I’m not really sure how or even why my kid found this, but he was asking me about it last night. The antecedent of “it” in this case is a 2012 YouTube video, part of their series of yearly recap “YouTube Rewind” videos that the video streaming site did between 2010 and 2019, with the last two getting such a terrible response (the 2018 one is the most-disliked video on YouTube, and the 2019 one is the sixth) that they discontinued the series. But back in 2012, things were different! It was a different world, a different internet. And I had a small, small part in that 2012 YouTube Rewind I may as well tell you about.
My kid, Otto, is kind of obsessed with internet culture just before he was born, or when he was very little. So, that late 2000s/early 2010s period has a strange draw for him, and I can’t really fault him for that; I was sort of the same way when it comes to cars, always being most obsessed with cars built about a decade before I was born.
Anyway, he vaguely remembered me doing something for one of these, and – well, I can’t remember how he found this specifically, but soon we were watching the 2012 YouTube Rewind video, and I got to show him the bit I was involved with. The actual, official video – the original posting of which no longer seems to be on YouTube, but there are re-posts – ended up getting over 194 million views, probably largely thanks to the fact that Korean star Psy was in the video, which was all roughly themed around his hit song from that year that I’m sure we all remember, Gangnam Style.
Anyway, here’s a re-upload of the video, set to the time where my tiny contribution is:
See that little robot-rover that drives across the screen and gets blown up in a Minecraft-style explosion? I built that.
My friend Michele worked for the production company that made the video, and they wanted for the video some sort of fun version of the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars, to much excitement, in 2012. The livestream of the landing was a big deal on YouTube, so it made sense this would get included in the video. Anyway, Michele came to me to build a little remote-controlled Curiosity rover, and I think while the timeframe was short and the money pretty short too, I was happy to do it.
What I ended up making was very much a caricature of what the actual Curiosity rover looked like, but I tried to get the key elements in there: the six wheels, the articulated black “legs”, the cyclopean camera on the long neck, and that finned RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) mounted on the back. I was going for a “cute” version of Curiosity, and I think I pulled it off?
I remember cobbling together two toy RC trucks to get the six-wheel chassis made, and I got a bunch of good complicated-looking bits from Apex in Sun Valley, CA, which had tons of aerospace surplus parts. Inside the box were the batteries and RC receiver stuff. You could drive it with a remote; the front axle steered, and i can’t remember if both or just one of the rear axles was powered? Whichever it was, it could drive, albeit not terribly quickly.
For the actual video shoot, I think Michele said they did some shoots driving it via RC control, and then some where they pulled it with a hidden line when they needed it faster, and the final video has parts from both.
I know all the people in this video were big YouTube/pop culture people at the time, but the truth is I barely know most of them. Otto knows who they are, at least. But the part that makes me most happy about all this, the part that actually makes me a little star-struck, didn’t happen until years after the video.
You see, despite that hyper-realistic looking explosion in the video, the little Curiosity rover was not destroyed. In fact, Michele kept it in her garage, and in 2020, when she was working on a television show that featured some of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientists that worked on Curiosity’s landing on Mars, she pulled it out again to use for some set dressing.
One of the people that was featured on the show was Bobak Ferdowsi.
You might remember Ferdowsi from that time because he got a lot of notoriety as the “mohawk guy” seen in all the JPL mission control shots, becoming something of a celebrity. Of course, he’s more than just a notable haircut; he’s a genuinely impressive space scientist, doing important and inspiring work. Here, watch his TED talk:
He wanted to keep the Curiosity I built, and Michele gave it to him, which absolutely delights me. I can’t imagine a better home for that thing, and I’d never have dared to hope that this quickly-built remote-control toy would end up with one of the key people who made the real thing happen, somewhere between 33.9 million to 250 million miles away.
I haven’t thought about any of this in years; I guess my kid’s strange obsession with past internet culture isn’t so bad after all.
I worked with JPL for Mars 2020 and it was kind of refreshing sitting in meetings going over their 17 page drawing and the inspection report of the in-process part and asking if certain deviations were acceptable and just getting back “…not sure.” Just reminds me that even rocket scientists are winging it.
So. Frikkin’. Cool.
Oh man, that teleports me back to the fun and hopefulness we had for a while after climbing out of what 2008 was.
Otto probably likes internet culture from that era because it was the best of the internet. The late 90’s early 2000’s is largely lost and the 2020’s has become infected with AI slop.
Hero achievement unlocked!