About the series
Re:cords is an interview series at Re:Sample delving into people’s experiences with Otomad/YTPMV.
This interview was conducted by MMaker.
About the interviewee
KinkyOats is a Otomad/YTPMV creator hailing from Canada, and one of the people responsible for organizing the Octagon collaborations.
How did you start making Otomad/YTPMV?
It was 2009 when I first started seeing YTPMVs and Otomads, and it was a couple different recent interests of mine that all happened to point me in that direction. I was playing a LOT of Mega Man 9 which was still pretty recently released, and randomly stumbled across some early YTPMVs listening to the soundtrack on YouTube. I was starting to get interested in anime besides Dragon Ball, and watching things like Lucky Star episodes split into three parts on YouTube had me naturally stumbling upon some MADs in the related videos. Raocow, probably my favorite content creator at the time, started his let’s play of Super Marisa World, which was my first introduction to Touhou and led me down that rabbit hole. Touhou, Mega Man 9, and Lucky Star, those were the three intersecting topics that kept bringing me back to YTPMV and Otomad content.
I spent most of 2009 watching more and more, thinking to myself that I have a good ear and could probably do a better job pitch shifting than a lot of the videos I saw. It wasn’t until MexicanSunflower dropped his Red Zone tutorial veg however that I actually felt confident enough to give it a try myself, and that led to my very first video.
As just an aside to this, this is the first YTPMV I can remember actually seeing on YouTube:
A lot of what you mention seems to be what had pulled people in back then, but I think very few had pursued it to the level you did – what made you believe you could do a better job than most at the time?
Keep in mind that this was back in the day when the standards were not NEARLY what they’re like now. “Correct” pitch shifting was, like, not a standard by ANY means. I had a big interest in music, I played piano and actually had another YouTube channel where I uploaded videos of me playing the ocarina. Really I was just confident that I could get the pitch shifting correct, and that that would be a step above a lot of other videos at the time. Looking back on it now I was definitely overlooking the TONS of other skills and considerations that go in to making a YTPMV, but just knowing I could hear pitch properly felt like an advantage and that was where my confidence came from.
What sorts of aspects and skills did you (and perhaps others) think weren’t considered back then compared to now, beyond pitch?
That’s a hard question to answer. I think a lot of aspects and skills that I wasn’t considering at the time WERE considerations for other people at the time. I think most things that are considered important to a good YTPMV or Otomad now are things that SOMEONE was already playing with and considering back then. Visual design, audio mastering, storytelling, there was someone specing in to each of those areas back then, but it was a while before people really started putting it all together. I had good pitch and rhythm, but neglected the sound quality.
Despite not being a witness to the scene during that era I think I can agree there appeared to be pockets of people who were specing in, as you say, to these niches. Over time as the community was fostered, I do believe though many of these aspects were beginning to be taken more seriously, leading to efforts like the Octagon collaborations, especially the second one, which I believe was still fairly early for its time (2013).
I am aware you were largely responsible for those collaborations, and as far as I understand it even one of the biggest representations of the originating source material with Jack Black. Could you go into some detail into how exactly that source material gained popularity and those collaborations started?
Octagon I THINK was already around when I made my first video, but if not it popped up at around the same time I did. Was a funny source, had a few good samples. I think the first Octagon video I saw might have been Bloomin’ Octagon, funny enough.
During my first year or two YTPMVing I gradually favored Otomad style videos more and more, and one thing I remember particularly liking about Japanese sources vs western ones was that Japanese sources often felt more… whole, more substantial. A lot of YTPMV sources that were popular at the time felt like single samples or single jokes without much room to expand with more material. Japanese sources all felt like big rabbit holes, with more and more material the further you looked in to them. Sources like Shuzo, Airmoto, Gachimuchi, they felt very grand in scale compared to big YTPMV sources of the time, and I was really drawn to that.
Of the popular YTPMV sources at the time, Octagon was the one I felt like lent itself to that kind of scale the best, and I REALLY wanted to see more Japanese creators take a swing with it. The first Octagon collab came about almost ENTIRELY as a means to make that happen, to essentially advertise the source to Nico Nico.
