Website / Vat19

Creators of award winning DVDs, and purveyors of curiously awesome products.

— Tagline

Vat19.com is an online shopping website/company that was launched in 2001.

Vat19 began as a website to sell their own line of DVDs, the most famous of which was their ambient DVD series. In 2005, they put out their first non-DVD product: The fireplace-scented candle. It went on to become a hit with customers and encouraged them to seek out more "curiously awesome products" for them to promote and sell. They are most well-known for their witty and creative advertisements on their YouTube channel that they make to sell their products (many of which involve comedic skits), the first of which is their ad for the Grillput Portable BBQ. Aside from strict advertisements, they're also known for doing challenges and experiments with their products, many of which tend to be pushing it a little.

They also have a few other shows for entertainment, including one destroying-stuff title, Break It to Make It.

Their YouTube channel can be found here.

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Vat19 and their collection of videos provide examples of:

• April Fools: Stōn, a supposed app-controlled rock. Though it ended up being uploaded on the wrong day.
  • After this, Vat19 made a video where they said that their products would be half-off. Turns out that they were literally selling one half of the products for half the price, with the ad showing an overenthusiastic Jamie informing people of the deal over footage of them literally chopping their products in half with a guillotine, though obviously it wasn’t a real deal.
  • Vat19 made one more of these videos called the Watch It Grow Challenge, presented as a live stream where you watch a Garden Bon Bon grow, when in reality absolutely nothing happens to the plant, and the stream is just 11 straight hours of it along with several random intervals when Vat19 songs are played.
• Bad Boss: While he may not be one in real life, the official website’s page about the employees of Vat19 calls Jamie “The Evil Boss”.
• Bait-and-Switch: One of their videos spends a full minute advertising ordinary folding chairs, only to reveal at the very last second that real purpose of the ad was to show off the hilariously awful sweaters the cast was wearing throughout the video.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Discussed. At the end of "We filled water balloons with WHAT?!," Eric asks if any of the kids fantasizing about working for the company have actually considered what they might have to put up with. This comes up mere moments after he was bombarded with water balloons filled with Liquid Ass, something that disgusted Jon to the point of vomiting thrice.^note In spite of this, the comment section for the video is filled with people saying they'd still work there anyways.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: One recurring gag is a series of videos where Bob Ross travels back in time after filming episodes of his show and interacts with several other famous people, notable examples being him influencing Jackson Pollock’s splatter paint style in 1947 with his Happy Accidents philosophy and giving some of his “positive essence” (actually an Energy Drink IRL) to Franklin D. Roosevelt before his inaugural speech in 1933.
  Bob Ross: The only thing you have to be afraid of is that silly little thing called fear!
  He’s Bob Ross, Tiiiiiiiiiiiime Traveleeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrr!
• Bigger Is Better: Commonly invoked with their gummy products such as the World’s Largest Gummy Bear and Worm, their 26 Pound Gummy Bear, and their one-time World’s Largest Gummy Pizza (not for sale). They also invoke this trope in some of their challenge videos, such as creating the World’s Largest Jello Cup, Cornhole Game, Stress Ball, Bath Bomb, Beer Pong and Dirt Cake among others. Countless other videos exhibit this trope, which can be found in their aptly named World’s Largest Stuff playlist. The description even names the trope itself.
  The bigger, the better!
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce:
  • There's enough videos about them messing with extremely spicy foods and sauces to fill an entire playlist.
  • Vat19 is also the creator of Burn or Bliss Chocolate (a set of chocolates that are either normal or spiked with 5 million Scoville units of heat) and the World's Hottest Chocolate Bar (a very tiny bar that contains 9 million SHU^note The highest heat level available to consumers, period all the way through, to the point where they consider only one fingertip-sized square of the bar to be reasonable for consumption.)
  • The aforementioned chocolate bar was dumped en masse into a chocolate fountain. It did not end well for everyone tasting it, especially Jamie, who ate a freeze-dried ice cream bar that contained a humongous dollop of the liquified chocolate.
