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Fun With Akatsuki

This is a fan-made animated series focusing on the Akatsuki characters from Naruto: Shippuden. It was made by a dedicated Naruto fan named OmniStrife, who uploaded the original 10 episodes to YouTube throughout 2006 and in March 2007. They are among some of the first videos I ever watched on the site, back when I was a devoted Narutard—in particular, I remember discovering and watching the 10th episode, Fun With Akatsuki X 01 - Never Too Late, around a month or two after it was uploaded in March 2007 (I actually watched the 10th episode before the previous 9, as it was the one which introduced me to the series).

The first 10 episodes are quite characteristic of their time: all of the scenes look like they were drawn in good old Microsoft Paint, while the videos themselves were edited with the Windows XP version of Windows Movie Maker, which any YouTube old-timer will immediately recognize as the standard video-editing software used on the site back in the 2000s. Although some might say that the early episodes look very amateurish and wonder at how they ever collected that many views, I say that the simple visuals and editing are a part of their charm and appeal: they certainly look like they were made not by a professional animator doing it for money, but by a fellow Naruto fan who thought it would be fun to put together his own little comedy series for the rest of us.

I remember that, back in 2007, I couldn't understand half of the jokes and references in Fun With Akatsuki because I was following the English dub of Naruto that was airing on Toonami in the United States, which at that point had not yet finished airing even the pre-filler Part I episodes; meanwhile, OmniStrife and the other fans were most likely following an English translation of the Japanese manga, which had begun Part II of the storyline as early as 2005. Despite this, I still found the videos to be very entertaining and funny, and I look back upon the first 10 episodes very fondly; they are some of my favorites from old YouTube, which I re-watched frequently during my early days on the site.

Apparently, OmniStrife was drafted into the Israeli army around the time he was making the 10th episode, and afterwards he never regained the momentum he had with the first 10 episodes. Between 2007 and 2014, he uploaded a great deal of videos, but only three Fun With Akatsuki episodes (the 11th, 12th, and 13th episodes; see the first list below); the rest are all trailers for new episodes, videos of him singing, or other random things. Since 2014, he seems to have abandoned making new episodes of the series, instead preferring to do remakes of the original episodes in HD (i.e. with sophisticated animation software; see the second list below). Looking through all of his videos, it is quite sad and disappointing to see that, as of March 2021, while the original 10 episodes all have over a million views each (besides the 6th, which has over 970,000), the 11th, 12th, and 13th episodes have only a few hundred thousand each, the first HD remake barely has more than 40,000, and the second HD remake has only slightly over 20,000. Additionally, the average number of views for each individual video has definitely dropped over the years. It would seem that most of YouTube has forgotten him, but I never will.

Listed below are all 13 episodes of Fun With Akatsuki.

Listed below are the HD remakes of the original episodes; as of March 2021, only two have been made.

All written materials on this Web site are my own, and all are released under the Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License Version 2.

This page last modified on 1 May 2021.