Sometimes, the internet does forget
Posted Jan 31, 2017
Remember that old adage that goes something like, once you put it on the internet, it will be there forever? Well, sometimes it won’t. And then at some point, maybe it will. Wait, what?
Back in 8th grade (which would be 2006 or so), I stumbled upon a series of crudely made internet videos by a guy named David Baker. David, who I assume was in his mid to late teens at the time, had made 11 short episodes of a cartoon about Super Go Up Stairs Man, a spoof anime superhero whose super power was the ability to go up (and fall down) stairs. The episodes ranged from basic plots to complete nonsense, but usually centered on the titular character and his arch nemesis the Jeep (who was supposedly evil). From the looks of it, it was made entirely with Microsoft Paint, Windows Movie Maker, and stock photos from Google image search. As low-budget (but not necessarily low-effort) as it gets.
In addition to the videos, which were hosted on Google Video (remember that?), SGUSM had an official webpage on one of the free web hosts that were popular back then, like Angelfire or Freewebs (remember those?). Even for 2006, it looked terrible. Its primary colors were pink and black, it had Javascript snowflakes falling down the page, and I’m pretty sure it also played a MIDI. Whether or not all this was intentionally bad is anyone’s guess — I would say yes — but it sure was quite a sight.
Myself and a couple of my classmates found SGUSM hilarious and lines from the show quickly became little inside jokes. That was a decade ago, and I hardly talk to any of them these days. But every once in a while I feel like taking a trip down memory lane. Imagine my surprise when today, the Google results looked like this:
Apart from random strings of characters, this might be the emptiest search page I’ve ever seen. And no, the one result is nothing more than a highly outdated list of Google Video links. Were we the only people actually watching SGUSM back then? I have no view counts to refer to, so who knows. In any case, the videos seem to be gone from the surface of the web. As a person who cares way too much about preserving old data, this makes me very sad.
But then I remembered: at some point, I saved all the episodes to my computer. Even though my computer from 2006 is long gone, much of the data from that time has been archived on several generations of external hard drives. So here I’ll post what I believe to be the entire series, and the internet recalls one very insignificant memory. I’m obviously doing this without permission from the creator. David, if by any chance you’re reading this far off in the future, be sure to drop me a line. Update 2017-05-23: now with permission. Thanks Dave!