I’m nostalgic about a lot of things – music, cartoons, breakfast cereals – but especially for the old internet, when websites, web forums and social media had a certain charm and chaos to them that just doesn’t exist any more.
Almost all of the videos below are more than a decade old and appeared on playlists that I carefully curated for kick-ons in my living room in the late 2000s. They are genuine classics and best experienced on the Nintendo Wii’s YouTube app between the hours of 4am and 6am.
1. Risky Business gone wrong
This video really earns its place within the first seven seconds – but, please, keep watching. One girl dressed like Tom Cruise badly tries to take care of her injured friend who is also dressed like Tom Cruise. The final frame is my favourite part.
2. Side of Smooth – Morning Walk
I’ve been forcing my friends to watch Nathan Fielder videos for 15 years now, and after that finale of The Curse I have no plans to stop. I think this video, the two-minute long debut single from his jazz-pop duo Side of Smooth, was my first introduction to Nathan and, while he definitely steals the show with his low-energy facials/high-energy vocals, I wish the other guy from Side of Smooth was still making videos too.
3. Ragnar Otnes and Mads Ousdal – Kick the Burger
This is from a Norwegian TV series called Hotel Oslo and, while it begins with the host speaking in his native tongue, all of a sudden he stands up, puts on a pair of sunglasses and starts speaking broken English into the camera (“We’re gonna have some time” is one of my most quoted phrases ever). Then a beat plays while he raps at a man who tries to kick a burger off a long stick. This video really grabs you by the throat and takes you on an unpredictable (and unintelligible) adventure. Will the man in the weird pants be able to kick the burger up into the moon? I don’t know! Alright? Alright!
4. A Triple Six Turtle Christmas
Every generation has a take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Gen X had the 1990 live action movies and Gen Z has Mutant Mayhem, but my favourite version of the Turtles is the one where Leonardo says “lick my nuts, suck my butt”.
5. Dancing to Becker theme song for one hour straight
Whenever I’m feeling down I fire this video up and go on a magical adventure with this brave man who, just like the title describes, loses his mind and family while dancing to the theme song from Ted Danson’s late 90s/early 00s sitcom Becker for 60 captivating minutes. If you get 90 seconds in and think you’ve seen all this video has to offer you couldn’t be more wrong; it takes more twists and turns than a whole season of Lost.
6. Streamer sings Fetty Wap at Nintendo world championships
Has someone done one of these lists and exclusively filled it with cringe moments from gaming conferences before? The greatest moment, I think, comes from the Nintendo world championships in 2015, where one of the hosts (a very nervous streamer named D1) stops the event so he can sing a rendition of Trap Queen by Fetty Wap and errs immediately. I think about this moment whenever I hear the original song.
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7. My Heart Will Go On (played on a nose flute)
The most recently added video on this list is also perhaps the most tender. I found this video while trying to explain to my kids what a nose flute was. Soon my entire family had tears in our eyes as we watched a lady with a flute in her nose make a tender tribute to the Titanic’s 1,517 lost souls, complete with a tiny model of a boat being pulled by a string into an ice cube. Beautiful.
8. Pretty Ricky – Late Night Special
This is my best friend Angus’s favourite YouTube video of all time and, funnily enough, this is a video about best friends – best friends who hang out, listen to music and show each other their coolest sex moves.
9. Brodyquest
From Mouth Sounds to Potter Puppet Pals, Neil Cicierega has maintained his YouTuber god position for almost 20 years and by far my favourite of his masterpieces is Brodyquest, a musical adventure that sends actor Adrien Brody into the briny deep, the depths of outer space and both back and forward through time. The song is a bop too.
10. Vote for Henry
In 2013 this old conservative dude named Henry campaigned for a Senate position by having a goofy Christian pop song recorded about what a great guy and businessman he was. I’m not sure if he was successful but I do know that earlier this year he appeared in court after being accused of stock market manipulation. Unfortunately he didn’t record a new song.
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Andrew Levins is a DJ, writer and content creator. You can hear him hosting the podcast Hey Fam..! every week and opening weird toys on TikTok