Can people make stuff on YouTube still?

A World Beyond YouTube Slop

—by Adam Bumas

As I covered last month, YouTube is starting to feel its first regrets about taking the world’s most popular place for literally any video and turning it into a dumping ground for disturbing, soulless AI shorts. And if these are clogging up your recommendations, it can be easy to miss all the excellent stuff that YouTube still has to offer.

But for all everyone is, rightfully, focused on the AI slop — or human-made slop like MrBeast — proliferating on YouTube right now, there have been a huge number of smash hits recently coming from former YouTube animators, from Smiling Friends to Hazbin Hotel. Streamers are cutting massive deals with productions like The Amazing Digital Circus, and big screen adaptations of a Backrooms series and Skibidi Toilet are on the way. 

So it feels fitting that the creators of one of YouTube’s biggest early animation projects is returning to the platform this year. Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera, the creators of Baman Piderman, announced last month that new episodes are coming later this year, fulfilling a promise made over a decade ago. And tracking their story over the last 15 years is a great way to track how much YouTube, itself, has changed in the same time.

If you’ve never seen it, Baman Piderman is a fun show, but very much of its time. The characters are cute, the leads’ vague resemblance to Batman and Spider-Man become just another surreal note, and the animation style is an eye-watering combination of simple drawings in elaborate, impossible motion. Just as hard to track is the show itself, which has gone from a personal project to a viral success to a corporate product that eventually became unsustainable for the company. To, finally, something with enough attention (and luck) to be fan-funded.

The show started out as a single cartoon done as a school project, which unexpectedly got millions of views. Soon it was acquired by Mondo Media, a company which was once YouTube’s biggest channel thanks to the infamous Happy Tree Friends (who, to take everyone down YouTube animation memory lane, recently did a crossover with Dumb Ways to Die.) 

“Youtube fame wasn’t particularly a thing at the point where we went viral, I think,” Lindsay Small-Butera told Garbage Day. “It’s strange to think of a time before that stuff. It makes me feel like I was born in the 1800s.”

Starting in 2009, a year after that first cartoon was posted, it became a show that drove the Small-Buteras past their limits as animators. “When we were working on those early Baman Piderman episodes, we were both brand new, fresh out of school,” Lindsay said. “Everything was experimental because we had barely any experience other than working on our own films in college.”

That experimental quality allowed the show to grow along with both its audience and its creators, but after a few years it had grown bigger than even Mondo could support. The company put the show on hiatus in 2012, with the creators’ planned story incomplete.

After another Mondo show, Dick Figures, funded a movie through Kickstarter, the Small-Buteras followed suit. The Baman Piderman Kickstarter raised more than twice its funding goal in 2014, but the promised new episodes were never completed. In an interview this month with Cartoon Brew, they claim that legal restrictions meant they both couldn’t release the episodes fans had paid for, and couldn’t talk about it, since the intellectual property was still the sole property of Mondo Media. 

“As artists, I think we’re all striving for the same kind of thing,” Lindsay told Garbage Day. “Which is the ability to create stuff on our own terms. Auteur works without meddling.” 

Which was the promise of YouTube in the days when Baman Piderman first went viral. But now, nearly 20 years later, YouTube has become yet another facet of the mainstream entertainment industry, subject to the same oversight and trends as everything else for anyone who wants to find success. 

But the Small-Buteras have enough of a footprint they don’t have to compete with AI shorts for attention and revenue. Since the show officially ended, they’ve won two Emmys for their work on Adventure Time, and have contributed to other YouTube-grown shows like Hazbin Hotel and Smiling Friends. They’ve been able to forge these connections thanks to how the internet works… or at least, how it used to work.

Because none of these hot animated shows would look the same if they had needed to get their start on YouTube in its current, AI-saturated state. These unproven creators have been neglected for years by the platform’s increasingly algorithmic system, and its recent changes don’t seem to be helping.

New Baman Piderman episodes drop later this year, but hopefully it won’t just be the Small-Buteras releasing new and imaginative content on YouTube in 2025. There just simply has to be more to the platform than sad, AI-generated cats. Though, those have also gotten a TV deal recently. So who knows…

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Angie The ICE Chaser

@aaangievargas

#fyppppppppppppppppppppppp #standonbusiness #latinasoftiktok #tiktoktrend #LA

Some context here. This woman is named Angie Vargas and people on TikTok are calling her the ICE chaser. She likes to follow ICE agents around Los Angeles, honking her horn at them and warning people they’re in the neighborhood. Her videos go hard.