• Breakout Character: Dan Italy and Tony Rigatoni, two mafia gangsters that are part of the many recurring characters in Vat19’s ads eventually stood out and became the main antagonists of Vat19’s own movie.
• Call-Back: The video on the Gummy Heart follows through on an experiment of the notorious Gummy Bear America company that was hinted at in the Gummy Brain ad.
  Chet Huskins: It looks real enough to make you wonder if we’ve been secretly growing genetic gummy human hybrid organs in a lab for the past three years, right?
  • In the ad for the Vat19 Pen which features a fictional pitch meeting of several company members, Jon starts to conceptualize an ad about the pen where Jamie and Joey go snorkelling and are supposed to bring a spear gun, but Jamie interrupts and refuses the idea when Jon responds to his question of whether he will die in the ad with "Maybe, maybe a little?" This is a reference to a previous ad about the Vat19 sticker where Jon thinks of an ad where Jamie and Joey go rock-climbing. In the ad, Jamie ends up falling to his death after Joey unsuccessfully tries to save him by having him grab the aforementioned sticker.
• Challenge Seeker: Vat19 has an entire playlist invoking this trope, where they attempt many often bizarre and silly challenges, sometimes using their own products.
  • Vat19 also has a recurring character named Scotty Pippen who is the living definition of this trope, existing only to attempt many dangerous risky challenges such as eating raw cookie dough and jumping indoors with a Giant Pogo Stick.
  Scotty Pippen: Challenge accepted!
• Cloudcuckoolander: Sloane and Miles are framed as ones when first introduced in the final "Hidden in Plain Sight" video by repeatedly suggesting strange replacements for the series, with shades of the trope lingering into some of their subsequent appearances. It ends up fully dissipating for them as the video for the creation of the world's largest gummy burger progresses.
• Crapsaccharine World: The fictional Gummy Bear America/Gummy World America corporation frequently invokes this trope. Appearing first as a seemingly innocent gummy creating corporation, it is later revealed that this company has a very dark and twisted side to them. Examples include creating and breeding several dangerous gummy animals (with their normal aggressive behaviour), breeding several gummy humans and destroying them if they become self-aware, housing a demented cannibal version of the Easter Bunny that gives birth to Gummy Bunnies, causing a zombie apocalypse, and kidnapping someone’s parents.
  We’d hate to see something happen to our investment... or your family.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Vat19’s Hubert initially seems like a goofy janitor with a heavy accent and bad English... until the post-credits scene of the Vat19 movie, where he makes a genuine-sounding angry threat to kill however messed with his mops (Joey used them to fool and fight against the mobsters earlier in the movie, breaking them in the process).
• Curse Cut Short: In their Caffeinated Marshmallows ad, when they mention that ordinary energy drinks have lots of chemicals, it cuts to a lab worker mixing chemicals only for the test tube to overflow. He swears but cuts away halfway through it.
• Defictionalizationinvoked: They have Sex Panther Cologne on the site, and thankfully, it doesn't smell bad like in the movie.
• Dare to Be Badass: What the "This Could be Awesome" series revolves around. In each video, Jamie challenges the rest of the crew to pull off an extraordinary project with extraordinary flair, such as a massive gummy hamburger or skating hundreds of meters using a comparatively short amount of practice field pieces.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: One of the recurring characters in Vat19’s videos is a group called Dude Decent, a parody of the channel Dude Perfect. Unlike the channel they are based off of, Dude Decent attempts to deliberately fail their trick shots, hence their name and catchphrase of only being “decent”, rather than perfect.
• Dream Sequence: Several ads feature a very bored security guard falling asleep in the job and into dreams where he is a very James Bond-esque secret agent.
• Do Not Try This at Home: Plastered all over many of their videos, given the distinctly off-the-wall nature of their challenges and such.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: Dude Decent’s “trick shots” often exhibit this trope, as they enjoy trying and only nearly succeeding at trick shots, even getting disappointed when they actually succeed.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Their early videos weren't as comedic or well-produced as their newer ones.
  • This trope also applies to the website. Before becoming the purveyors of curiously awesome products we know today, they used to create and sell DVDs (they still sell their DVDs but they don't make new ones anymore).
