“Yeah that’s right, limp-dicked Luftwaffe!” Never mind what the Luftwaffe was, I didn’t even know that Hitler was German back then. But if there’s a rhyme, reason, and meter, I can really get into it and follow along. Watching something like Smosh, I wouldn’t really get what was so funny when someone said “haha, your last name is HECOCKS?” They’re just awkwardly laughing while I’m sitting there thinking it’s a total flop. But even I’m too old for those things now.Īnyways, something else that was kind of special was that even though kids like me didn’t understand a lot of the lyrics and references, it still felt as if I was being included in the joke, unlike a lot of the other comedy of the time. Perhaps ERB was a prototype of the popularization of high-effort but extremely short videos that would come in the form of Vines and TikToks and YouTube Shorts later on. ![]() At the time, gaming Let’s Plays, vlogs, and other variants of raw, dude talking into a mic with minimal editing stuff was kind of getting all the attention. This kind of short-form content was a big departure from a lot of other popular YouTube content that was preferred by the algorithm, though. String theory? In my rap battle? It’s more likely than you think. Maybe the point was that we wouldn’t get all the historical and fictional references, so we’d learn something new each time. ![]() It catered to the generation’s shortening attention span, maybe. Especially for kids, there was just something about how the battles were written that ensured that one watch, two watches, a hundred watches wouldn’t be enough. Hell, even with all 86 rap battles that have been made, that comes out to, like, 3 hours? (Though the later ones tend to be longer.) That’s just about as much as a single long movie, though to be fair, there are single movies that have just as much of a cultural impact.īut for how short the videos are and how little there is to work with, the rap battles have never seemed to get boring. The first season had 15 rap battles, and with a runtime (not including intro/outro) of about 2 minutes on average, that is only half an hour of content. They aren’t really meme videos by themselves, though the series as a whole is certainly a staple of meme culture, but as a creative endeavor there really isn’t much footage to go around. Weed jokes ran rampant in this one.īut anyways, now that I’m older and have a little more knowledge of how media and the world works, let’s have a few retrospective thoughts about what makes ERB kind of an anomaly for how ubiquitous it’s stayed basically the entire time.įirst of all, ERB was and still is somehow one of the most time-dense entertainment to have made it this far. Guest appearances are also abundant, including this one here: Snoop Dogg as Moses. It’s a pretty impressive set of technical feats involving writing, sound design, choreography, and film-making, to be completely honest. The creators go through the effort of creating elaborate costumes, acting it out, and throwing in various visuals in the videos to go along with whatever the rappers are throwing out. ![]() This project has been going on since 2010, and has been actively uploading – well, consistently but infrequently, considering that as of now (March 16, 2023), there are only 86 battles split across 6 “seasons”.Ĭonsidering the production value, it does make sense why there aren’t that many. Well, that’s what regular rap battles are for, anyways. It was a project started by a duo of Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD (two white dudes doing comedy, as was usual for the time) in which real historical figures and fictional characters alike spit hot bars and use slick lyricism to… just prove that they’re better, I guess. ![]() If you are somehow older than the zucchinis in my fridge and don’t know, Epic Rap Battles of History is a series that has had an unbelievable amount of longevity in Internet terms. Those Smith and Wesson guys must have a big chicken farm or something idk I was just laughing at all the funny bad words. Yes, it was not so long ago that prepubescent 9-year-old me was watching random videos on the haven that is YouTube, laughing and quoting some hypothetical insults thrown out by some random famous people I don’t even know, all while I was at the age where I didn’t even know what a dick joke was. For zoomers like me, the scenes of ridiculous two-minute hip-hop skits like the one where Darth Vader raps against this other guy (dunno, some guy called Adolph?) are forever etched into our collective memory.
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