Retsupurae

Retsupurae (Reht-Soo-Purr-ay) is a channel that was created by a Youtuber that goes by that go by the internet alias Slowbeef. The channel was created February 28th, 2008. As of April 2014, the channel has more than 92,000 subscribers and over 50,437,000 video views. Retsupurae is a YouTube series dedicated to parodying mediocre  Let’s Play walkthrough videos. The channel’s name stems from the  Engrish pronunciation of “Let’s Play” with its logo utilizing the Chinese character for  Failure. Since the launch of the original channel, several Retsupurae accounts run by other users have been created for the sake of its popularity.

Origins
 Retsupurae was created by slowbeef , a  Something Awful user and moderator known for making some of the first Let’s Plays released in a video format.  In 2008, slowbeef came across a  Super Mario All-Stars: Super Mario Bros. 3 walkthrough video shared on the forums. Finding the video to be amusingly bad, slowbeef teamed up with fellow Something Awful user Sinix to film a satirical commentary reminiscent of  Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the short playthrough of the Nintendo game. The video was greeted with warm reception on the Something Awful forums, in part due to slowbeef’s role as a prominent figure in the growing Let’s Play community. The response quickly inspired slowbeef to create a YouTube channel for these videos. The channel was initially known as “Retsupray” (not to be confused with the later backup account “Retsuplay”) and slowbeef enlisted other Goons from the Let’s Play subforum to help add commentary including proteus4994, Dave_O, Psychedelic Eyeball, Cherrydoom, Voidburger, and even Diabetus, who has since co-starred in nearly every video and even hosted several of his own. The videos typically satirize common themes of Let’s Play web series, including bad video or audio quality, singing along with the video game’s music, deliberately exaggerated commentary, demonstrating a walkthrough with little-to-no-experience at the game, spouting memes for no reason or redundant gameplay footage. Shortly after Retsupurae’s creation, Something Awful user ResearchIndicates created a video explaining the purpose behind the channel. 

Spread
Though Retsupurae was greeted with praise on Something Awful, a number of YouTube users initially expressed disdain for the group’s critical videos. Many of these users were fans of the people who were riffed on, with some incorrectly stating that the Goons never made LPs of their own and Youtube was the original source of all LPs (shown below). Sometimes, the creators of the riffed LPs attack the videos, usually in the form of flaming in the comments.



<span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18.979999542236328px;">As of April 2014, Retsupurae has more than 10,400 “Likes” on Facebook <span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18.979999542236328px;"> and over 15,200 followers on Twitter. <span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18.979999542236328px;"> In addition, slowbeef and Diabetus also maintain a Formspring accounts <span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18.979999542236328px;"> where they answers questions about the series, in addition to more personal inquiries. There is also a fan-run single topic Tumblr dedicated to supporting their videos <span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18.979999542236328px;"> as well as a social justice <span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18.979999542236328px;"> group against them <span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Helvetica,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;font-size:13px;line-height:18.979999542236328px;">, calling their commentary “hateful mockery” with evidence of transphobia, homophobia, and support of suicide, though a handful of Goons and Tumblr users alike have questioned the authenticity of the blog. Interestingly, a handful of YouTuber Let’s Players who have been riffed on have actually appreciated the parodies, including SSoHPKC (shown below).

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