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: Invoked in the Zombie Garden Gnome ad, which features the aforementioned products swarming a normal gnome while a surveillance camera looks on and later an Angry Garden Gnome with a gun who fights the undead.
• Finagle's Law: One Vat19 music video features a fictional police force known as Murphy’s Law Enforcement, who correct strokes of luck by making sure that the wrong thing that didn’t happen does happen after all to a person. Examples include pouring coffee all over someone’s pants after it just narrowly didn’t spill while he was driving, hitting another man in the crotch with a bat after his daughter just narrowly misses while trying to hit a pinata, and ripping up a hundred-dollar bill after a homeless man finds it, though the last one gets them arrested for destruction of US currency.
• Gigantic Gulp: The Das Beer Boot, the Giant Martini Glass, the 5-for-1 Giant Beer Glass to name a few.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Vat19 runs a series with the same name as the trope where Danny has to hide from Jamie (the company CEO and therefore his boss) for as long as possible while still making it either a textbook case of the trope or otherwise completely obvious to a trained eye. Much to Jamie's chagrin, Danny's hiding spots have almost always required assistance or hints to identify, and Danny himself has lasted for considerably lengthy periods of time in each video.
• Hope Spot: In the ad that Jon thinks of for the Vat19 sticker during the video about the branded sticker, Jamie and Joey are going rock-climbing when Jamie loses his grip and almost falls off the mountain, just narrowly hanging on. When Joey and Jamie are unable to reach each other’s hands, Joey suggests to grab the sticker even though Jamie says it will not hold. Jamie grabs it anyway and he seems to be holding on for a few seconds... until the sticker snaps in half, causing Jamie to fall to his death.
• Hurricane of Puns: As expected, the Mayor of the fictional Pun City (which started as a catchphrase for puns made by Vat19), used this when he talked to Eric in one episode of the series Sample Room.
• Imagine Spot: In the Frogger Desktop Arcade ad, after an office employee plays Frogger all day and night, his boss comes in and he hallucinates him in a frog costume and is able to control him with the Frogger game.
• Incendiary Exponent:
  • Their second video for the Giant Jenga set has them playing the game as usual, the only difference being that the tower is on fire while the players are using industrial-strength fireproof coating on their hands. They also offer a couple of products specifically about pyrotechnics and fire.
  • A Burning Questions segment for Spitballs has Jamie being asked what would happen if the globules were filled with lighter fluid and then ignited. Though Spitballs can't soak up the fluid, it turns out they combust just fine.
  • Jamie has on multiple occasions exposed the company's giant gummy products to potassium chlorate.^note Mixing both together causes a violent reaction and accompanying flame, requiring only a tiny amount to create a large reaction.
• Initiation Ceremony: There are videos of Danny, Adam and Kara being welcomed to Vat19 with very odd things happening which include Danny and Adam having to drink eggs from a Beer Boot, get slapped in the face with Twizzlers, drink from a dirty toilet with the LifeStraw and get bombarded with water balloons. In Kara’s case, she had to ride on a Mini Circus bike while being doused with Coke, Silly String, eggs and other liquids, and ultimately getting a cake shoved in her face at the end of the ride by the boss himself.
• Karma Houdini: In the ad for Mini Beer Pong, two castaways on a raft (played by Danny and Eric) play the aforementioned game with water, with the castaway played by Eric telling his partner that he needs to drink both small cups of water because of “raft rules”. The same castaway (Eric) later uses this same excuse when he gets rescued but his companion doesn’t.
  • In the ad for the Jumbo Lighter, Eric once again gets rescued without Danny coming along, and when the abandoned castaway asks why, he gets a pretty petty response.
  Castaway (Danny): Why aren’t you taking me too?
  Pilot: Sorry, the lighter took your seat.
• Kill It with Fire: Invoked in the ad for the Gummy Heart, where Chet Huskins reveals that their genetically engineered gummy humans are weak to fire, which actually happens when one of them becomes self-aware and retaliates after being attacked, causing Chet to have to destroy him with a flamethrower.
