i wonder what Ganon's up to - a madanonymous CD-EYEsore retrospective

i have closed eye visuals pretty much all the time. until i was an adult, i thought everyone did. i saw it as a consequence of the cartoons and video games i interacted with as a child, just reprocessing them in different ways. rotating 16-bit pizzas on an HTML cyan background. a 2D Rayman clipping into a total blackout. it’s hard for me to imagine what such hallucinations were like pre-television.

when i was 19, i smoked weed for the first time (i know, i was late to the game!), and my friend showed me a madanonymous YouTube Poop. i remember the moment really clearly, because i think he expected me to laugh at it, like he did when he discovered it at age 12. i had never heard of YouTube Poop, i didn’t know about the CD-i, and, as i said, i was experiencing an altered state for the first time. i probably did laugh, but mainly i was awed at how close it resembled the phantasmagoria that i was constantly seeing behind my eyelids. it felt like someone had looked inside my skull and projected it onto a screen.

it’s been over ten years since then and i still can’t stop thinking about it. so for whoever cares, this is a primer on madanonymous’ CD-i YTPs and why they mean so much to me.

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the CD-i was contemporary to the original PlayStation but far less popular. it featured many games “on-rails,” or what i call “movie games;” more cutscene than play, with an animation style more similar to a cartoon than a video game. you aren’t expected to make choices or develop skills, you just follow along. YTPs are structurally very similar to on-rail games; they typically follow their source material chronologically, and insert or alter beats within that story, rather than rearranging the plot altogether. mainly i think these games became good source material because they looked goofy and were easy to pirate and screw with.

i’m a child of the ‘90s and played a lot of movie games at the time. while they might seem overly simplistic to an adult player, they’re kind of perfect for children, providing immersion and interactivity, not requiring too much motor control. part of the reason i am so drawn to these CD-i videos is that they look like something i would have known. they’re proximal to my own memories, scratching at media i’ve nearly forgotten.

madanonymous, especially at the beginning of their CD-i edit playlist, isn’t making the puerile jokes one typically associates with YTPs as a genre, they’re really just showcasing the medium. they’re breaking open files, combining all the languages of voiceover contained within the game and playing them at once, and largely leaving the visual and narrative content otherwise untouched. (by the way, i’m using the fittingly anonymous “they” for madanonymous because i literally cannot find any information about them as a person, not on reddit, not on discord, not anywhere.)

in their captions, madanonymous calls these initial edits “the worst” of their oeuvre, but i’m not sure what “worst” means here. YTPs as a whole might be technically well edited, are they artistically good? the genre’s very scatalogical name suggests that “good” doesn’t apply to anything here. “good” is not what we’re reaching for. so madanonymous’ use of “worst” here might just mean that these are their least purposeful, least directional. if i were being pedantic (which, i guess i am), i might say that this era is more process-driven than content-driven; a sort of Burroughsian tactic.

aside from technique, most YTPs are boob/dick/shit heavy toilet humor– and that’s being kind. some are super dark, replete with SA jokes and racism. like other artistic movements driven by collage, parody, quotation, and noise (Italian futurism, esotericism, hardcore music, South Park edgy kid humor), fascism is as equally prevalent as anti-establishment rhetoric. madanonymous doesn’t really lean on that kind of humor. their “worst,” while it might not have traditional punchlines or a really intentional thrust, is far less off-putting than the “best” of many of their contemporaries.

it’s right around “squadala evil boobs” that madanonymous begins to adopt many of the most common tropes of YTP edits; reversals, pitch shifts, and intercutting found media from other sources. but still, the first intercut they utilize is a clip from a John McCain debate. pretty dry. the juxtaposition between his pixelated bald conservative head and the plump cartoon-red animated lips behind him can be read as some sort of political statement, but i’m more interested in it because of how that unique combination of 2009 politics and ‘90s media reveals the mind of an elder Millennial. it grounds the piece in time and also stretches and warps time like play-doh slapped on a table and smushed around. (play-doh, like YTP, is more of a pastime than a proper(ly recognized) art form. YTP isn’t for the critics, it’s for the children.)

following this are a number of what can only be called “character studies;” videos which focus on one character from the Zelda universe at a time. this era has a very Mirror Link boss battle quality to it, by which i mean not only are characters often duplicated and made to play out scenes with themselves, but also that they attempt to excavate facets of character personalities where very little exists. Link is a famously silent protagonist, and Ganon is famously evil-for-the-sake-of-evil. they have very little personality, and yet whatever is there, via color scheme, costume, props, imagery, is exaggerated in these videos. it’s a further deepening of technique within a limited toolset. as a top comment on the Ganon vid wisely analyzes:

