What's GPGPG13RNC17?
- Paul Mcvay
- 15 hours ago
- 2 min read
Seventeen years ago, in 2008, I started a YouTube channel to help promote my streaming radio show, which had been on the air since 2002. Drive-In of the Damned, launched on YouTube in November 2007, and it was one of the first channels to showcase movie trailers. Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Exploitation film trailers were uploaded. Sometimes, I would digitize studio promotional reels I had in my possession and upload them to the channel. Trailers and other ephemera were shared, ten or more per day, and the reaction was fantastic. Nobody was paying any attention to YouTube back then, but when they did, it worked. Listenership for the radio show grew by leaps and bounds, but occasionally, I would feel extremely creative and upload a brand-new video nobody had ever seen.
In February 2008, I shared the now iconic "What's GMRX" trailer, which was featured on several of the Something Weird VHS trailer compilations at the time. After watching it a few dozen times, I was compelled to create a "modern" version.
Hence, What's GPGPG13RNC17? was born. After YouTube changed its model to favor "monetary" videos over truly creative fun, I stopped posting on my channel. As a result of several questionable copyright claims against the channel, I removed nearly 500 movie trailers in 2014. However, there was this one, which I didn't have the heart to delete because it still amused me, and others, as it were.
This goofy video, written and produced in just 45 minutes, seems to continue to have a life of its own. To date, What's GPGPG13RNC17? has had a little over 19k views and continues to be shared, manipulated, and remixed all over the internet. Not too bad for 45 minutes of my time and roughly nine beers. For seventeen years, the video has not gone, what they now call "Viral", but it wasn't created to do that. In 2008, if you owned a YouTube channel, you just wanted to entertain and keep your subscribers engaged and pointed in the direction of what you were doing; this fit the bill. In my case, the Drive-In of the Damned radio show.
So, here it is. For three-quarters of an hour of my creative time, I created a brief video and poked some fun at a two-decades-old trailer. There are some favorable reviews on this old sow on the channel, but most of them date back 17 years. In 2008, people "GOT" it, and I was delighted that they did. Sadly, today, you would need a frame of reference and an understanding of movie history to understand my little video. Just the same, here it is. Sourced from where it came from, seventeen years ago. It's still there—treading water and racking up video views.
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