be noted that Ahoy seems to primarily focus on shooters and british games. But his Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake videos are not to be missed. The Gaming Historian features a much wider breadth of coverage – everything from the Super Mario Bros. movie to the creation of the ESRB. He had a fantastic video on how Nintendo came to own the Seattle Mariners, but the MLB forced it down for using baseball footage.
Steering things back towards movies, I can’t end this post without mentioning No Small Parts. This is a show helmed by Brandon Hardesty that exclusively focuses on lesser-known character actors, paying tribute to actors that many may not even know by name. It is always incredibly fascinating and often very intimate, and he’s been getting enough coverage lately that IMDB has begun sponsoring specific episodes for their site. This is one of those things where I make time to watch it the instant a new episode is released.
I could probably keep going, but I’ll end it here for now.
5 Likes
Night Mind is a really fascinating channel that takes in-depth looks at various forms of horror stories, creepypastas, scary games and so many other things. The host, Nick Nocturn, also has a very chill voice, it’s pretty nice listening to him explain these things!
Speaking of explaining things, Today I Found Out does a lot of fun little rapid-fire videos explaining all sorts of scientific and historic curiosities. Probably one of my favourites was about how Coca-Cola tried to market Dasani in the UK and completely screwed up.
As far as videogames and LP channels go, I can most certainly recommend A + Start for his “Son of a Glitch” series, in which he looks at videogame glitches, explains how to recreate them, and usually explains briefly why the glitch happens.
Last but not least a recently-formed LP channel, Press Buttons 'n Talk, featuring Alex Mankin and ProZD (Some folks may know ProZD from a bunch of silly vines he made, as well as doing all sorts of voice acting stuff), and more recently Anne Marie/cherrizard. They recently finished a full (and fully voice-acted and riffed) playthrough of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, it’s a pretty funny watch if you’ve played through the games before!
2 Likes
Steve1989 MREinfo reviews various military field rations, both current and older ones going back to the 60s.
Haylee’s World of Go/Baduk A Go player who posts videos of online games with commentary, and she also does analysis of top player games and other instructional videos.
Chess Network same as Haylee’s channel above, but for chess.
Russian animation eus347 a channel dedicated to russian/soviet animated short films, with english subtitles (mostly hardcoded). The main channel is on Dailymotion where they have a larger library.
The Korean Film Archive official international channel for the Korean Film Archive. Lots of classic South Korean films, with english CC subtitles.
1 Like
seconding Hydraulic Press Channel, and would also suggest his side channel, Beyond the Press, where he does other goofy shit like making lava and dropping red hot steel on a frozen lake
also seconding Ashens, and also would suggest his other channel with Barry Lewis, Barshens, which is basically a variety show of sorts.
1 Like
A channel devoted to Old 90’s videos and shows, with gems such as this Graphic Design Laserdisc from 1991.
2 Likes
Wrestling With Wregret Probably the best wrestling-related channel I’ve seen on YouTube. He does videos on various topics related to wrestling, from Top 8 videos, discussions of specific trends, and a weekly opinion piece on whether Smackdown or Raw was better.
Also, he’s reviewed Heroes of Wrestling. Yes, that Heroes of Wrestling.
1 Like
Classics of Game is a channel that hasn’t updated in 2 years now, sadly, but it’s a channel full of funny, out of context clips of games. Some of them might be from games you recognize, but a lot of them are really obscure, bizarre games.
Dig That Box RETRO is a channel full of hundreds of old video game commercials from around the world, and it updates pretty frequently.
1 Like
Movies With Mikey is a show that tries to do positive takes on movies even ones that mikey doesn’t personally like. He always tries to look at movies from original angles that most critics out there haven’t considered. I recommend his Dark Knight and Interstellar episodes as good starting points. Also episodes before The World’s End i would avoid imho.
Regular Car Reviews started out as an outlandish parody of every amateur car review going on around Youtube and went on to wax philosophically about the time and mood various cars reflect.
Oh, and poop jokes.
Regular Car Reviews used to have some problematic language in their early stuff but thankfully they’ve buttoned up a lot since then.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
1 Like
I would definitely second Errant Signal and SuperBunnyHop they’re two of my favourite channels.
Not youtube but SFDebris is pretty great and I’ve been a fan of his stuff forever. He started out only doing review/analysis of Star Trek, highlights of which include The Wrath of Khan, Threshold and Tapestry, but he’s also been doing non star trek Sci-Fi stuff for a few years now and he’s usually really funny with some interesting well thought out and researched analysis.
Lazy Game Reviews is a great channel about old PCs, obsolete peripherals and DOS games. He’s gone more off DOS stuff recently but it’s probably the only channel you’ll see someone playing GTA V on a pinball controller. His Tech Tales series about old Silicon Valley success stories and forgotten tech companies is really interesting too.
Mark Brown’s Game Maker’s Toolkit is a really good series about design. I think sometimes he discounts context for his stuff but the ideas he talks about are really interesting regardless.
Cool Ghosts, which is some of the same guys from Shut Up Sit Down but mostly Matt Lees, really positive stuff and also pretty out there humour on some of their videos. I’m a big big fan. Their Bloodborne analysis is great, and the stuff Lees was putting out before he launched Cool Ghosts is good too. Particularly this video.
EDIT: somehow missed BlazeHedgehog already mentioned Game Maker’s Toolkit, but yeah, Strong second from me.
2 Likes
Can’t believe kaptainkristian hasn’t been mentioned yet. They release consistently excellent short form video essays on a wide range of topics. The editing always amazes me, one of my favorite channels.
1 Like
I think this thread should also be discussion of youtube video things. HBomberguy has released another massive 2 hour long video this time about Sherlock and how Moffat ruined it:
It is such a good long video explaining reasons why I dropped off of the show during season 3 and never got around to watching season 4 and also some of the similar things are reasons why I didn’t like a lot of Moffat’s run on Doctor Who as show runner. (I hope this season is good because I like Capaldi as an actor but the whole “The Doctor is a smart guy who solves everything - also don’t mind not having explanations for the mystery who cares about that.” did pervade all of Matt Smiths years and the first Capaldi year very much.
1 Like