“I love how this video is like Ganon showing off how cool he is. He emerges from the secret book, sings Lady Gaga, changes day and night as he pleases, morphs his own face into the planet Earth and can make you prisoner of his love... Or whatever.”

that “Or whatever” is doing heavy lifting here. analyzing YTP or memes, commenting on a YouTube video, thoughtfully dissecting internet content in any way feels like a fool’s errand. there is an amount of apathy baked into its creation, and so too there must be in our analysis. lest we be cringe. i submitted this essay to a film blog once and they summarily rejected it.

all of this study, of individual characters, of editing tools, of the tropes of the YTP community at large, pays off in the magnum opus “johnathan swift returns from the dead to eat a cheese sandwich.” narratively, this changes almost nothing from the original CD-i cutscene. the pacing and dialogue are all maintained, but the visuals are beyond anything other YTP has done; true frame-by-frame and pixel-by-pixel edits of the actual animation itself. 

this is why the fascination with the flat CD-i style– because it is more pliable than other kinds of video, and uniquely so in the digital editing landscape. fingers can be added, mouths can expand and swallow body parts, bodies can change shape and faces can be swapped with no realism lost, because the starting point is flat with clear edges. Zelda becomes Medusa, Impa becomes the King, the King’s lips expand beyond his face. truly seamless hallucinogenic visions.

now, if you wanted to be an insufferable analyst about this, you could. you could make the argument that the last oil derrick image positions the whole video as a political commentary on resource imperialism (the flashing word REALITIES popping onto the screen after Link says “i can’t wait to bomb”). you could argue that the titular reference to Johnathan Swift further situates the work in a political landscape, identifying YTP as a site for satire, yet still maintaining a sort of “cheese sandwich” dadaism. you could look at other videos with the same microscope, arguing that the shot of a single die at the end of the Ganon video is a visual reference to Man Ray’s “Les Mystères du Château du Dé–” Man Ray being one of the original film collagists, a Silent Film Pooper. you could claim that madanonymous and their peers are archivists of the highest quality– giving infomercials, dead game consoles, and local news segments new artistic life. you could easily make the case that YTP, though it never broached the mainstream, has had impact far and wide on meme culture.

but why would you do any of this? in the sheer ever-expanding glut of meme videos that exist online, why examine this artist, this moment in time, this dying subgenre? for me, i can say that the fascination lies in its connection to my own experience and visual language. i’m a ‘90s-born Millennial who has been gaming since age three, playing demo games my grandpa got at software conferences. my peers created YTPs, we were all part of the same zeitgeist. i’m not sure that these videos would appeal to those who weren’t part of the late night infomercial era (Zoomers, sound off), but it feels important to me to memorialize how much they do speak to me, even if they don’t speak to anyone else. this is part of the meme-ification of art in general. you had to be there. it’s funnier in context.

all the videos through “doug henning promotes a two day sale on enceladus” are equally masterful. truly a golden era of the art form, as the comments attest. after that, madanonymous’ work peters out to nothing. their most recent upload was years ago, a ten second fart of a clip. it’s not hard to imagine why they would have stopped creating; YTPs as a genre and community have almost entirely fallen off (big dogs like cs188 are still around, and there are a few revivalists like very tall bart, but it’s nothing like it was in the mid-2000s). besides which, there was never anyone else doing the kind of work that madanonymous was, the painstaking recreations, the consistent pushing of media boundaries with no quick comedic payoff. i can imagine feeling isolated, spending ever-increasing hours developing your craft to see no one out there matching your freak. and if madanonymous is an elder Millennial as i expect, it’s likely they don’t have the time they had in their younger years to be pouring hours into these meticulous works of art. maybe they got a real life editing job. maybe this was a hobby that simply stopped being fun.

i continue to scour YouTube Poops for similar videos, past or present. this 100 gecs remix vid is pretty nuts. one day i’ll make a playlist of all the batshit TikToks i like. but by and large the aesthetic fascination with 90s-borne hallucinations has faded. which makes sense. we’re old now. but when i close my eyes and see collaged cartoons stretching into infinity, i still wish i could commission madanonymous to bring them to video fruition.