The BamHoofYah Recovery Project (HOME PAGE)

The year is 2013. Season Three of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has finished, the first Equestria Girls movie has released to a middling reception, and BronyCon has moved out of its New York City hometown to its new home, Baltimore. The overall sensation in the Brony fandom is that of change: a princess Twilight instead of a unicorn, a new group of human characters to parallel the Equestrian ones, and, though it is more a vague sensation than a firm recognizance on the fandom’s part, the closing days of the so-called Brony Golden Age.

At its new Baltimore home, BronyCon 2013 featured a wide array of activities and panels that captured the minds of longtime and first-time con-goers. I was the latter at the time and wanted to take in everything that I could. I went to every panel that caught my eye, from MLP Analysis panels to video game demos. The experience was wonderful, probably the best BronyCon I ever experienced on a purely emotional level. It was not until after the convention, however, that I discovered a panel I had missed. My father was driving through rough DC traffic while I perused the back section of the BronyCon 2013 program, where I realized that there had been a PMV collaborative project that premiered at the convention: something called BamHoofYah. It had premiered at 2:30 PM on Sunday in the Baltimare Theater, a specialized room where con-goers could watch both old and new PMVs (side note: I greatly missed the removal of these theaters in the last years of the convention; they were fun to visit during the downtime between panels). The description was as follows:

The collaborative effort of eight prominent PMV editors, “BAMHOOFYAH!” is the complete PMV-ification of the fourth album release from the mash-up DJ super-group, The White Panda.

The description intrigued me, but my father and I decided to go on a tour of the Virginia countryside and visit early American historical sites, and thus I had little time to watch the PMV online. Yet BamHoofYah remained in my mind for several days, even when Dad and I visited hallowed Americana sites like Monticello and Mount Vernon. When I finally got home, I watched the first few songs of BamHoofYah and found myself fascinated. While Ponies the Anthology 3 (released later that year) featured the smoothest of editing and animations, BamHoofYah tended to feature much rougher editing and felt like a 2011 PMV, where editors were still feeling out the potential of editing MLP and were content to let some dubbing issues slip by the wayside as long as a consistent mood could be maintained. Yet this wasn’t a hindrance to my enjoyment of BamHoofYah; on the contrary, I appreciated the more limited editing and focus on matching the mood of the accompanying songs rather than believable lip syncing. I flipped through the different songs that caught my eye, like “Yeah I’m in Love” (a mash-up of Chris Brown’s “Yeah Yeah Yeah” and Alex Gaudino’s “I’m in Love”) and “Turn Marvin Gaye Down” (a mash-up of Big Sean’s “Marvin and Chardonnay” and “Turn it Down” by Kaskade). These mash-ups remain so firmly in my mind that I still grow confused when “Yeah Yeah Yeah” comes on and doesn’t sound anything like The White Panda remix.

Yet, for a reason I can’t quite remember, I put the PMV to the side. Perhaps it was because high school was starting soon, and, as an incoming senior, greater thoughts about the future were in my mind (in fact, I distinctly remember missing several Season 4 episodes due to my school work and only finishing the season over the summer). Regardless, BamHoofYah sat in the Watch Later YouTube playlist for several months, then several years. I swore I would finish it someday, when the time was right.

Time, however, waits for no man. YouTube’s general shift into a more consumer-friendly instead of user-friendly business model caused many videos of the early fandom to vanish soon afterwards. BamHoofYah was one of these, and while I do remember one re-upload around 2015 or 2016, this too didn’t last as YouTube’s tolerance for copyrighted songs started to lessen even further. Thus, while the bits I’d watched beforehand remained in my mind, the totality of the project was never witnessed by me in its full-length.

Despite this undignified end, I was sure that others in the fandom would at least remember BamHoofYah. Yet nobody seemed to mention it in any fan circle I frequented. The closest came BerryTube’s stat page that lists playing it 88 times in their stream. The reason for this lack of knowledge was clear: No easily accessible copies of it were available to view. While the Ponies the Anthology series weathered the YouTube shift fairly well (though it too suffered plenty of takedowns as well; Ponies the Anthology 3 was recently re-uploaded by JHaller, and I recall the first Ponies the Anthology having to be re-uploaded some years ago), BamHoofYah seemed to never fully escape the YouTube copyright bots and pretty much disappeared from the memory of bronies everywhere. This dearth of BamHoofYah information is apparent by the fact that many of my previous blogs that featured BamHoofYah as a subject are some of the first results in the Google Search Engine, just behind independent clips from BamHoofYah contributors that still remain up on YouTube. BamHoofYah has, for all intents and purposes, essentially vanished from history.