You obviously can’t force something to organically take off, and the collab didn’t necessarily have the direct impact I was hoping for at the time. There wasn’t a surge of Japanese Octagon videos after the collab or anything like that, but it definitely played a part in Octagon continuing to grow. I think ironically, instead of getting the Japanese to adopt western material, it did a much better job of encouraging western creators to explore and create more Japanese style videos.
Growing that adoption in the West I still see as a feat in itself, and speaking on my behalf but I know for many others, those collaborations are very much responsible for what sparked my interest to explore the medium more and inevitably consider trying to make my own.
In regards to the popular sources used in the East: the “rabbit hole” aspect is something I’m very fond of as well. I do appreciate that I’m seeing this being done more in the West now – the series of “bagel” sources comes to mind.
What you described does put into perspective now of how, on the atwiki page for the first Octagon collaboration, you did share many more sources beyond just the origin.
Note
atwiki is an older web service for wiki-style collaborative editing, similar to Fandom (Wikia). It was often used for purposes fulfilled by services like Google Sheets or Notion today.
First - I agree, there are a lot more western sources now that fall in to that rabbit hole archetype and I’m all for it. I love the Bagel collabs, and I’ll give a big shoutout to all of the Better Call Saul/Breaking Bad YTPMVs too for that reason.
Second - that page existed PRECISELY to try and encourage that type of feeling, that it was a big series with lots of material besides the main source. Still to my surprise, multiple Japanese authors used Jack Black sources OTHER than the ones from that page! Tosochika comes to mind, he made a killer part in the first Octagon collab with samples from a Tenacious D song.
On that topic of things happening in the “now”: has any recent event or trend in Otomads or YTPMVs left an impression on you?
Honestly I love everything that’s been coming out of the Re:Sample video jams! They’ve drawn a lot of creativity out of the people who have participated and they’ve each been a treat.
I’ve also kind of had a soft spot for goofy fads lately, the kind of thing people make 20 second Twitter videos out of… I’ve really enjoyed these little one-off fads that just work through the whole community in a week, like the Alex Jones Liberal thing, or when everyone was letting the dogs out.
athletic liberal (PAL-EX Version)
— Torjuz, The YTPMV Machine (@torjuz) February 24, 2026
Extended Tribute to @JoshThePinkGump's amazing idea https://t.co/rnxL2OmHEg pic.twitter.com/7khVkLkTlu
Also I’ll just drop this cause it’s only 9 months old and I LOVE this video, it cracks me up
The propulsion of fads in the West is super interesting to me… I believe back then they originated more solely on YouTube, when there were more discovery features (remember video responses?), but this has since become more broad and many now originate from Twitter/X (such as the Alex Jones source), or there is more crossover with the East (Dance of Venus). Sometimes the videos posted on X are far more popular than a YouTube upload nowadays too.
Do you have any thoughts on if this has affected the medium in any way? Or is this simply a natural progression?
Yeah, fads used to be made very possible because of YouTube’s discovery features. You were way more likely to find related fad uploads in the related videos, but video responses were REALLY what allowed fads to happen. Made it super easy to follow any fad video back to its origin, and it was an incredibly simple way to view essentially all of the videos that were a part of any fad.
Losing that centralized starting point for fads has made it harder to engage with them in the same way, but that might have been bound to happen as the medium grew. Different platforms like TikTok and Twitter (or X THE EVERYTHING APP) have undeniably put YTPMVs in front of a bunch of new eyes and have almost certainly been responsible for turning new talented creators on to the medium. It sucks to lose that community hub but I’m confident that the trade to reach more eyes and potential new talent is worth it in the long run.
@rameses_b
I agree… in some ways, YTPMVs are on the eyes of more people now than ever, some making them without the knowledge such a community has existed for years… I’m hopeful that, with Re:Sample, and sister projects like otoDB, we can help fill some of these gaps you mention and to better bring a feeling of a full community here in the West.
On that note for the future… is there anything in the future you would like to see regarding Otomad/YTPMV?
Just for it to keep going! There’s so many talented people keeping YTPMV and Otomad alive and it’s such an honor to feel like I played an important part in growing it back in the day.
I don’t have any clever new amazing ideas I want to see done, and nothing I could suggest will top the creativity that’s brewing in the mind of some young ambitious creator right now. I want to see THEIR vision of the future - my vision of the future is just the present!
But also if I saw some new Cat Planet vids that would be pretty good too 😉