Trivia / Internet Historian

• Approval of God:
  • Richard Heeney approved of Balloon Boy: The Untold Story, and would go on to be interviewed by IH and even wear a t-shirt telling people to search for his video.
  • Sean Murray tweeted a link to The Engoodening of No Man's Sky while asking people to not watch beyond the 45 minute mark... for understandable reasons^note to wit, it's not just the erotic fanfiction at the 49 minute mark, but also Sean and "the auditor of games" making out upon being redeemed.
• Breakthrough Hit: The Fall of 76 is the channel's most popular work, clocking in at over 33 million views as of February 2023. While it wasn't exactly obscure before (earlier videos like The Tumblr-4chan Wars had already brought the channel from two-thousand subscribers to almost twenty thousand in about two weeks), the video brought the channel to mainstream attention due to the topic being covered.
• Colbert Bump:
  • The Engoodening of No Man's Sky led to a spike in sales of the game, making the top ten list on Steam when it wasn't even on sale.
  • Similarly, his use of Fall of Envy's cover of "White Flag" in The Cost of Concordia gave it some attention as well.
  • Due to the infamy of the plagiarism accusation, spikes occurred in the Mental Floss website’s traffic due to people checking out the original article to see what all the fuss is about.
• Corpsing:
  • "Friendship Ended." goes into the death of Asif's pet goat and inquires about a possible murder angle. IH audibly starts chuckling when he says "we can rule out suicide."
  • In "Jeff The Killer", IH almost loses his composure when reading some particularly silly lines (such as stifling his laughter when the mother tells the father to "get the gun"), and occasionally derails the reading to question particularly stupid plot points or to laugh at the bad grammar that permeates the story.
  • You can hear Historian crack up when he explains that Batman is a small conservative Muslim city in Turkey.
  • "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky": IH attempts to replicate Sean's accent at separate points and on the final instance, he finally cracks and laughs.
    "This accent sucks!"
  • You can hear snickering in schadenfreude during "The Fall of 76" when Bethesda's official PR response to players logging into other people's characters is that "[they] couldn't do anything about it."
  • In "The Cost of Concordia":
    • First, when he segues into the post-cruise incidents.
      "There's a whole veritable spaghetti of details to untangle. Let's dive in."
      [IH removes the lid on a pan full of spaghetti (with sauce), then pulls it out of the pan by hand, revealing "The Deets" written in permanent marker on the bottom of the pan]
      "There they are, the deets!" [wheezing]
    • Then, when he's talking about the looting.
      "...as well as the iconic bell, which hung from the bridge of the ship. It was never found. *starts snickering* Who steals a big fuck-off bell?"
• Follow the Leader:
  • The popularity of Internet Historian's unique style of ads compelled Pyrocynical to emulate them in his own ad segments. Internet Historian then humorously calls him out, describing Pyro's ads as less energetic than his. A Friendly Rivalry ensues. It evolves until the Framing Device for the Raycon ad segment in "Girls can't be Gamers" is Pyrocynical and Internet Historian having a Showdown at High Noon (where Pyrocynical wins).
  • Historian has named YourMovieSucks.org as his inspiration for starting a YouTube channel.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The video on Kurt Eichenwald was taken down from the main channel due to various reasons. You have to see reuploads from other channels online if you want to see it.
  • "Man in Cave" was taken down due to extreme similarities to a Mental Floss article on the same historical subject. A re-upload was unlisted shortly after being uploaded until it was made public again in October 2023. Said reupload reworded the script, removed the most similar sections, and credited the original article, leaving reaction videos and offsite means ^note  Due to the reputed plagiarism, reuploads are quickly taken down by YouTube as the only way to watch the original version.
  • "The Great iPhone Massacre" originally had a short intro of iPhones being tortured (in the Historian's typical manner, taking scenes from things like Casino Royale (2006) and Heavy Rain and poorly photoshopping an iPhone over the victim in the scene), but due to copyright claims on the music used for the scene the video was edited circa March 2020 to cut straight from the fair-use disclaimer to the Framing Device of receiving a call via iPhone, leaving reaction videos from before that point as the only way to see the original intro.
  • The original release of " The Failure of Rainfurrest" had a credit scene where attendants of Rainfurrest are credited as patreons. This was edited out sometime in 2020/2021 for unknown reasons.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Fredrik Knudsen, best known for his smooth, neutral toned voice in Down the Rabbit Hole voices Sonic in the Sundance Rejects Video on Sonic High School, playing the character like it were an actual Sonic game as over the top and hammy as possible.
  • The Right Opinion, known for putting up a professional appearance in his videos, played the part as one of the art thieves with a loutish Cockney accent in The Swedish Job. The accent is so outrageously thick that a subtitle has to clarify that it really is Right Opinion doing the voice every time his character speaks.
• Schedule Slip:
  • IH makes a joke out of how the No Man's Sky video took so long to make, Hello Games made an entire expansion pack while he was working on it.
  • On another occasion, IH lost his main account's password, which forced him to post most of his content on his secondary channel, causing his primary content to go on hiatus for an extended period of time.
  • Just look at the amount of time that passed between "That Zone Between Area 50 and 52" (posted April 1, 2022) and the previous video, "The Cost of Concordia" (posted February 16, 2021). He lampshades this at the end of "That Zone...", joking that his promise of putting out shorter videos more quickly at the end of "The Cost of Concordia" was an April Fools joke and suggesting the next main-channel video will take two years.^note As it turned out, he seemingly was only half-joking, as the next video ("Man in Cave") came out on September 29, 2022, less than six months later, but clocked at 74 minutes — only two minutes shorter than The Gentleman Pirate on the Incognito Mode channel, the longest video he's made — in comparison to "That Zone..." (38 minutes) and "The Cost of Concordia" (almost 47 minutes).
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The original "Man in Cave" was taken down in early March 2023, as the original script was way too similar to a Mental Floss article. The edited version reworded significant portions and cited the original article as a source, even linking users back to it. Your mileage may vary on whether this was an adequate solution.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Part 3 of his My Immortal fanfic would have included the portion where a hacker gets into Tara's account, with the hacker played by Chris Ray Gun, but he decided to cut it out since it seemed as if they made it up themselves and appeared out of place even with all the insanity. He also decided to cut the whole storyline in which the main character uses time travel to change the main villain's name and have a giant orgy when she went back to Hogwarts (all while featuring an emo Marty McFly), because of how incomprehensible it sounded. Many viewers noticed this and found it hilarious how removing these storylines did nothing to change the fanfic.
  • The original Framing Device for The Cost of Concordia was based on the tanker chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, with Snake infiltrating the Costa Concordia during its fateful voyage. It was scrapped as it had little to do with the subject of the video and felt shoehorned in, and was replaced with a more thematically appropriate Titanic (1997) parody in the final video.

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