It was during one of my numerous reflective episodes on the fandom that I remembered the aforementioned re-upload of BamHoofYah. On the brief time said re-upload was up, I recalled seeing an individual claiming to be the project’s leader (likely lead project editor theinvincible316, now going by Bronies and Mash) announced that they would find a way to re-upload BamHoofYah on YouTube “if there’s enough interest”. Apparently there wasn’t, for I have found no re-upload of any sort, but it was this memory that motivated me to start this: the BamHoofYah Recovery Project. This project aims to resurrect BamHoofYah from the memory hole that the Internet has placed it in and allow bronies to witness an important piece of Brony history.

Now, one question many of you might ask is: Why is BamHoofYah so important? What made it so special that it even needs to be remembered? The main reason, in my mind, lies in its ambitious undertaking. At the same time Ponies the Anthology was demonstrating the visual and animated lengths PMVs could go, BamHoofYah was showing how the conceptual lengths you could take a PMV. BamHoofYah adapted an entire album to ponification, something that still remains rather infrequent among the fandom, and of which the fandom has only occasionally attempted. The closest examples I can think of is an old PMV of an entire Whitest Kids U Know episode which I currently can’t find, Skymation2415’s edit of the movie Shrek with Discord as the main character, and the DarkHoofStudios collab PMV for “Psychosocial Baby” (itself a mash-up song and a PMV that I think likely inspired BamHoofYah to some degree). A great reason BamHoofYah was successful in this endeavor was the fact that the BamBooYah songs themselves were already combinations of different songs, giving BamBooYah a sense of eclectic variety that gave a lot of creative freedom to the editors. Editing an album by a singular group with a singular performance style would’ve likely just made a PMV adaptation rote and uninteresting, and is likely the reason such an undertaking in PMVs hasn't been attempted that often ever since.

However, BamHoofYah’s biggest importance is as a boundary marker between old-style PMVs and today’s slickly edited PMVs. In the earlier years of the fandom, as many of my fellow fandom elders can attest, there was a general feeling of discovery and experimentation to PMV creation and less a focus on making them as polished as possible. There was also less focus on making them purely music videos and more ponifying whatever audio you could find. Movie trailer PMVs, now largely abandoned by the fandom’s editors save Draft the Filmmaker, were one of these forms and some of the first prominent examples given notice by those outside the fandom. There was also a limitation on usable scenes, as we only had three seasons worth of material, and a good part of PMV editors’ creativity came from them finding ways to edit a limited amount of material into distinct works that didn’t seem too similar to their editing contemporaries. In the early days of the fandom, there was still a market for these rough-around-the-edges PMVs and their unique experiments in mixing two different mediums.

Yet even by summer 2013, this milieu of fandom creation was starting to change. Numerous editors had figured out the tricks to perfecting the lip-syncing and made the tactics known to the fandom. More visually-stunning works were starting to be attempted, as represented by Ponies the Anthology 3’s entirely new animations added onto the edited footage. PMVs were becoming art in the minds of the fandom’s editors, and creating the cleanest product possible was the end goal. I do not think this was a bad mindset in of itself; there have been plenty of fantastic PMVs created from this focus on quality that many editors pursued. Yet there’s an unmistakable feeling that perhaps too much of the early fandom’s experimental attitude has been abandoned for more guaranteed successes (though this is hardly reserved to just PMVs). I suppose folks in other artistic movements have felt similar feelings as their movements evolved, but there’s still a faint melancholy whenever I remember those more chaotic and exciting days. In that sense, BamHoofYah was an elegy for these rougher, more experimental PMVs. A final farewell to an art form and style that had changed so much in such a short time.

Thus, this project’s aim is twofold: To inform the Brony fandom of this important work of fandom history that’s been relatively forgotten, and to create new commentary and art through this examination of the PMV. Each objective I have written below works toward highlighting BamHoofYah’s importance in the fandom, as well as inspiring the creative passion in the modern fandom that BamHoofYah itself demonstrated through its creation. The final lines of each objective will denote the progress I have maintained in each step of the process, being marked in three manners: Pending, In Progress, and Completed. These will be changed in the following weeks as progress is made in the project, with this post acting as the homepage for the project all the way to its conclusion. By this, I hope to keep those interested informed in the progress of the project, while also pacing myself into keeping my momentum with the project (despite my enthusiasm, I don’t want to do this forever).

