Over the holidays, I got deep into one of those YouTube rabbit holes and got lost in the world of what I call “recap YouTube”. There are these channels on YouTube that essentially summarize a movie or TV series in ten to twenty minutes. All these recap videos feature footage from the movie or TV show and there is always narration, which explains the plot and the characters. Some of the channels use text-to-speech, so you’re never sure who really is behind the channel. Other channels use a real human voice and their narration is sprinkled in with commentary, like when a character does something dumb.
I kinda got addicted to watching these, especially for movies or shows I never had the intention of watching. Some of the recaps are from foreign shows and movies that would never even know existed nor would I even know where to get access to them. Instead, I discovered them through these recap channels.
I’ve watched a lot of horror recap vids because I’m not a huge fan of horror but I can easily spend ten minutes and know exactly what happens in a horror movie, without having to devote an hour and a half to two hours of jump scares. It’s great!
There is a potential downside to all these recap videos however. Sometimes I’ll get to the end of the video and think, “that was great, I kinda wish I’d just watched the whole thing”. Now there’s nothing to stop me from doing that but I already know what’s gonna happen, so unless it’s a masterpiece of entertainment, one could view it as a waste of time.
I also have a feeling these types of videos are perhaps an indication of the times we currently live in. Attention spans are shorter now. Social media videos need to be short to get traction and no one has time or the focus to take in information in a long form.
As an experiment, I’ve watched a few recap videos of movies I’ve seen from start to finish, just to see what gets cut out of the plot summary narration and what stays in. Now obviously it’s subjective and boils down to the skill of the person who wrote the narration but for the most part, these videos hit all the necessary major plot points. They also show the most interesting parts of the most important scenes as well. I should also mention that nearly all these videos do not include audio from the show or movie. The narration audio is backed by generic music, so you won’t hear any dialogue or music from the movie. I’m actually surprised these videos don’t get copyright striked on YouTube but they must fall under some fair use policy… or maybe they don’t.
Anyways, the video above is a recap of season one of Outer Range. Don’t watch it unless you want to be spoiled.