It has officially been 20 years since “Lazy Sunday” turned YouTube into a legitimate internet fixture. It was December 17, 2005 when the second ever Digital Short aired on Saturday Night Live – and relative newcomers to the show known together as The Lonely Island challenged the idea that every sketch (that wasn’t a fake commercial) had to be LIVE. They weren’t sure the strange rap about the Chronicles of Narnia in theatres would land with audiences, but it was so beloved immediately that several bootleg copies of the video suddenly found their way onto YouTube and those links went viral.
YouTube launched nearly a year earlier in February of 2005 and was struggling to gain traction as audiences were simply not used to streaming anything at that point. Eventually Saturday Night Live, like every network and every show, established their own channel on the site and uploaded their own sketches. It’s kind of fascinating how this short has outlasted many of the then-current references in the song, and that the short’s home-video vibes set a blueprint for the Do-It-Yourself filmmaking that came to define the first decade of the video streaming platform.
What was your favourite early-YouTube video?
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