How Neil Cicierega Shaped my Entire Life

as a child who was growing up just as internet content was starting to explode you never really knew who was responsible for making the things you would see which is why i only recently connected all the dots and realized that one man has been subtly influencing and shaping me as a person for the last 15 years of my life it all started when i was very young probably about six or seven years old back then we had one family computer it was always a bit of a battle between my siblings and i to get time on it i specifically remember rushing out of school at 3 30 and sprinting home so i could play runescape before my older brothers back then we were always looking for online browser games to play this was right when flash games and animations were all the rage one time my brother and i went over to our neighbor's house and he showed us a site called freeonlinegames.com which had all sorts of browser games but more importantly it also had flash animations now at the time i was a huge fan of mario games like super mario world it was one of the first video games i ever played so i was immediately interested when our neighbor showed us an animation called rise of the mushroom kingdom which for anyone who hasn't seen it spoilers ahead but it goes a little something like this right off the bat mario dies and everyone's standing there crying at his funeral then luigi decides it's vengeance time and leaves a brutally violent attack on bowser's castle where he chucks bowser into the moon who later wakes up on an island and is promptly torn apart by baby yoshi's but then in a twist we learned that it was actually wart responsible for killing mario and everything up to this point was actually all just a prophetic dream luigi had so after waking up he stops time and saves mario only to be blown in half as he dies in his brother's arms he tells mario that warden was the culprit mario decides it's vengeance time and raid swartz castle meanwhile peach grabs a one-up brings luigi back to life so luigi can save mario from falling into spikes and the two kill wart by shooting a fireball into his butt causing him to explode so after that quick explanation you could see how this was a bit of an emotional roller coaster for me as a seven-year-old child who loved mario and it was i almost cried right then and there at our neighbor's place but violent and emotionally scarring as it was it was also one of the coolest things i had ever seen at the time and that's the thing the stuff you see as a child usually the kind that causes some level of fear and confusion you never forget it so later we were on freeonlinegames.com again seeing what kind of animations we could find oh there were a bunch there was the star wars wrap one ring to rule them all and of course the potter puppet pals now i'm sure you're all familiar with these guys especially the mysterious ticking noise episode which everyone on the planet knows and can recite by heart but did you know that before the live action puppet episodes there were a couple flash animated ones bothering snape and trouble at hogwarts absolute classics even though a bit odd and violent they were overall cartoony enough for my parents to let me watch them and i swear to this day i will occasionally quote trouble at hogwarts and the line it's time to die for you but you see we were smart kids we paid attention to the details so on our third or fourth watch of trouble at hogwarts we realized that while snape is getting hit by avada kedavra it makes a star for a single frame if you advance the animation frame by frame and click the star you were treated to a scene where hermione explodes ron's head off how pleasant this was to watch as a seven-year-old child this plus what i witnessed in rise of the mushroom kingdom it put a certain fear into my mind a fear that at any moment the internet could take something seemingly innocent and wholesome and twist it and believe me the internet did this a lot and like i said before when it comes to being memorable it's the slightly creepy twisted and shocking things that stick with you forever little did i know that this pattern would hold true many more times in the future so let's fast forward a bit it was may of 2009 i was 9 years old and i was invited over to a friend's house to have a sleepover we went to the movie theater to watch night at the museum 2 battle of the smithsonian which was a very fun movie for a 9 year old to watch and a very fun evening for me after we got up the next morning my friend opened his parents laptop and played some videos he played an old robot chicken parody this video was called mario vice city and was a mario based grand theft auto parody featuring among other things mario and luigi being gunned down by the police this was not content appropriate for a nine-year-old but after we finished watching that video my friend put on another the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny a classic song and animation where every character you've ever heard of is killing each other ending off with a needlessly dramatic scene of mr rogers in a green sweater committing suicide by stabbing himself to death ah yeah i wanted to go home after watching that and i did but not before having a trauma-induced half-breakdown in front of my friend and his mom as i slowly tried to come to grips with what i just saw in those last two videos you know it really doesn't seem like much now but to a sheltered nine-year-old the bloody violence was enough to cause overwhelming discomfort a couple years later when i was about 11 my brother called me over to watch a video it was a song with an image of adrian brody walking across various backgrounds and i loved it well at least i did until things got a bit weird near the end of the song it changes completely and the video goes from brody walking around various backgrounds to some uncomfortable close-ups and this nightmare fuel the video itself only creeped me out a little at the time and i could sense that it was giving off a familiar energy that same feeling like