  Chet Huskins: Another one’s become self-aware! See you in hell, candy boy!
  Gummy person: RAAAAGGHHH-
• Laser-Guided Karma: The ad for the USB Missile Launcher features a guy named Al who is consistently bullied and mocked by an office jerk for working too hard asking for help from a man who he thinks is his uncle (but he’s not). The man sends him the USB Missile Launcher, which Al uses to shoot the office jerk, who falls over despite how harmless the Launcher is. The girls in the office proceed to laugh at the office jerk, causing him to furiously declare that he will quit and leave. Al then becomes the most popular person in the office.
  • The notoriously loud and sometimes rude John Cotton is thrown a beer can in the video for the Beer Bandolier, only for the can’s contents to explode in his face thanks to the fact that Joey had shaken the can beforehand.
• Leave the Camera Running: The video about the Ultimate Birthday Prank Card, a card whose birthday song goes on loop for hours without any way to stop it without tearing it, is four hours long due to the clip where the card sits on a table until its music function runs out, with several Easter Eggs being featured throughout the long repetitive video.
  • Also invoked in the Watch It Grow video.
• Luck-Based Mission: If a product comes in assorted colors or styles, it's practically guaranteed that you won't be able to pick for yourself which one you get. Usually this is a minor thing if you don't have a favorite color, but it can be a pretty big problem with collectible items, like the World's Smallest Transformers or Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers figurines.
• Magic Versus Science: In one video about an alarm clock that works with water, a scientist fights a wizard.
• Mundane Made Awesome: While many videos exhibit this trope, here are a few notable examples:
  • Their music videos for the 26-Pound Gummy Party Bear and the Das Beer Boot.
  • This music video for their brand of giant sticky notes.
  "We do it JUMBO!"
  • The video for the FreeKey shows Joey using the aforementioned product to easily slip off the keys on it and throw them into the necks of the two terrorists chasing him after he runs into a dead end.
  • The video for the Beer Bandolier has Joey use the product to store beer as he throws it around to other people in a party with epic music playing. The skit ends with him throwing a beer can he shook beforehand to John Cotton, which causes it to explode in his face.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Kyle is framed as such in several videos, discussing macabre topics without a hint of emotion.
  Kyle: (in response to Adam noting an unusually-high level of cholesterol in the pig brains he has to eat) You're probably going to die. But it makes for good content.
• Ninja: While Vat19 does have several ninja-related products and videos involving them , a very notable example is the video for the Ninja Mug where Jamie fights off an army of ninjas while trying to do the voiceover for the commercial, somehow acquiring an entire tank at one point near the end to fight them off.
• No Animals Were Harmed: The end of the Frogger Desktop Arcade ad disclaims that no humans in frog suits were harmed in the making of that video.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The ad for the Ultimate Cloth features a parody of Billy Mays, aptly named "Milly Bays".
• Orphaned Series: Every mini-series which features a character played by Eric (such as "Confection Perfection", "Awesome Time" or "The Sample Room") can no longer continue due to him leaving in February 2019.
  • However, Eric has thankfully returned a few times to do some roles for newer commercials, a notable example being him playing the creepy Chet Huskins again in a new gummy ad.
  • This trope is also exhibited for the series known as Vat19Land, a comedic series featuring talking and moving products was seemingly cancelled after literally only one episode. Looking at the like-dislike ratio (about 5:1), it’s easy to understand why.
• Overly Long Gag: In the video for the Pop n’ Pour Mug, this trope is invoked as Joey (as a stereotypical Irish man) sings an initially exciting and catchy Irish folk song about the origin of the mug, only for the song to drag on for what seems like hours, with event after event being sung about, some of which seem unnecessary, before Jamie stops the song in a fit of rage.
• Product Placement: This trope was notably invoked many, many times in the Vat19 movie, where certain scenes featured several Vat19 products. As the movie was originally uploaded in individual parts, each new part started with a segment that pointed out the product placements featured in the previous part.
  • Also invoked with the Cross Promo gag, where individual ads featured references to other products, usually putty ads which mention other types of putty sold at Vat19.
