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Will It Blend?

This is a rather well-known video series in which various items, some quite unusual, are placed in a blender and subsequently mixed together and/or destroyed by it. I first stumbled upon it while I was using YouTube one day in 2007, probably during the middle of that year, and quickly found it pretty interesting and amusing; I can still recall, during my initial discovery of the series, viewing in one sitting many of the videos that had then been uploaded. Afterwards, during the late 2000s (and probably into 2010 as well), I would occasionally return to the Blendtec channel and watch any new videos that caught my attention, as well as re-watch old ones which I had previously enjoyed. In those days the channel was relatively active in terms of uploading new videos, and more than once I remember feeling a sense of delight upon I checking it and seeing that a new batch had been uploaded.

Though I generally dislike those channels on YouTube seeking to make money from their videos, and have written elsewhere of their pernicious growth and current-day dominance of the site, I will admit that the Blendtec channel was one such type of channel which I very much enjoyed. The entire Will It Blend? series, in fact, is nothing more than a clever advertising campaign uploaded to YouTube by a company seeking to sell its product; in many respects it is the exact opposite of what old YouTube was and what I believe YouTube today ought to return to—namely, a video-sharing community dominated by the mass of its ordinary, everyday users not seeking to make money in some manner off of the site—and yet I cannot bring myself to disparage it, but, on the contrary, can even find many reasons to praise it. The main draw of each video is, of course, getting to witness whatever odd item(s) being blended, but besides this there are also many little jokes and other bits of humor inserted into each one, along with a few running gags (e.g. Don't breathe this!); I also find the overall presentation entertaining and Tom Dickson a very pleasant host, without whom the appeal of the videos would no doubt be greatly diminished. The series, pretty impressively, has also demonstrated an awareness of current events and trends (such as the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, Justin Bieber's fame, or the popularity of the Old Spice commercials), and even, in the instance of the Chuck Norris episode, of Internet culture.

Will It Blend? is still an ongoing series—the newest episode was uploaded as recently as November 2020—but the number of uploads has certainly declined in recent years. Although it has not been forgotten, it has still fallen far from the level of relevance it possessed back in the late 2000s, when the Blendtec channel was both one of the most-subscribed and most-viewed on the entirety of YouTube. Today I remember Will It Blend? as one of the few good series from the early years of YouTube that was (and still is) motivated primarily by money; it manages to avoid being clickbait, and instead presents genuinely interesting and entertaining material that I look back upon very warmly as forming a part of my memories of late-2000s YouTube, and especially of 2007 YouTube.

Listed below are my favorite Will It Blend? videos. (Quite predictably, these were all uploaded during the 2000s; I have watched almost no episodes that were uploaded after the early 2010s.)

YES, IT BLENDS!

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This page last modified on 29 May 2021.