Do you have what it takes to watch the 38-hour YouTube video about The Beverly Hillbillies?

There’s an art to creating an ultra-long YouTube video. First, you need to make sure it’s broken down into digestible, whole chunks so people can take breaks that feel natural. Second, you need to use length to your advantage. These are all things Quinton Hoover thinks about when he publishes a video for Quinton Reviews, a pop culture video essay channel recently devoted to recapping a series episode by episode or breaking down years of history for a show.

Hoover has been a content creator for a decade, with approximately 881,000 subscribers at the time of publication. For the first few years he made skits or 30-minute breakdowns about popular TV shows and Garfield, but he’s become known lately for a series of videos about 2000s Nickelodeon shows – mainly because these videos are longer than a standard eight-workday of one hour to serve. For example, his three-part series on Sam & Kat (part of an even longer saga about the iCarly/Victorious universe) takes over 21 hours to watch. So the fact that he has uploaded another long video about a TV show is not new. However, this time it was different.

On April 1, 2024, Hoover began uploading his longest video to datein which the history of The Beverly Hillbillies And Petticoat connection, two long-running sitcoms from the 1960s written and narrated by his father, Russ Hoover, who would be familiar to fans of the channel. But then viewers looked at the length: 38 hours, 27 minutes, 48 ​​seconds. To put that in perspective, many parts of the video are longer than two-hour films; it takes more than a day and a half to watch the full video. It’s not the longest YouTube video ever (that honor goes to ‘Longest Video on YouTube: 596.5 Hours’) but it’s pretty close, especially considering there are no loops or many hours of blank screen .

“So I think the thing that people will be most surprised about is that this video wasn’t necessarily something that I planned, it was something that happened to me,” Hoover told Polygon. Hoover’s father had started rewatching those two shows chronologically and decided he wanted to try a video about them. “(My dad) comes to me one day and says, ‘Hey, I had an idea. (…) What if one day I talked about the shows I watch for April Fools?’ And I didn’t think about it. I said, ‘We’ll do that.’”

Hoover worked to help his father with the project, but he soon encountered a problem: Russ had done that a lot of say.

“He sends me the script. And then – I was in shock when I saw it. Because I said, ‘Dad, this Google Doc is like 400 pages,'” he shared. “And I thought, ‘Dad, it’s going to take me two and a half minutes to read every page I write. (…) Do you know how this is going to be about 40 hours of material?’ And I was really, really upset. He thought it was funny.”

Another reason the video took years to make was because Russ had to learn how to make one first. Hoover helped his father edit and condense his scripts, and also taught him what to explain to the audience. Russ, for example, wanted to talk about it The Beverly Hillbillies star Buddy Ebsen and according to Hoover, he didn’t really explain to viewers who that was at first.

“I remember the first month he was recording. I sat in the living room while he recorded in his bedroom. I was just listening to his record, and I’d come knocking on the door and be like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,'” he said. ‘You have to explain what this is. Because you don’t explain these things, you know?’ So it was just a funny process.”

Unfortunately, Russ was in a serious car accident in 2022, which Hoover described as a “near-death experience,” requiring his father to undergo multiple leg surgeries. The long recovery process suddenly left Russ with a lot of downtime. “That was why we had so much of the video done by the end of the day. (…) He just had these horrible months and months and months where he just couldn’t get out of bed.

“It was very therapeutic for us to work on this together, to kind of create an art project and have something to do while he got better,” Hoover continued. “And so it was very much about just wanting to share the love that I have for my father with some of my viewers.”

However, there were many more complications during the process. There were a lot of technological limitations, which makes sense for a 38-hour video. First, Adobe Premiere Pro doesn’t allow users to shoot a video longer than 24 hours, so the video had to be edited in parts. Then there’s the matter of YouTube video limits. If you are verified or a member of the affiliate program, you can upload longer videos, but it is still unclear what the upper limit actually is. As someone who has repeatedly pushed the limits of what YouTube allows in terms of video size and length, Hoover says he’s had inconsistent success. For the Beverly Hillbillies video, he uploaded four videos: two failed, one was stuck in processing, and one ultimately succeeded.

The video also just took a lot of effort. According to Hoover, the entire video featured the work of about 22 people, took several years to make, was written almost entirely by Russ (with transitions by Hoover), and was about 133 GB in size (and that’s after a lot of compression to to make it). as small as possible). And unfortunately for the team, it took over a day to upload and process; it finally went live on April 3, a bit too late for a real April Fool’s joke.

Still, all things considered, the video essay does well. At the time of writing, there are approximately 660,000 views (Hoover is aiming for more than 1 million). Many of the comments on the video talk about how informative it is, or how it makes sense for Russ to post longer videos than even his son (like father, like son). Then there are the jokes about how long is enough to essentially be a college course.

Hoover generally gets a lot of angry messages and comments when he uploads one of his longer videos, but he says this project has still been a positive experience, at least for his father. Russ isn’t much of a public figure online and therefore “doesn’t have to experience the negative reactions, which I’m grateful for,” Hoover says.

“There’s a lot of animosity toward the things I do that really burns me out,” Hoover said. “I always knew there would be some level of anger because that happens to me all the time now. I can’t let go of anything anymore. So I’ve definitely gotten that specifically on Twitter from people who don’t watch my stuff.

Hoover is generally burned out by his particular video essay format, and told Polygon that he might take a break after this to spend more time with his parents (his father is doing well, he adds), which build models, go for walks, and decompress. “Doing things like this is one of the few ways you can really break away from that kind of hyper-consistent negativity. And I think that if I just give myself a few months of that, I will come back healthier in body and mind.”