• Recurring Character: Despite many of Vat19’s ads having one-shot skits, they still have quite the number of recurring characters, which include the unsettling businessman Chet Huskins, the German Hans Gretel, the candy reviewer Chauncey, and many more.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: While Vat19 sells many plush animals that easily fit this trope, one notable example is the ad for the Squishable plushies, where a news show is shown interviewing people who have been severely affected by the cuteness of the plush animals before the people on the news set fall under the spell of the adorable Squishables too, cuddling them instead of doing their jobs.
• Rockers Smash Guitars: In the DIY Ukulele ad, Joey almost smashes Jon's Ukulele before he stops him and suggests that he smashes Jamie's instead. After the Vanity Plate, Joey smashes Jamie's Ukulele.
• Running Gag:
  • The Not-A-Cat Cat.
  • "Cross-promo!"
  • "Pun city!", not to mention its Mayor.
  • Many recurring characters such as Scotty Pippen and Redford who frequently show up in videos.
  • "What the H?"
  • A user named FastBreak383 being featured in almost all of the videos in the Burning Questions series, where Jamie answers questions about a certain product.
  • Jamie dismissing things as red herrings in the Hidden In Plain Sight series, which has been memed many times in the comments.
  • Asking if something has a bottle opener.
• Sequel Hook: The Vat19 movie has a post credits scene where Hubert, Vat19’s janitor who is known for his heavy accent and bad English, recovers his broken mops (which Joey had used to fool and fight against Dan Italy and Tony Rigatoni) and swears that he will kill whoever messed with his mops. However, currently Vat19 has yet to follow through with this plotline.
• Serial Escalation: The "Hidden in Plain Sight" series, which has Danny attempting to hide from Jamie as long as possible while still making it obvious, gets increasingly bold with each episode. As of writing, Danny has, in order, pretended to be an intern, locked himself in a bathroom coated with Liquid Ass, hidden in a box on the top shelf of a warehouse while still being in view of a security camera, locked himself in a sprinkler room while putting up signage for his whereabouts everywhere, and finally leaving Vat 19 altogether and hiding in Six Flags. Later entries, however, are less flamboyant, instead relying on psychologically manipulating Jamie with more subtle acts to keep Danny hidden; however, the subtlety was once again dropped in #12 where Danny not only leaves the building once more, but doesn't tell Jamie about it, and sneaks everyone sans Jon (who was filming) out of the office to his location while the episode is filming.
• Shout-Out:
  • At the end of the Build-Your-Own Ukulele ad, Joey is playing the main theme from the Super Mario Series.
  • An earlier version of the Finger Drums Tabletop Electric Drum Set has the logo on the bass drum writen in Bootle font.
  • In the video for the Gummy Heart, the video starts off with a brief riff-off of the Jurassic Park theme, which proves appropriate for the name of the fictional park created by a gummy company.
  Welcome, to Gummy World America.
  • The add for Caffeinated Granola features a fictional drink known as Blue Moose, an obvious over-the-top parody of Red Bull. The drink features chemicals such as caffeine, taurine and chlorine.
  Let the moose loose! NOW, YOU’RE INVINCIBLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-
  • Many videos about their dinosaur-related products feature references to Jurassic Park, most notably the video for the Hatching Dinosaur Candle, which features a parody of the scene where John Hammond watches a Velociraptor hatch, costume and all. Another video covering Can Safes references the franchise again with their shaving cream-can looking container.
  ...whether it’s a couple of emergency bills, keepsakes and jewellery, or precious dinosaur embryos.
  • Their video on Feisty Pets has a scene where LordMinion777 uses security cameras to look for the missing plushies and eventually gets jump scared by the brown bear Feisty Pet that features many parallels to Five Nights at Freddy’s.
  • Videos such as reenacting movie scenes with Mini Feisty Pets and trying to understand movies quotes spoken with Hyper Lips on are obviously chock-full of movie shout-outs.
