Good morning, John. Universally considered to be pretty far down the list of terrible things that happened as a result of the SAR cov2 virus, but definitely on the list, was Galado Do's Instagram video in which a lot of celebrities sang the John Lennon song Imagine in a bunch of different keys. But this is not about that. This is about another celebrity collab, one made before smartphones, before YouTube, before Instagram, before even Home Star Runner—a viral celebrity collab video so delightfully pure and goofy that it could only have been created in a world that did not know about viral videos. This video, which is now almost entirely forgotten, contained a huge list of '90s royalty: George Clooney, Eric Estrada, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell, Alex Trebek, Pamela Anderson, Kevin Nealon, David Spade, Jerry Springer, Brad Pitt dressed as Tyler Durden, also people who I swear were big deals once like Jerry O'Connell and Gary Shandling, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Calista Flockhart. And I cannot emphasize

this enough because not going to make sense to you, but this video was not made for the internet, 'cause these days, all videos are made for the internet, especially ones with dozens of celebrities. To understand this bizarre circumstance, I must transport you back to a world where, instead of social media, we had instant messaging systems and internet bulletin board systems, and almost no one used them. But those systems had created spaces where people could really love stuff together and also let people know about cool stuff that they might be able to go download somehow, somewhere, because this was like 8 years before the launch of YouTube. Also importantly, there was this show. It was called the X-Files about a couple of FBI agents who were always on the case of some paranormal weirdness, and I loved this show. It was a very nerd show, the kind of show where the fans were big fans, but it was also just like super successful generally. And back then, fan creation was a thing, but largely due to the fact that there wasn't much culture around it and not as much audience for

it was very different now. Fan creation is ongoing and everywhere, with people building on top of ideas and formats of others, with a huge amount of stuff, but most individual units of creation being quite small. That's not how it was back then. Back then, things would leap out into the world fully formed in discrete moments that lasted. I cannot convey to you the extent to which nothing on the internet lasts at all anymore. Things happen now, and they're over like 2 minutes later, but in the '90s, stuff could happen for like 6 months straight. And this, in the late '90s, was the beginning of it getting easier to share certain things online, specifically MP3s through Napster, which was an illegal music-sharing service. And I cannot believe that I feel like I have to explain Napster right now, but that is how I feel. Bringing all of this together, in 1999, the same year Napster launched, Bree Sharp released a fully produced X-Files fan song called David Duchovny, which was an extremely well-done, very

funny song referencing X-file stuff all about how the singer is in love with the actor who plays Fox Mulder on the X-files. The song went viral, though we did not have a word for that back then, among X-files fans. People told each other about it in chats and on bulletin boards and in real life, in actual conversations that people used to have. And people downloaded an abster just to get this song, and then they also filled up their hard drives with MC Chris and Cherry Rounders songs. But it gets weirder. What no one knew at the time was that this song was also a big hit with the crew of the X-files. Unsurprisingly, they were also big nerds, and they followed the bulletin board, and they loved the song. And then two people who worked on the X-files decided that it would be funny to film and edit a music video for the song entirely to play at their Christmas party. X-files was at this point a big hit and had been for a long time, and the

people who made it knew a lot of other people in TV and had a lot of clout. That industry was smaller then, and maybe back then things were just like a little less transactional and there was more space to just do more weird stuff. The result is a video that feels like what it is. It's not a video made to go viral. It's not trying to call attention to some important issues like We Are the World. It's not a Taylor Swift music video packed with carefully orchestrated cameos. It is an office Christmas party video filmed on camcorders and put together by amateurs, and it just happens to have Whoopi Goldberg and George Clooney in it, and that does honestly make it feel very special to me. Not for a single moment do I think that the people who made this video or who were in this video thought it would ever be viewed by strangers on the internet because in 1999 no one watched videos on the internet. The internet for almost everyone was too slow to download videos, especially not

videos that were 5 minutes long. But a few groups of people did have internet that fast, and one of those groups was college students who were at schools that had installed really fast internet so that they could do the important work of distributing fansubbed anime. As a big fan and almost a scholar of online video, I love this video because it is one of the very few viral internet videos that is completely unaware of its potential future as a viral internet video. And there is no way that this video could be made in a world where we all understand that a video with two dozen A-list celebrities in it is going to get millions of views. There'd be way too many questions. It would feel like way too much of a favor to ask, too many agents arguing with too many managers. This video existed right on that line when no one knew what the internet could do, but the internet had just started being capable of doing it. Now, of course, there was no way to just go watch this video. Napster couldn't handle video files, and

more versatile peer-to-peer file-sharing services like Kazaa didn't come around for a couple of years after this video, so how do people get it, you ask? Well, I'm not going to explain IRC to you right now, but suffice to say we figured it out. In these days, you could hardly call this a viral video; it has less than half a million views on YouTube. But I promise you, when we were emailing videos to each other in 1999, it was huge. Why you, why you, me, I want you to kiss, to hug me, me, me, you, I'm s, I'm, I'm going to K, why won you, why won you, why won't [Music] you, John Happy Pizza. So far, the things most in danger of selling out are the apron, the magic eight ball, the dice set, and the blanket hoodie, which I do not have in here yet. All the pizza stuff you can get at pizz miss.com or on the pizza Miss app, where I will send it to you, a bad dad joke every day of pizzas. You've already missed some, they're

Actually, in there, there's even previous years. You could read through all of them and just be disappointed. I don't know why I spent time making a complicated video during pizza, but I did, John. I love saying this: I'll see you tomorrow.

The Forgotten Viral Video that Could Never be Made Today

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