Will you watch this 38-hour-long Beverly Hillbillies YouTube video?

There’s an artwork to creating an ultra-long YouTube video. For one, you need to be sure it’s damaged up into digestible, full chunks so that folks can take natural-feeling breaks. Second, you need to use the size to your benefit. These are all issues that Quinton Hoover thinks of when he publishes a video for Quinton Opinions, a popular culture video essay channel that’s lately been dedicated to recapping a collection episode by episode or breaking down years of historical past for a present.

Hoover has been a content material creator for a decade, with round 881,000 subscribers on the time of publication. For the primary a number of years, he would make skits or 30-minute breakdowns about fashionable TV reveals and Garfield, however he’s grow to be recognized currently for a slate of movies about 2000s-era Nickelodeon reveals — particularly as a result of these movies take longer than a regular eight-hour workday to sit down by way of. For instance, his three-part collection on Sam & Cat (a part of an excellent longer saga in regards to the iCarly/Victorious universe) will take over 21 hours to look at. So the truth that he has uploaded one other lengthy video a couple of TV present isn’t novel. This time, although, was totally different.

On April Fools’ Day 2024, Hoover started importing his longest video but, which chronicles the historical past of The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, two long-running sitcoms from the Nineteen Sixties, written and narrated by his dad, Russ Hoover, who can be acquainted to followers of the channel. However then viewers regarded on the size: 38 hours, 27 minutes, 48 seconds. To place that into perspective, many segments of the video are longer than two-hour motion pictures; the total video will take over a day and a half to look at. It’s not the longest YouTube video ever — that honor belongs to “The Longest Video on YouTube: 596.5 Hours” — but it surely’s fairly shut, particularly when you think about it doesn’t include any loops or many hours of a clean display.

“So I feel that the factor individuals are going to be most stunned to study is that this video wasn’t essentially one thing that I had deliberate, it was one thing that occurred to me,” Hoover advised Polygon. Hoover’s father had began rewatching these two reveals chronologically and determined he needed to attempt his hand at a video about them. “[My dad] simply walks as much as me at some point, and he says, ‘Hey, I had an thought. […] What if, for April Fools’ at some point, I talked in regards to the reveals that I’m watching?’ And I didn’t give it some thought. I stated, ‘We’re doing that.’”

Hoover labored to assist his dad with the challenge, however he bumped into an issue rapidly: Russ had so much to say.

“He sends me the script. After which — I used to be in shock after I noticed it. As a result of I stated, ‘Dad, this Google Doc is like, 400 pages,’” he recounted. “And I used to be like, ‘Dad, it takes me two and a half minutes to learn each web page I write. […] You know the way that is gonna be like 40 hours of stuff?’ And I used to be actually, actually upset. He thought it was humorous.”

One more reason why the video took years to make was as a result of Russ first needed to discover ways to make one. Hoover helped his father edit and condense his scripts, and likewise taught him what to elucidate to the viewers. For instance, Russ needed to speak about The Beverly Hillbillies star Buddy Ebsen and, in response to Hoover, he initially didn’t really clarify to the viewers who that was.

“I bear in mind the primary month he was recording. I’d sit in the lounge whereas he recorded in his bed room. I simply listened to him report, after which I’d come and knock on the door, and I might go, ‘I don’t know what you’re speaking about,’” he stated. “‘It is advisable clarify what this factor is. Since you don’t clarify this stuff, you understand?’ So it was only a humorous course of.”

Picture: Quinton Opinions by way of YouTube

Picture: Quinton Opinions by way of YouTube

Sadly, in 2022, Russ received into a nasty automotive accident, which Hoover described as a “near-death expertise,” that required his father to get a number of leg surgical procedures. The lengthy restoration course of meant that Russ immediately had numerous downtime. “That was the rationale that we received a lot of the video executed on the finish of the day. […] He simply had these terrible months and months and months the place he simply couldn’t get off the bed.

“It was very therapeutic for us to work on this collectively, to form of make this artwork challenge and have one thing to do whereas he received higher,” Hoover went on. “And so it was very a lot about me making an attempt to only share form of the love I’ve for my father with a few of my viewers.”

Picture: Quinton Hoover

There have been many different problems within the course of, although. There have been numerous technological constraints, which is smart for a 38-hour video. For one, Adobe Premiere Professional doesn’t enable customers to make a video longer than 24 hours, so the video needed to be edited in chunks. Then there’s the matter of YouTube video limits. Being verified or within the accomplice program means you possibly can add longer movies, but it surely’s nonetheless unclear what the higher restrict really is. As somebody who’s repeatedly examined the bounds of what YouTube will enable by way of video dimension and size, Hoover says he’s had inconsistent success. For the Beverly Hillbillies video, he uploaded 4 movies: Two failed, one was caught in processing, and one ultimately succeeded.

The video additionally simply took numerous effort. Based on Hoover, the total video featured the work of round 22 folks, took a number of years to make, was written virtually solely by Russ (with transitions by Hoover), and was round 133 GB (and that’s after a ton of compression to make it as small as potential). And, sadly for the staff, it took over a day to add and course of; it lastly went dwell on April 3, a bit of too late for a real April Fools’ joke.

Nonetheless, the video essay is doing properly, all issues thought-about. On the time of writing, it has round 660,000 views (Hoover is aiming for over 1 million). Most of the feedback on the video discuss how informative it’s, or the way it is smart that Russ would publish longer movies than even his son does (like father, like son). Then there are the jokes about the way it’s lengthy sufficient to principally be a university course.

Hoover usually will get numerous indignant messages and feedback when he uploads one in all his longer movies, however he says this challenge has nonetheless been a optimistic expertise, not less than for his father. Russ isn’t as a lot of a public determine on-line and subsequently “doesn’t must expertise [the negative comments], which I’m grateful for,” says Hoover.

“There’s numerous hostility to the stuff that I do that basically burns me out,” Hoover stated. “I at all times knew there’d be a certain quantity of anger, as a result of that at all times occurs to me now. I can’t launch something anymore. So I’ve undoubtedly gotten that particularly on, like, Twitter, from folks that don’t watch my stuff.”

Hoover on the whole is burned out on his specific video essay format, and advised Polygon that he would possibly take a break after this to spend extra time along with his dad and mom (his dad is doing properly, he provides), construct some fashions, go on walks, and decompress. “Doing stuff like that is without doubt one of the solely methods you possibly can actually disconnect from that form of hyper-consistent negativity. And I feel if I simply give myself just a few months of that, I’ll come again more healthy in thoughts and physique.”