  • Vat19 once did a Halloween special involving a skit about members dressing up as many famous YouTubers and Trick-Or-Treating at Jamie’s house. YouTubers featured included Markiplier, Pentatonix, Miranda Sings, LA Beast, Vsauce and Good Mythical Morning.
  • Videos such as the Giant Martini Glass and the Shot Flask feature Joey as a parody of James Bond, featuring him re-enacting several of the cliches and tropes from the spy movies.
  • The video for the Giant Gummy Tongue is a clear parody of the Twilight Zone, with the aforementioned show even being named for a second before they change it.
  ...and travel to the Twilight Zo- Area. The Twilight Area.
  • Videos such as Flint Laces and the Aquabot Water Bottle feature a fake show known as Bare and Scared.
  • The ad for the Desktop Punching Bag features Joey punching the aforementioned product, only for him to mention a parody of a famous quote from Rocky IV after it pops back up.
  Joey: I cannot break you.
  • One of many original characters featuring in Vat19’s ads is Larry Poppins, a very lazy babysitter who is the sister of Mary Poppins.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Vat19’s Larry Poppins is very different from his supposed sister, the active, kind and kid-loving nanny Mary, in that he’s lazy, drinks a lot, does not care about kids at all, and cannot fly with an umbrella.
• Skyward Scream:
  • In an ad for Ghost Pepper Fire Dust, a mob boss tries to blow up Vat19’s Joey, who was kidnapped by him, after failing to get ransom from Jamie, boss of Vat19, only to invoke this trope after finding out that the gun powder he's using is candy that the company sells. And then there's the Scroll Pen Gift Set ad, which was the prequel to the Ghost Pepper Fire Dust ad. The same mob boss calls Jamie again and threatens to kill Joey if he doesn't deliver ransom. However, Jamie is unable to find a pen to write down the address and the mob boss invokes this trope yet again over the phone. The mob boss, named Dan Italy, invokes this trope in almost all of his appearances, including Vat19’s official movie, shouting the name of the company whenever his plans get foiled by them.
  Dan Italy: VAT NINETEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN!
  • In the Throw Throw Burrito video where members created cinematic, dramatic and very exaggerated skits based on their experience playing the game, Danny invokes this trope in one of the cinematic scenes after he kills Jon in a duel forced by Joey.
• Stuff Blowing Up: On multiple occasions, Vat19's more gelatinous products, such as putty and gummy candies, have been strapped to packs of tannerite and shot at by the team to generate a massive explosion.
  • Their collaboration video where they try to break JustDustin’s Unbreakable Box invokes this again, as they ultimately destroy the box by blowing it up.
  Adam: Blow it up baby, blow it up!
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: Vat19’s Feisty Pets go from cute to menacing when you squeeze their head, revealing jaws with sharp teeth.
• Take That!:
  • The Stinger for the Twiddle Mega has this:
  Eric: (repeating a line from the original scene earlier in the video, in response to Jamie's daughter saying "it's fun") I was going to say that, later in the discussion... (Beat) Who wants coupons to Whole Foods? (entire room begins laughing)
  • Shorts that contain snippets of one of their parody videos (e.g. the Dhar Mann spoofs) will be accompanied by another clip of a product like thinking putty, making fun of shorts that do the same thing with similar products and serious content to maximize viewer retention.
• Unconventional Smoothie: The fictional Blue Moose energy drink.
  Blue Moose Energy Drink loads your body with every chemical, like caffeine, taurine, and chlorine!
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Played with. In "We filled water balloons with WHAT?!", Jon vomits three times from being pelted with water balloons filled with Liquid Ass prank spray in clear view of the camera, but the stream is pixelated in spite of his vomiting being the video's main attraction.
• Would Hurt a Child: In one of the ads, Larry Poppins, supposed sister of Mary Poppins, casually tells several kids to fly a kite near power lines.
  Larry Poppins: Ol’ Larry Poppins needs a nap. You kids stay near the power lines where I can see you, okay?
  Children: Okay Larry.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Invoked in the video for the Gummy Brain, where one of the survivors is a considerably more bearded Chet Huskins of Gummy Bear America. The aforementioned company is also hinted to somehow be the cause of the zombies.

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