This Is Halloween: top 50 uploads of all time

[seasons]

1.【AMV】Soul Eater『This Is Halloween』
uploaded by Paulo PT90 (March 4, 2012)
21,807,662 views

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The song in the credits is "Finale/Reprise" by Shiny Toy Guns
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Give the creator the credit that deserves.
Editor: Hagaren Viper
Hagaren Viper's YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/HagarenGao
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This was far from the first reupload of this video to YouTube, and while Paulo PT90 has a LOT of subscribers (80.6K subs), it's a tier or two below heavy hitters like VermillionAMV (338K subs) or TheBestAMVsOfAllTime (348K subs). How this particular reupload became The One that really took off when countless others never did to anywhere close a degree, I can't even begin to guess. "Just a channel for hanging out and view thousands and thousands of vids," Paulo PT90 writes in their channel description. There are 142 videos listed on the channel, with only two other videos clocking in at over a million views. Although it could only be a matter of days or even hours before yet another joins the club:

Spoiler :

There have probably been scores of "This Is Halloween" reuploads taken down over the years, either voluntarily by the people who uploaded them to their channel or by force as YouTube has cracked down on copyright infringements by various channels (or at least given total and complete carte blanche to third-party companies to freely do so regardless of fair use statutes). Perhaps we'll never know just how many alternate uploads of this video were out there at one point or another. Perhaps half of these still active accounts hosting the uploads I've listed here have been abandoned or even forgotten by their users, where they'll sit for years or maybe even decades as a monument to what AMVs and the culture around them became in the 2010s.

If you believe the comments left on these uploads, people passionately love this video. It's a Halloween tradition for thousands of viewers, got people into Soul Eater in a way that no other fan created content ever came close to doing, and was an introduction to anime for tons of young people who were irresponsibly left to their own devices online by exasperated parents who had no idea what their kids were watching and probably never wanted to know in the first place. It could have turned out a lot worse for them.

This was a waste of time, obviously, but I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole went. Even after all this digging, I still suspect there's some hidden part of YouTube that's hosting dozens or perhaps hundreds of uploads of this AMV. I can't imagine what it would be like to have your work copied and twisted and disseminated to such an uncontrollable degree. I don't think I would handle it well (fortunately, this will never happen with anything I could conceivably create).

I have no idea how to end this but right now someone is reading this, so thanks for that.

[Zarxrax]

Hmm..
I remember watching this back when it came out. I had no idea it had become so popular though. Definitely an interesting case!

[Mol]

Waiting for top seasons thread

[vivafruit]

What an amazing thread. I read through the whole thing. I have to admit before I was more on the "pro-Vermillion" side before reading it, but it's hard to look at something like this and not come away disgusted. I gotta admit I'm still conflicted - outrage over stealing content for views is partly why people's AMVs get taken down for copyright strikes. So there's a give and take that means the more freedom you give people to use existing copyright material in creative ways, the more you have to just put up with shit like this. I wonder what the happy medium is here.

Made with Youtube Text Editor

[Hagaren Viper]

Well this thread changed my plans for the night - this is absolutely the strangest, weirdly flattering, and objectively best thread I've ever seen on this forum, I'm completely tickled by this. Special shoutouts to the editor who remastered the video using episodes he screen captured from Netflix, the one who added karaoke that doesn't match the flow of the song, and the one who "recorded [the AMV] off Netflix".