The objectives are as follows:

OBJECTIVE 1 – REUPLOADING AND REVIEWING BAMHOOFYAH

Re-uploading BamHoofYah has been my number one goal throughout the planning of this project. The number one reason the PMV has faded from memory is due to its lack of easy availability, and thus the greatest solution is bringing it back into the public eye. This was going to be the hardest part of the project initially, as I had no copy of BamHoofYah to upload and was leaning on the fandom at large to provide a copy once I made this project publicly know. Fortunately for us, I managed to find a copy in the great nether of the Internet (and finally watched the entirety of the PMV), so now my focus is purely on the logistics of the actual re-upload. I suspect that any uploading via YouTube is doomed to fail due to the ever-tyrannical copyright bots, but I am establishing a primary YouTube channel to facilitate this anyway. I’ve seen video uploads on Derpibooru, though I don’t know if there is a length limitation or authorial limitation that will block it. As I have a BitChute account too, I plan to upload a copy there too. I also will submit a copy to The Pony Archive for their caretaking, as they don’t currently have a copy in their archive. If anybody reading this has any suggestions about other good alternate sites, please feel free to list them in the comments.

Once these uploads have been done, I aim to review BamHoofYah with each of its thirty-five sections. This is fairly straightforward, as I want to point out what makes the project work and examine the tactics the editors use to make their sections so effective. This will be done after re-uploading because it wouldn’t make much sense to write this without anybody else being able to see what I’m commentating on. I also want to stress this will be less of a review in the sense of “this part is good, this part is bad” so much as looking at what the editors do with their respective sections and what their editing accomplishes. This review will be posted here on FimFiction for ease of access, and links to the review and the re-uploads will be provided in the status bubble below this paragraph once they are ready.

(Current Status: In-Progress)

OBJECTIVE 2 – INTERVIEWING THE EDITORS

I’m curious to what the process for creating this PMV was, so I want to interview the eight different editors who worked on BamHoofYah. Some I know are still present in the fandom, while others are harder to find. Either way, my hope is to interrogate each editor to see what their creative process was and how they approached this unique project. Much like how the Royal Canterlot Library (RIP) investigated how their authors of the week created their written works, I want to investigate how the editors created their respective video sections for BamHoofYah. It will also help in setting the scene for the early years of the fandom and how different that era was compared to today. These will likewise posted here on FimFiction and will be linked in the status bubble at the bottom of this section.

I am not sure how successful this part of the project will be, as there may be little to say by the interviewees, as well as few participants. However, I want to add onto BamHoofYah’s history aside from a re-upload and review, so adding some contextual history to its creation would be quite wonderful. I also believe that it is important to preserve the voices of those who shaped early fandom history, in the same way as many have documented creators of early era FiM fanfics and artwork. Just because the fandom is eleven years old doesn’t mean that we won’t start forgetting these things at some point; best to preserve them while we still can.

(Current Status: Pending)

OBJECTIVE 3 – BAMHOOFYAH AUDIO-LITERARY TRIBUTE

This objective is going to be the most loosely defined, as there may be changes in its execution in the future. Essentially, this final objective aims to create new work inspired by BamHoofYah. This is my way of showing how BamHoofYah has created new things by remixing the old, just like how it did with FiM and The White Panda. The general idea I have now is holding a writing contest where people submit stories inspired by sections of BamHoofYah, with a select group of judges and I deciding which stories are the best to be featured in a collection. I’ve been heavily inspired by Ponyfeather Publishing’s output, and I’d really like to create a similarly premiere literature collection that demonstrates the creativity of the fandom as prompted by another fandom creation. My main idea would be to have this story collection premiere on Aug. 4, 2023, the tenth anniversary of BamHoofYah’s premiere. This not only lights a fire under me to complete the project by a specified deadline, but it would prove a fitting day to conclude the effort.

This outline may change, however, depending on the interest of those following the project (if any) and the resources provided to me around this time next year. I may expand this tribute to include audio elements like original songs or even custom PMVs made by submitters. I’ll keep this tribute flexible for the time being, since I’m still trying to feel out what the interest in this project will be. The current writing contest idea is there since fanfiction and writing is my main forte and will prove to be the easiest to implement with my current faculties. Feel free to suggest other ideas for a tribute in the comments; I’d really be interested in seeing if there were other creative ways to honor BamHoofYah.

(Current Status: Pending)

Please tell your friends or anybody interested in Brony history about this project. While the second and third objective are the only ones that require participation outside of my own, I really want those who are interested to chime in with their own opinions about BamHoofYah or my goals in documenting this fascinating PMV. This project is being done not just for my own amusement, after all, and the more people who interact with this project, the better.

Thank you, and here’s to preserving an important part of Brony history!