the happy video was about to get twisted like i was about to witness something i didn't want to see i absolutely loved the song though i downloaded it and have been listening to it for the past 10 years but even today when i get to the end of the song i remember how i felt when i first watched the video about a year later i actually used brody quest in the credits of a video of mine called dimensions this was when i was just starting to get into using video effects in my videos but the song has been with me ever since in my early teenage years our family started a family band we would learn and memorize all sorts of songs and play all sorts of small events we even got paid for a good chunk of those events so it was actually my main source of income at the time i used the money to buy the computer that i first used to make youtube videos on i mostly played the bass guitar using a synth keyboard my father would listen to a song transcribe the bassline show it to me a couple times and then i would memorize it playing a bass line on a keyboard is pretty simple so the parts were easy to remember and play to this day i still have several bass lines etched deep into my mind i played them so many times i don't think i could forget them if i tried one of the songs we played in the family band was sweet caroline always a crowd favorite it had a very simple bass line so it was one of the first ones i learned it always made me a bit nervous as a kid since there's a section of a song where all the other instruments cut out in the bass line has a little solo bit it had a lot of repeating the same note so i had to watch myself and make sure i didn't accidentally speed up as the song went on which would sometimes happen we'd sort of look at each other like oh no now sweet carolina is a song by neil diamond and neil diamond is not the subject of this video so i'm just gonna i'm just gonna move on so not long after watching brody quest i came across a video called haircut which was a choose your own adventure style song the guy singing somehow sounded kind of familiar i first chose the option to get my hair cut where i quickly ended up with a pair of scissors in my head went to the hospital to get them out and ended up getting killed by hugh laurie stealing my brain that was weird and kind of uncomfortable i went through a lot of the other options at the time because i thought the choose your own adventure style was really cool and interesting i liked the style so much that almost six years later i made my own choose your own adventure video called escape the school a series i never would have made if it wasn't for that really weird musical series about getting a haircut many years later i finished high school and attended a year of university during this year i took an elective class for electronic dance music production which was probably my favorite part of university as a whole my final project for that class was the first song of my first album land and at the time i didn't have a name for it so the project file was actually just called the happy one during the summer of that year i was working on the rest of the songs in that album looking for inspiration so i listened to all sorts of music online at some point i encountered a meme or something that used a portion of the song not sure how to pronounce this wonderwall by nielsey cerrega hmm that guy looks kind of familiar i really like the chord progression in one portion of the track so i took it into ableton live and saw if i could transcribe the progression turns out it goes something like this [Music] while that was fun i never put this chord progression into any of my songs it wasn't long after that my brother introduced me to the song's cabinet man and when he died from the album spirit phone by lemon demon hearing that name made me think wait a second don't i already have a song on my phone by that artist and sure enough i did it was a little song called brody quest that's when i got a feeling a feeling like there was something very significant going on here but there was some key information i didn't know about so i went with the best idea i had and just googled lemon demon wikipedia hit me with a revelation i was not ready for he was there right in the description at the top of the page neil cicerrega and then i saw it lemon demon is best known for its song and video ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny it was him it was neil he made brody quest wonderwall and the ultimate showdown i clicked into his name and was immediately struck with another revelation that neil was the one who created the harry potter parody series potter puppet pals i immediately went to his youtube channel to see if it was all true and sure enough the potter puppet pals videos were there but there was something else familiar right above them the haircut video even ariel needs legs a video i randomly encountered while looking at memes was there he was everywhere from my early childhood to my teenage years and now even as an adult he always found his way back into my life it was a shocking realization learning just how much influence this one person had on me he was the creator of both my childhood joy and my childhood trauma he inspired my videos he inspired my music every time i encountered something he worked on it buried itself deep into my mind and took root there forgetting his work was impossible instead it changed me it challenged me it steered my very path of life i would literally not be the same person i am today if it weren't for the work of neil cesaregas so with that in mind i think there's only one more thing i can say thank you neil [Music] snyder [Music] severus [Music] severus

Channel: ShortHop

Views: 16,632

Rating: 4.9931273 out of 5

Keywords: ShortHop, luke, keller, Neil Cicierega, Potter Puppet Pals, Brodyquest, Haircut, Mouth Moods, Lemon Demon, Flash Games, Flash animations, Freeonlinegames, newgrounds, Mysterious Ticking Noise, Wndrwll, Mouth Silence, Spirit Phone, Mouth Dreams

Id: MT5fVTFqeak

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020