State of the JoyRide 2023

Praise the 8!™ It’s time for our annual recap of the year that was and the year ahead!

2023: The Long and Shorts of It

Love ‘em or hate ‘em (for most of you, it’s reasonably the latter), Shorts made a HUGE impact for us this year. Where in most areas, YouTube enjoys stomping down on our necks and going well out of it’s way to hide the channel (they attempted to demonetize us this past Spring, but got their asses thoroughly beaten in the appeal; another momentous victory for this year), Shorts has presented a more even playing field that saw us effectively double our subscriber count. Although this didn’t necessarily fix the former issues (what good are 200K subs if YouTube doesn’t put our videos on their subscriber feed?), it created a new revenue stream that made it possible to give JoyRide our full-time attention.

And what better way to use that new found time than to burn it all away in a major move between the Summer and early Fall? We gave JoyRide’s previous home, Mother Base, a fond farewell salute after 6 (out of 8) years of service. We’re now comfortably settled into the new JoyHouse, and already grinding to make up for lost time. Many of the actors and editors on our team also made some major pilgrimages of their own this year (some internationally), so understandably it’s going to take some time into 2024 to get back into our old rhythm.

We made the pledge in last year’s recap to focus on quality over quantity in major parody releases for 2023. This resulted in the conclusion of Dr. Stone Abridged and longer episodes of Spy x Family Abridged. We also released three My Hero Academia Abridged specials: My Villain Abridged, World Heroes Mission Abridged, and the MASSIVE Joint Training Abridged. At this time of writing, we are currently editing Part 1 of the even more colossal My War Academia Abridged, which we hope to at least have available to Patrons this month to cap off the year.

Although we did not achieve our viewership goals for major videos in 2023, we found ourselves incredibly proud with the quality of storytelling. Much of this is thanks to the release of our long anticipated Jump Force Abridged pitch video. The original vision was far too ambitious for the lofty planning that spawned in the channel’s earliest years, and waiting for things to simply “go our way” was untenable and heavily restricted what we could do across parodies. Presenting the climax of “The Jiren Saga” this way has allowed us to untie our hands and begin openly sowing the seeds for the “Yomama Saga” as you saw at the end of Spy x Family Abridged 07. With many lessons learned, we will make ZERO promises on how Jump Force Abridged 2 is presented, but make sure it is more tenable than our original plans and not to wait so long that it stifles the greater JoyRide Abridged Multiverse (would you like to just call it “the JAM?”).

Another goal we had in 2023 was merch... WHOOPS! We released the super cool, limited-edition THESE BACKWARDS ECHOES shirt and made the JoyPride shirt available year-round. After that, it was a whole lot of nothing and it was thoroughly out of our control. The store we’ve grown accustomed to using, TeeSpring or Spring or whatever (they spend more time rebranding than fixing their bugs), just doesn’t work properly anymore. It’s buggy and nigh impossible to update, but unfortunately it’s the one YouTube chose to partner and integrate with. So we’ll be sticking with it until we find better options in the future, so you can at least continue to purchase the classics.

We also rebooted the Patreon to bring better value and exciting new rewards to our most benevolent patrons. Most notable additions were the monthly W.I.P. series where we gave a more in-depth look into our production process along with previews to upcoming parodies, and the weekly Anime Watch Club where patrons can join cast and crew to watch and curate a list of the season’s best/entertaining (for better AND worse) Anime. We are excited to continue the latter, with the Winter Season starting in January. If you’re a $1/month Patron (or considering becoming one), we greatly encourage you to join us every Saturday 8p ET in the Discord server. It’s an absolute blast, and way cheaper than juggling your Crunchyroll/HiDive/Hulu accounts :)

As for W.I.P., we quite expectedly ran out of things to talk about in our very tight and secretive production process. As such, we’ll be shelving it in favor of rededicating our efforts towards more Director’s Commentaries in the future.

