Late bird: 13 years late in fact

With Halloween in the air I thought I'd let you guys into a little secret. What you thought was my first "retro" video actually was my second. You're the first to know this but back on 9 Jan 2009 when I only used my YouTube account for watching other people's videos, I decided to upload something on a whim and see what happened.

You see, in the UK (I didn't move to LA till 8 months later) I had been going through my childhood VHS tapes of funny things I'd saved, and I found one of my favourite hidden camera scare pranks ever, which had been broadcast on The Clive James Show (RIP Clive). 

On that whim I uploaded it, and I think it made the front page of Reddit or Digg and shot up to 700,000 views! The irony of this has never been lost on me; A video I put no thought into went viral, and spending a few years working for days on each intentional ЯR video had most of them lucky to reach 20,000 views until maybe a year ago when fortunes improved. Funny old thing The Internet in'it?

When I started Retro Recipes, I always kept this first video "Unlisted" because I didn't want the first "most watched" thing people saw on the channel homepage to be a video that wasn't really what the channel was about. Makes sense right?

But now I've got a couple of videos overtaking it, and with the Björk video from 4 days ago now sitting at 70k views already - showing that my viewers appreciate both the tech and the classic TV clips - I decided to give this one a shiny new thumbnail...

...trim a bit of the VHS visual flutter off the beginning using YouTube's built-in editor options, make a proper description and end screen, and set it back to Public. 

It kind of goes with our more recent "80s Tech & TV" moniker anyway. So it now sits in the second row of the homepage, to no doubt both terrify and confuse visitors to the channel!

Seriously though, I'm actually quite satisfied with how that row looks to new visitors. I hope I'm right that it paints the correct picture of what we're all about. Retrocomputing, 80s TV projects, classic clips, and then much more retrocomputing!

This one isn't AI upscaled though (well okay the thumbnail is) but the video you'll just have to enjoy in good ol' 480p! Talk about retro!

Myself and Ladyfractic are still hard at work on a couple of mammoth edits for you guys, and I've got a lot of exciting stuff coming up. These little respites give me a fun excuse to do something different for an hour here and there, so thanks for indulging me! I'm always tweaking the channel in some way or other.

Can't wait to share more retrocomputing, Lego, and Knight Rider goodness soon. There's a lot going on that some of you have seen on the Lens, that I'm beyond excited to get out there - woo! Ahem I mean woooooo-ooooo-oooo 👻

Your friend in retro, Perifractic