2016’s Youtube Rewind

This year has had no shortage of memes, challenges, and just general stupidity on the internet that Youtube has captured perfectly in their yearly rewind. Every year since 2010, Youtube has released videos of the top moments from the year, as a “rewind.” It started out as a Top 10 list in 2010, with the ten most popular Youtube videos that year, gradually progressing to mashups of songs, news, videos, and more in 2012, featuring the, at the time, Youtube royalty. Near the end of last year, the 2016 Rewind was released but has since received mixed reviews with some people thinking it was relatively good, while others thought that it wasn’t nearly as good as years previous.

This year’s video opens with an original track by Major Lazer playing in the background, featuring the likes of Justin Bieber and Fifth Harmony for instance, and begins with an appearance by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who had recently made his own YouTube Channel, pulling a Youtube sigil out of a firetruck red fanny pack. It only arguably gets better from there.

From Pewdiepie to Bethany Mota, there was no lack of representation in the Rewind. Showing people from all sides of Youtube, from the gamers to the daily vloggers and the beauty vloggers, Youtube tried to portray the different types of communities on their site. They even included a global assortment of Youtubers, representing as many countries as possible. Various Youtubers took part in some of the challenges of the year, from Casper Lee and others doing the running man challenge to Michael Senatore flipping a simple water bottle in an epic fashion.The video also wasn’t short on somewhat abstract references. From the infamous Hodor scene from Game of Thrones, to gallons of orbeez and the Phelps face, Youtube captured some of the weirdest moments of the year, concluding with the well-known Carpool Karaoke, with James Corden.

Referencing some of this years most popular music videos, including Ariana Grande’s “Side to Side”, with Hannah Hart, Rhett and Link, Ricky Dillon, Mamrie Hart, Grace Helbig, Tre Melvin, and Kian and JC dancing on stationary bikes. Lilly Singh, aka iiSuperwomanii, even portrayed Beyonce, referencing her impressive song “Hold Up.”

Junior Shreyasi Saha exclaimed that she liked this year’s rewind, because of Superwoman’s appearance. “Superwoman was Beyonce, and I love both of them, so I really liked it.” Reviews of the rewind have been mixed though, as Junior Chris Sciulli prompted that “It was kind of cool, but it was too much. Like, too many things were happening at once.” This seems to be a commonly shared view, as even the comments on the actually video seem to share the same perspective. Regardless of the diverse views, the video has garnered over 177 million views on the site, despite currently being a measly four weeks old.

To many, the video seemed very choppy. For one thing, the arrangements of the songs chosen by Major Lazer did not flow into each other, and started and stopped abruptly without it sounding amazing. There was also so much going on in each part of the video. If you wanted to see everything in a certain spot, you had to pause the video for a moment. Even after watching it a few times, there were things the viewers hadn’t detected before, and YouTubers that weren’t even noticed previously. They seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Ultimately, it’s up to each viewer to determine how awesome they think that the video truly is. Do you think it was good, bad, or overall just weird?