The first YouTube Poop was uploaded months before YouTube itself existed
A chopped-up Super Mario cartoon, stitched together in Windows Movie Maker and posted to SheezyArt on 22 December 2004, is counted as the first YouTube Poop. The deliberately crude remix genre that followed shaped the jump cuts, sound effects and sudden volume spikes now common across mainstream online video.
A YouTube Poop, or YTP, is a collage built from existing footage, re-edited to be absurd, vulgar, satirical or simply baffling. Its roots run back through older remix practice: the writer Luke Dormehl points to William Burroughs's cut-up technique, hip-hop sampling and the frantic, non-linear cutting of 1980s MTV. Fan vidding and comic anime music videos fed in as well. That first clip, by a creator called SuperYoshi, reworked the 1990 series The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, and the media scholar Randall Halle suggests the word poop originally mocked how rough such early videos looked.
Through the mid and late 2000s the form became one of the loudest strands of absurdist humour on YouTube, full of running jokes shared across the community. Halle singles out a 2010 video about Jonathan Swift rising from the grave for a cheese sandwich as a turn towards artistry, with layered video-in-video effects. Cheap, critically dismissed 1990s cartoons were favourite raw material, and even the children's poet Michael Rosen became a staple source.
The community developed its own rituals. In YTP tennis, creators take turns re-editing one video in rounds, piling alteration on alteration; Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig likened this to call and response. Collabs join many editors on a single, sometimes very long piece. A musical offshoot, the YTPMV, cuts clips into songs, and on the Japanese site Niconico it evolved into otoMADs. The anthropologist Michael Wesch described the whole genre as remixes that imitate the worst standards of remix culture in order to comment on it.
Popularity fell in the late 2010s as well-known creators such as Schaffrillas Productions moved to other work, and analyst Nicole Perrin tied the slide to YouTube's drift towards polished, advertiser-friendly content. Dormehl noted in 2019 that the scene had splintered into smaller groups, each with favourite sources. Its fingerprints remain: some mainstream YouTubers now hire YTP editors to cut their ordinary videos.
Source: YouTube Poop
