On April 23, 2005, a nineteen-second video titled “Me at the zoo” made history as the first-ever video posted to YouTube. Even with videos capped at just 30 seconds, the site was receiving eight million views a day when it exited beta in December. Martin Billany, AKA LittleKuriboh, noticed the exploding popularity of the website and wanted to join in the fun.
“Because of the whole YouTube thing that had just recently started, I thought I’d start doing some videos of my own,” Billany said in an interview with The Abridged Podcast. After experiencing Curtdogg’s “Yu-Gi-Oh in a Nutshell,” Billany hoped to create an episode-by-episode comedic gag dub of Yu-Gi-Oh that would be fun for fans while inspiring love for the series from newcomers as well.
Gag dubs weren’t exactly novel on their own. Even in the corporate spaces, Funimation was giving Crayon Shin-Chan a foul-mouthed makeover and ADV was creating their infamous Ghost Stories dub in 2006. At the same time, Billany was working on his Yu-Gi-Oh! project. What would make Billany’s project stand apart was his decision to make that dub a comedic summary of the original story, with significant portions cut to keep things fast-paced and punchy. It was a novel approach, as comedic fandubs hadn’t been serialized in this manner before.
On July 15th, 2006, the first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series launched on YouTube. The series lampooned Yu-Gi-Oh! in general while sticking to the earlier roots of comedic fandubs and détournement by criticizing decisions 4Kids Entertainment made while localizing the series for North America.
The series quickly earned an immense online following. “Around Episode 6 of the show I started noticing forum posts on websites that had nothing to do with Yu-Gi-Oh! talking about it,” Billany said in an interview. “It snowballed almost immediately.”
The series became so iconic that, when Lawrence Simpson (MaskakoX) and Brandon (Vegeta3986) wanted to make their own similar series on YouTube for Naruto, they took Billany’s naming convention and called it Naruto The Abridged Series, solidifying that these series would be called abridged series in history forever. The two, alongside Curtis Arnott (Takahata101) and Nick Landis (Lanipator) ultimately went on to create abridged versions of the first two Dragon Ball Z movies. This would lead to the formation of the now famous TeamFourStar, who would create one of the most popular abridged series of all time, Dragon Ball Z Abridged.
Other groups beyond TeamFourStar went on to create historically significant abridged series, as well. Twelve years after Evangelion: ReDeath was created, EvAbridged swept the internet by storm. Something Witty Entertainment’s SAO Abridged—a parody of Sword Art Online—has become so popular that some say its story eclipses the original series. Ryan Nicks (PurpleEyesWTF), creator of titles like None Piece, would enter meme history with “I’m At Soup” from his abridged parody of Code Geass called Code MENT. The concept even spread outside anime into the My Little Pony fandom, thanks to Friendship is Witchcraft.
Truly, it seemed that abridged series could not be stopped and would be a powerhouse of fandom far into the future. Unfortunately, some corporate lawyers thought differently.
To be continued…
