The Internet forgets

People have often said that if it exists then you can find it online and that the internet never forgets. These people have never tried to find an archive of the Irish dub of Avatar: The Legend of Aang or dug through tech support forums full of dead links and a dozen pictures of the same yellow frog saying that the image you’re looking for is no longer available. The internet is, in fact, extremely forgetful and its memory is deteriorating rapidly as the companies that have been relied on as communication infrastructure rapidly close themselves off more and more.

There’s a guy who goes by Bing Bong who in 2021 posted a video online simply titled I shortened Yu-Gi-Oh!’s 1st episode down to about a minute, and over the course of months posted similar edits of subsequent episodes, eventually covering the entire show. I really liked Yu-Gi-Oh! growing up and it was a really fun way to revisit them without actually having to watch the entire show again. It’s two hundred and twenty-four episodes long and quite frankly not a lot happens in most of them. The high-speed recap giving me the gist and jogging my fond memories was, I think, a nice way to dwell in some nostalgia without having to spend a hundred hours watching something I don’t think I’d have the patience for as an adult. It also has a few of its own fun running jokes in how its edited, such as trying to “fix” characters saying Reborn the Monster instead of Monster Reborn and leaving in every single instance of characters explaining the rules of Pot of Greed or every utterance of the phrase Egyptian god cards¹.

Bing Bong is still uploading similar videos to his current Youtube channel (he’s covering Bleach at the moment) but the Yu-Gi-Oh! videos are long gone. I said his current Youtube channel because his original one was banned due to copyright claims. These videos were posted elsewhere but it has been a pain trying to track them down again. It looks like he was uploading them to a Tiktok account for a while but it only has the first ninety-seven episodes and hasn’t posted in months. Still, that was at least a good chunk of them and I was able to save them with yt-dlp.

Trying to find these videos with Google and other search engines can be difficult because they all think they know better than you what you are asking for and keeps giving me results for Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series. Still, I found that he uploaded at least a couple of episodes to Vimeo at some point but I genuinely don’t know if the rest of them are on there. Apparently Vimeo no longer allows you to open a user’s profile to view their uploads or even search for videos that you have not already added to you “library” and if other episodes are uploaded there then search engines do not seem to have indexed them.

These videos were also uploaded to Bing Bong’s Twitter account and as far as I can tell were never taken down but Twitter is barely functional any more. It simply won’t show you anything any more without an account and even with one it’s almost impossible to find things. Trying to scroll through the media tab to see older uploads it just stops loading new posts after a while and the search function seems to be falling apart at the seams. I tried searching for posts from his profile in a range of specific dates for when he was uploading these but whether it actually returns any posts seems random, often showing only two results when trying to search a specific month and then potentially showing nothing when I put in a different date range even if it actually contains the dates the posts I just saw posted on. Incidentally, apparently at some point Twitter added the ability to filter advanced search results by engagement metrics, i.e., only showing posts that reach a certain minimum threshold of replies or likes, which is not something I have ever seen on a site before and shows just how the laid bare the ideology of the site has become.

After some experimentation I did finally get some results searching for the specific titles of individual videos and managed to get episodes ninety-eight through one hundred and one that way but then get no results for the subsequent four episodes. The one hundred and sixth episode does show up but immediately after that they’re missing again. So I might be able to, slowly and painfully, fill in some blanks this way but it is not reliable at all. I can’t even just message him about getting them because Twitter no longer allows direct messages from people you don’t follow unless they have paid for a premium account.

This is not ancient history; these videos are less than five years old and attempting to find and archive them has been a frustrating mess. Anything online that you might take for granted could easily become inaccessible tomorrow and the trend at the moment for it is to become ever-more closed off.