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 What Is This Thread? It's meant to catalogue Jon Bois and all of the Jon Bois-like "long form Youtube documentaries done in his specific style/with his direct inspiration", which is a surprisingly deep well of content. It's honestly kind of crazy how many different Youtubers Jon Bois, specifically, has inspired or has influenced, but here we are. Who Is Jon Bois? He's the content director at Secret Base, formerly SB Nation. This thread isn't specifically built around cataloguing SB Nation's extremely extensive archive of video content, although I love basically everything they do so I'm more than happy if the conversation goes in that direction and if there's enough interest I might update the op with more stuff about SB Nation as a whole. That being said, what this thread is ostensibly focused on is, for lack of a better term, "Jon Bois videos", which is an important sub-category that is itself, somewhat paradoxically, a much larger genre than what SB Nation does. But I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. Jon Bois got his start off of weird internet stuff, maturing as a content creator/writer in a lot of similar/the same circles that long-time front page SA writers did, producing much the same content - absurdist, somewhat Dadaist branded humor which he then leveraged over time into becoming a staff writer at then-SB Nation, a sports blogging website, and he zoomed up the ranks there. Now, and primarily, Jon Bois has pivoted to video and does long-form Youtube documentaries almost exclusively. Jon Bois sort of defies classification as a creator, but I guess the most reductive and most, honestly, offputting to the TVIV crowd way I would describe him is he writes about American sports. But not...really. I mean he does, but his viewpoint is through the lens of trying to contextualize sport in its broader range and impact, trying (and in my opinion, consistently succeeding) at forming a narrative from data, of telling a human story through the guise of showing graphs and charts and numbers. To accomplish that, Jon Bois has adopted an extremely distinct "house style" in his documentaries, heavy on Google Earth and focus on data points and charts, often spiraling them into this sort of weird singular ethereal beauty by divorcing them from any sort of traditional human element you would see in most documentaries. These don't have talking heads, The Last Dance these are not. There's barely any archival footage, even most of the licensed images he uses are often blurred or pixellated to the point where they barely resemble what they're attempting to represent. Most of his documentaries consist of him, sometimes with collaborators (most often Alex Rubenstein, who is at this point his co-creator), dryly intoning and describing the events he is covering. All this sounds like the boringest poo poo ever. And yet it isn't. Bois' writing is sublime, his dry delivery making his genius sense of comedy and timing land all the harder. But, more than that, by divorcing his documentaries as much as possible from the surface-level human element, he's able to speak to this greater human truth that's honestly even more impactful and incredible, more emotional and heart-wrenching than it could possibly be on a facile, obvious level. There's a moment at the beginning of the second episode of The Bob Emergency (a study of people named Bob in sports, natch), that is genuinely one of the most singularly affecting moments I've viewed in any media, and still makes me tear up even now, and it's a...panning shot of a ruler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcGamPqUIxI So yeah. Even if you hate sports, you should watch Jon Bois' stuff. It's loving incredible. Where Do I Start? You can, as aforementioned, start with The Bob Emergency, which is a relatively quick roughly two-hour two-parter (here's part one, btw). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvh6NLqKRfs It's very good, and has some of the best work he's ever done. It's a good place to start if you're new to Jon and his stuff. If that's too daunting, you can always try his video on Scorigami, which took off in popularity enough that it's now a semi-regular fixture of the NFL. That video, titled Every NFL Score Ever, is a relatively breezy fifteen minutes and although it's not as emotionally resonant and impactful as his longer stuff it's a good intro to Jon's specific style of video, and the type of stories he likes to tell: He really likes to focus on sports things that don't really matter in absolute, objective terms, but he makes them matter by celebrating their relative obscurity and imbuing meaning to the trivial. Sort of finding beauty in the little things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l5C8cGMueY If you're looking for his longer, better Youtube documentaries, there's his seven-part epic History of the Seattle Mariners, detailing the weird, cursed history of the weird, mostly bad baseball team from the Pacific Northwest. You can watch the whole thing as a supercut here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIgK56cAjfY Fair warning, it's four hours long. Highlights include toilet jello and making a picture of an arm genuinely chill-inducing. For more recent stuff, this year Jon has done three major projects, and the first one this year, a four-part documentary on Toronto Blue Jays' star pitcher Dave Stieb, is in my opinion his best project of 2022. There's a moment in the documentary that somehow is able to portray Lovecraftian horror via a...chart. Like full on brain-breaking, unwillingness to comprehend the enormity of what has happened without going insane levels of trying to look at an eldritch horror. And it's a chart about baseball. It's so impressive he was able to pull it off. First part's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlviajJlctQ There's a lot more videos of his I could get into, but that's a good initial selection of the types of stories Jon likes to tell. The Offshoots Jon Bois is kind of your favorite Youtuber's favorite Youtuber, and as a result he's directly influenced many storytellers who take his bespoke style and transplant it into being about other mediums or stories. Here's a list of some of the best ones - if you know of any others feel free to write them up or let me know and I'll add them to this OP. Summoning Salt The guy that most of you here probably already know about, considering the demographic makeup of these forums. Having taken direct, obvious, stated inspiration from Jon Bois, he details the world record histories of various video games. If you like Jon Bois, you will almost certainly like SS, and considering they're both overtly a fan of the other it couldn't be more rubber-stamped as an "if this, then that" if you tried. Personally speaking, I very much enjoy Salt's stuff. If you're looking to dive in, I recommend giving The History of Wii Sports a shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NscWoJVrEfw Stay tuned and you'll hear a direct reference to Jon Bois! It's great! Personally I think his overall best stuff is having to do with Mario Kart, and specifically, his video on Mario Kart 64 is simultaneously this dissection of this Sisyphean attempt by one man who is also utterly dominant at it, this strange tale about a person who is at once both the champion and underdog. It's a story that has to be seen to be believed and it works as this sort of very singular narrative. Plus, you get to hear Salt struggle with stupid loving gamer names. