Smosh
Two teenagers lip-syncing the Pokémon theme in their living room, mouths flapping with total commitment. Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla were making dumb videos with their friends before "YouTuber" was a word — and for long stretches of YouTube's first decade, nobody on the platform was bigger.
Smosh predates YouTube itself. Anthony Padilla set up smosh.com in 2002 as a teenager, making goofy Flash-era videos with his best friend Ian Hecox; when YouTube appeared, the pair claimed their channel on November 19, 2005, in the site's first year. Nine days later they posted the video that made them: a deadpan, fully committed lip-sync of the Pokémon theme song. It racked up over 24 million views and briefly stood as the most-viewed video on all of YouTube — until a copyright claim erased it from the site in 2007, an early lesson in how fragile internet fame's artifacts could be.
It hardly slowed them down. Smosh became the defining comedy channel of YouTube's homemade era — lip-syncs, sketch absurdity, two guys yelling "SHUT UP!" in the intro — and held the crown of most-subscribed channel on YouTube across three separate reigns: mid-2006, from April 2007 to September 2008, and again from January 2013 until a Swedish gamer named PewDiePie finally overtook them that August. For kids growing up in the 2000s, Smosh videos were playground currency, passed around on library computers and quoted until teachers banned the catchphrases.
The later chapters turned corporate and then came full circle. Alloy Digital — later rebranded Defy Media — acquired Smosh in 2011 and built it into a sprawling brand; Padilla left in 2017, and Rhett & Link's Mythical Entertainment bought the company in 2019. Then, in June 2023, Hecox and Padilla bought Smosh back and reunited on camera — two thirty-somethings who had grown up on the internet, repossessing the thing they'd built in a living room before anyone knew what a YouTube career was.
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