Looking Ahead to 2024

2023 will surely go down as JoyRide’s most stable, but was it the most satisfying it could be? Because we played it so safe this year and didn’t throw as many long shot darts at the board, one thing we missed dearly was our parody pilots. Our friends at Slap Happy Chaps came to the rescue over the Thanksgiving holiday with their very well-received (but unfortunately not canonized) Jujutsu Kaisen Abridged shorts (uncut version can be found here on Patreon), and will soon be producing another series of exclusive shorts for Zatch Bell.

This informs our goals for 2024: future-proofing the channel. Shorts taught us a lot about how a wider audience digests content now. However, we agree with our hardcore fans and subscribers that the Shorts program is surely NOT our future, but shorter forms of our content could be a potential new outlet for our pilots.

While Spy x Family, My Hero Academia and the next pilot, Oshi No Ko Abridged, will continue to operate in the traditional format; we would like to explore a wider variety of new anime, NOT as SHORTS but just shorter parody pilots (about 1-3 minutes each / multiple parts). The patreon versions of JJK Abridged Shorts are an example of this approach.

We’ve already planned this format for the upcoming Tokyo New Mew Abridged, but would love all of your opinions on other relatively new and upcoming anime to approach?

As for the big guns, Spy x Family continues to be the center of our abridged multiverse. Look forward to the hotly anticipated meeting of Loid and Lupin as they uncover more of its secrets in Lupin x Family. You may even see us tackle the upcoming movie if it inspires any interesting ideas and we can get our hands on the footage.

With the release of My War Academia Parts 1 and 2, we will be entering My Hero Academia Abridged’s endgame. Until the original manga concludes (Horikoshi originally promised it would have ended over a year ago haha), we do not have the clearest route to our version of the ending and very little wiggle room left in the anime to execute on the twists already in play. We know what we WANT to do, but we can’t anticipate the anime footage we’ll have available to work with until we see how the manga finally ends. We are currently writing Dark Deku Abridged, but taking it veeeerrrrryyyyy slowly, as we do not want to write any further until we have 100% certainty of what we’re working with. The announcement of Movie 4 also has us debating if we should wait until that releases, as it may provide footage worth exploring in the Dark Deku arc. Worst case scenario, Movie 4 will become its own meta-venture that can tide us over until we’re ready to properly conclude the series onward. Until we see either or both of these in play, we can’t make any promises for the series going into 2024, but just know we want to continue making it BIG.

How About Those Originals?

As we said last year, the pilot for our original manga PARAMEDIC is still being worked on, but we will not show anything until it is 100% complete. At the budget we currently work at, projects like this simply take longer, but thankfully, we are reaching ever closer to completion.

On the podcast front, the third episode of our sci fi audio drama THESE BACKWARDS ECHOES is late into production, with a fourth currently being written. Rebuild of JoyCast is going strong after our brief hiatus during the Fall, and barring any other significant breaks due to our hectic schedules, we should be celebrating a momentous Episode 100 this year!

TLDR; NOTES

• We didn’t just survive, but THRIVED in 2023 thanks to Shorts
• Moving caused a lot of delays that will be felt over this Winter, but we’re hoping to stack this holiday season with 2 more parodies
• We want more Parody Pilots in 2024, and are looking to do them in a shorter format (but NOT YouTube Shorts). We’d also like your suggestions for new/upcoming anime to parody
• Spy x Family Abridged will unravel of the JoyRide Abridged Multiverse further in 2024
• My Hero Academia Abridged may experience delays as we wait for the original manga to end so we can properly set up our own ending. Dark Deku Abridged is currently being written
• More Director’s Commentaries on Patreon

A YouTube channel lasting for 8 years is unheard of, especially when the odds are stacked against us. Your continued viewership and support on Patreon has made that possible. Even a measly $1/month makes a HUGE DIFFERENCE and it’s why we offer so much at that tier. Please consider donating today if you’ve been on the fence about it, as it goes a loooooong way in keeping our editors well taken care of and our parodies (and original projects) releasing with such consistency over a near decade.

Otherwise, thank you so much just for watching. Entertaining you all is the greatest privilege and we look forward to continue doing it well into the next 8 years and beyond!