Do you have what it takes to watch the 38-hour-long YouTube video about The Beverly Hillbillies?
09.04.2024 - 17:55
/ polygon.com
There’s an art to making an ultra-long YouTube video. For one, you have to make sure it’s broken up into digestible, complete chunks so that people can take natural-feeling breaks. Second, you have to use the length to your advantage. These are all things that Quinton Hoover thinks of when he publishes a video for Quinton Reviews, a pop culture video essay channel that’s recently been devoted to recapping a series episode by episode or breaking down years of history for a show.
Hoover has been a content creator for a decade, with around 881,000 subscribers at the time of publication. For the first several years, he would make skits or 30-minute breakdowns about popular TV shows and Garfield, but he’s become known lately for a slate of videos about 2000s-era Nickelodeon shows — specifically because these videos take longer than a standard eight-hour workday to sit through. For example, his three-part series on Sam & Cat (part of an even longer saga about the iCarly/Victorious universe) will take over 21 hours to watch. So the fact that he has uploaded another long video about a TV show isn’t novel. This time, though, was different.
On April Fools’ Day 2024, Hoover began uploading his longest video yet, which chronicles the history of The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, two long-running sitcoms from the 1960s, written and narrated by his dad, Russ Hoover, who would be familiar to fans of the channel. But then viewers looked at the length: 38 hours, 27 minutes, 48 seconds. To put that into perspective, many segments of the video are longer than two-hour movies; the full video will take over a day and a half to watch. It’s not the longest YouTube video ever — that honor belongs to “The Longest Video on YouTube: 596.5 Hours” — but it’s pretty close, especially when you consider it doesn’t contain any loops or many hours of a blank screen.
I was asked to edit about 30 minutes of this video for Quinton! I wonder how long the finished video ended up…
OH MY LORD https://t.co/BMn1Zz108w
“So I think that the thing people are going to be most surprised to learn is that this video wasn’t necessarily something that I had planned, it was something that happened to me,” Hoover told Polygon. Hoover’s father had started rewatching those two shows chronologically and decided he wanted to try his hand at a video about them. “[My dad] just walks up to me one day, and he says, ‘Hey, I had an idea. [...] What if, for April Fools’ one day, I talked about the shows that I’m watching?’ And I didn’t think about it. I said, ‘We’re doing that.’”
Hoover worked to help his dad with the project, but he ran into a problem quickly: Russ had a lot to say.
“He sends me the script. And then — I was in shock when I saw it.