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6cpa-TvKn8 BobbyBroccoli Another person directly influenced by Jon Bois (he literally has a video, on his channel, which is a tutorial on how to animate like how Jon Bois does with Google Earth), he tells stories that are extremely aesthetically similar to Jon's but detailing scandals in chemistry and science in general. It shouldn't work, and yet it totally does because imo Bobby most clearly has internalized exactly what about Jon makes him singular, and is able to replicate Jon's penchant for analogy and metaphor to make concepts you otherwise shouldn't care about digestible. IT=t also helps that he's carrying Jon's torch for making data itself the centerpiece of the work, and his most recent video and its portrayal of the search for new elements as islands in a roiling sea is really impressive and effecting visual imagery that's genuinely beautiful. Highly recommended stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe5WT22-AO8 Folding Ideas I gotta be honest I don't watch this channel but I can very clearly see when a video is inspired by Jon's influence, and Folding's most recent Warcraft video is very clearly taking a page from Jon's particular book. If anyone has a more detailed or informed writeup on Folding Ideas' stuff I'll paste it here later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU Foolish Baseball Now we're getting into people inspired by people inspired by Jon Bois, because FB was inspired by Salt, who was inspired by Jon. Foolish likes to, as the name of his channel implies, do short form pixel-art documentaries crunching the very stat-heavy field of baseball and singles out interesting stories and narratives in the sport to build people who are otherwise unheralded up. If Jon is all about the celebration of the mundane, Foolish (real name Bailey), is all about expressing how people are great through stats, digging up otherwise forgotten treasures and making an honestly kind of boring sport more palatable to the average viewer. I really like his stuff, his most famous video is probably the one on Justin Verlander's Impossible Inning that actually got shouted out by JV himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpIs__45t5I For me personally, though, I'm a gigantic Shohei Ohtani fan so his triptych of videos all about how much Shohei rules are my favorites. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egVe2WdRrFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNzKPQcAnjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ1wO5HwN1g Anyways, that's it. I made this thread in part to surface the honestly pretty expansive trend of Youtube deep-dive documentaries from people who took direct inspiration from Jon Bois specifically, but also to ask if anyone else is aware of more stuff like this. I'm always looking for more stuff like this to watch while I eat. I'll edit the OP periodically with other channels if anyone is knowledgeable about more stuff in this vein. I heard Defunctland is good? Is it good?
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Dec 14, 2022 17:43
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| # ? May 5, 2024 12:34 |
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Jon Bois - 17776 is really good. The premise is "What will football be like in the year 17776?", but you don't really need to know anything about football to enjoy it.
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Dec 15, 2022 00:46
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Jon Bois is pretty good but he goes off the wall with some stuff that makes no sense, like how UFC was in response to 911 or the Patriots/Falcons super bowl being a politically charged pro/anti trump matchup. He also had some moron on claiming that the Falcons/Saints rivalry was the fiercest in sports.
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Dec 15, 2022 02:15
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The Rude to Be Bad at Warcraft Video is kind've an outlier for Folding Ideas. His other videos are much more traditionally edited and political but are still fantastic. His two best videos imo are: In Search of a Flat Earth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44 Lines Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g Edit: Also Defunctland is good though sometimes a bit too forgiving of Disney Ohtsam fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Dec 15, 2022 |
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Dec 15, 2022 22:31
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Doltos posted:or the Patriots/Falcons super bowl being a politically charged pro/anti trump matchup. It absolutely was for a lot of people.
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Dec 15, 2022 22:35
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Tokelau All Star posted:Jon Bois - 17776 is really good. The premise is "What will football be like in the year 17776?", but you don't really need to know anything about football to enjoy it.
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Dec 16, 2022 03:58
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Here's the link to 17776: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football and its sequel 20021: https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020/
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Dec 17, 2022 05:46
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Tokelau All Star posted:Jon Bois - 17776 is really good. The premise is "What will football be like in the year 17776?", but you don't really need to know anything about football to enjoy it. Heads-up: The first time you visit the 17776 link and start to scroll, the page will dissolve on you. This is normal; nothing is hosed, dude. Subsequent visits to the same address will instead display the chapter index (at least, as long as you keep its little tracking cookie or whatever in your cache/browser history). But for any not-a-sports-fan readers, 17776 is a solid example of how Bois tells stories about sports, but not necessarily for fans of sports. If you know that football is the sport with touchdowns and that those are usually good things for a team to get, then you know enough to understand what's going on. 20021 is also good but I need that follow-up real bad.
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Dec 17, 2022 09:16
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Ohtsam posted:The Rude to Be Bad at Warcraft Video is kind've an outlier for Folding Ideas. His other videos are much more traditionally edited and political but are still fantastic. Dan's 50 Shades of Grey trilogy is also some must-watch material https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzk9N7dJBec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjViIRWesQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R4bczm8BPY As is his break down of Doug Walker's The Nostalgia Critic's The Wall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rokAtlFGa7Y
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Dec 17, 2022 09:58
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