The Best Videos on the Internet, Vol. 2
The most incredible videos from around the world, each stranger and more miraculous than the last. Read on and you’re guaranteed to see something that truly amazes you.
About This Archive
For years, readers of my Twitter feed have been asking me to create an archive of all the music, unusual videos, and other strange internet detritus I post on social media—much of which I came across over the years while searching for new content in the 2010s and early 2020s for my digital writing, post-internet cultural theory, and intro to visual narrative courses at University of New Hampshire. On an irregular basis, I’m curating and publishing these videos via the “Best Videos on the Internet” moniker at RETRO.
You can find the first entry in this ongoing series here.
I hope you enjoy these videos—all worth viewing, in my view, albeit for very different reasons, and perhaps appealing to very different audiences. This entry in the series is particularly focused on natural and manmade wonders of the world.
The Videos
(1) Time travel through colorization. Old video footage from cities around the world has now been colorized to create—if you hold your phone close enough to your face—the sensation of time travel. Turn the volume up, get yourself into a dark room, and experience the world as it was a hundred years ago or more in the following locales:
San Francisco, 1906
Paris, the 1920s
Beijing, 1920
New York City, 1911
Paris, the 1890s
You can find many more such videos—and time-travel experiences—here.
(2) The longest water slide in the world. It’s a sad commentary on the current state of the United States—we simply don’t build things to the degree we once did, especially when it comes to infrastructure and public attractions—that when you go on TikTok or Instagram you largely find wonders that people elsewhere in the world get to enjoy without leaving their home countries.
A surprising number of these wonders are in China. Or perhaps it’s not so surprising—among the thousands of drawbacks to living in a Communist state is the narrowest of silver linings: major construction projects do get built when and as the government decides it wants them built, whether they are public works or are intended as private (such as the notion exists in China) attractions. The amazing video below, of a historic waterslide in Zhejiang that really has to be seen to be believed, is one such example.
You may think you can imagine how long this slide is, but I promise you, you can’t.
(3) An underwater road. We stay in China for a sight the likes of which you only see in the United States after a hurricane, when it’s a harbinger of danger and possibly even death for anyone caught up in it. But in China, there’s actually a road that’s designed to be driven on after it floods. What I urge everyone to consider is what it must feel like to be inside the car recorded here, as the road truly is invisible unless you’re looking at it from a height. The location here is Poyang Lake. Assuming you had the money to visit, would you have the courage to drive through a lake? I’m not sure that I would!
(4) The narrowest city in the world. I promise, not all of these videos are from China! But I have grouped the videos of China together because I went there a few years ago and found that wonders truly do abound there. And this one’s no exception. Picture it: a city approximately the size of Boston population-wise that is just 90 feet wide at its narrowest point—and even at its most expansive is no wider than three football fields.
The city recorded and discussed below is Yanjin. It truly seems like an impossibility.
(5) Endless fields of light. We move east now, to Japan, specifically to the Nabana no Sato Plant Nursery, which—as you can see in the video below—may be one of the largest light installations in the world. That fact is made even more remarkable by a concurrent one: these lights are combined with endless fields of flowers sprawling in all directions and a haunting show that is put on every night. This combination of the manmade and the natural is truly stunning, and I don’t just say that because I’ve been obsessed, since I was a child, with things getting lit up in the darkness (though I am)!
(6) The most amazing model train layout ever. You don’t have to love model trains to appreciate the thousands of hours of creativity and artistry that go into creating a microcosm of the world as spectacularly realistic as the one below. It’s breathtaking.
(7) The “Well of Death.” Throughout history, different cultures have marveled at many different types of attractions, but one constant seems to be that people—or some folks, at least—like to see others risk their lives. In the harrowing “Well of Death” in India, people and cars and motorcycles and centrifugal force combine to create circus-like feats that I have to assume have really killed people at certain points. Fortunately, the video below does not include any grisly fates, just death-defying and truly unique escapades the likes of which you will likely never see anywhere in the United States. (While there are “Wall of Death” spectacles at certain state fairs in America, none of them are nearly as dangerous as this Indian iteration.)
(8) What English sounds like to non-English speakers. Many interesting videos have been recorded—some of which I’ve tweeted out on Twitter over the years—trying to give Americans a sense of how we sound to non-English speakers, but the two below may be my favorite because they are works of art rather than just curiosities. In late 1972, Italian pop star Adriano Celentano released a song that hit the top of the charts in his home country, despite the fact it wasn’t performed in Italian. In fact, it wasn’t in any language at all. “Prisencolinensinainciusol” makes up an entirely new language intended to sound just like English to those who don’t speak English. Give it a listen!
(9) Skydiving Down the Tallest Building in the World. In case you didn’t know, perhaps the very best thing the internet has given us is the ability to “experience” things second-hand that we would never be willing to experience first-hand. A wonderful example of this is the plethora of stunning skydiving videos out there.
Here, a brave skydiver brushes up against the entire length of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. As with the first videos in this article, I recommend watching this, if you can, on your phone—close to your face—in a darkened room. It is really something to get a sense of the height of the world’s tallest building from such a unique perspective.
(10) World War I—the Lego edition. Can the look and feel of war be recreated through Lego cinematography? I’d assumed the answer was “no,” but suddenly I’m not so sure.
Ultimately you’ll have to decide what you think for yourself, but if you make this video large-screen (e.g., by “casting” it from YouTube to your television) and then turn your volume up, I think you’ll be very surprised. For me, it was a rather intense experience.
Cool! You rock, Seth! Now I know exactly what my son meant when he was telling me lately how much he liked the colorized remastered vids from WW1. I told him that all I had to look at growing up were b&w fuzzy vids where people walked funny. And wait till I show him the Lego Battle of Verdun!