JeansGate Rages On

Crooked Media’s Jon Favreau and Amanda Litman, the president of Democratic NGO Run for Something, have both weighed in on our national crisis of whether or not Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans ads are a Nazi dog whistle.

“How we got here: a few random posters claimed the Sweeney ad is Nazi propaganda and then the White House and ultimately the President weighed in,” Favreau wrote on X. “Name a Democratic politician who complained about the ad.”

Favreau, of course, is right. No one from what you could conceivably call the Democratic establishment has said anything about Sweeney’s ads. Which is a problem, considering all of right-wing media is screaming about insane Democrats wanting to cancel hot women wearing jeans.

Which is why Litman, piggybacking off Favreau’s post, wrote on X, “I genuinely don't know how we solve the problem of ‘Democrats are held accountable for every rando on the internet and Republicans bear no responsibility for the opinions of the bigots and Nazis they nominate/elect/hire/appoint.’”

And Litman is right to be concerned here. There is actually nothing Democrats can do actually to quickly build up an equivalent media ecosystem to what the Republicans have across X, YouTube, podcasts, tabloid newspapers, and cable news. That should really freak people out!

The Sweeney controversy is, as these things go, pretty stupid and we will, almost certainly, forget about it in approximately three days. But the effect of running ops like this over and over again will be disastrous for Democrats unless they figure out how to go on the offensive. Maybe, like, book some time on CNN and just list every single Nazi the vice president follows?

The Girls Are Fighting, MAGA Edition

You can’t really call Hannah Pearl Davis a right-wing influencer because she has tried several times now to climb the conservative media ladder and failed. Which has got to be one of the saddest possible things you can do with your life.

In 2023, Davis tried to turn getting banned from TikTok into a right-wing rebrand. It didn’t really work because right-wing men didn’t think she was pretty enough to be part of the movement. And now she floats around X halfheartedly posting about traditional gender roles. But even sadder than all that, she is currently in the middle of a trad wife flame war because she tried to dunk on conservative influencer Sarah Stock’s engagement photo.

The feud between Davis and Stock is getting really nasty — also, super racist. Journalist Will Sommer on X has a bunch of screenshots of Stock and Davis fighting with each other, which have spun out into accusations of drug abuse and public sex at Turning Point USA events. X users also pointed out this isn’t even the first time Davis has attacked another conservative woman over her engagement photos.

But the important part here is that right-wingers genuinely all hate each other and a slight breeze could knock down this entire movement.

X Users Are Having A Meltdown Over Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros

There are a whole bunch of accounts on X that farm engagement by asking people basic questions about movies or music or whatever. The responses to these posts, as quote-posts, tend to go very viral because X’s algorithm loves quote-posts for some reason. Even though the site actively hides quote-posts now… Anyways, I digress, it’s a stupid app.

X users were asked this week what the worst song ever was and people landed on “Home,” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Likely because Gen Z has never seen what Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros look like and, yes, the 2009 video now going viral of the band playing the song on NPR’s Tiny Desk is, in 2025, violently millennial.

If you want to torture yourself by reading a lot of opinions from very dumb people about why this song is bad (I think it’s fine), you can click here to see all the quote-posts on X. But I, regrettably, have to push back on something that seems to have been lost to time.

This is NOT “stomp clap hey ho indie,” as I’ve seen users on X claim. This is obviously closer to recession-era folk or folk punk, which came years before. It was smellier and annoying in a totally different way. “Stomp clap hey ho indie,” which arrived around 2011-2012, was made by Mormons, midwesteners that were functionally Mormon, or British nepo babies and it was explicitly written to cash in on the need for Silicon Valley Keynote background music or plantation weddings where all the drinks are served in mason jars. Bands like Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros were involved with dangerously insane cults, hung out with people who ate trash and tattooed their dogs, and made songs that sounded like they were written by preschool teachers suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. Thank you!!

Theo Von Interviewed Both Hank Hill And The Rizzler This Week

The 21st century’s Barbara Walters, Theo Von, had a big week. He’s part of the new ad campaign for the King of the Hill reboot. You can see that on X if you feel like exposing yourself to such a thing. Though, I will say, I think it’s an important marker for how important podcasts — and the aesthetics of podcasts — have become within the larger media landscape.

Von also dropped an hour-long conversation with The Rizzler, which is, honestly, kind of adorable? Though, Von does seem to almost break character a few times and look genuinely concerned about this now very famous child’s life.

Anamanaguchi Made A YouTube Poop

Some Stray Links

• DOGE’s Big Balls was carjacked

• “Pod Save Palestine”

• “OpenAI releases a free GPT model that can run on your laptop”

P.S. here’s Gus, 2007.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***