Webdriver Torso is a YouTube slideshow series of blue and red rectangles on a white background, with random tones playing as music. That's about it, besides for a few videos that break away from the formula.
Initially the origin of the channel was unknown, leading people to speculate it may be part of an Alternate Reality Game, among other theories, but Google eventually revealed they created the channel in 2013 to test the quality of YouTube's video compression algorithm.
Watch it here
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Webdriver Torso provides examples of:
- Color Contrast: The blue and red rectangles contrast with each other and with the white background.
- Easter Egg: Searching for the channel on YouTube used to make the YouTube background look like a Webdriver Torso video. Nowadays, you can search the channel on Google and see a Logo Joke where the Google logo looks like a typical video from the channel.
- Eiffel Tower Effect: There's one video that shows the Eiffel Tower to signify it takes place in France.
- Extra-Long Episode: Some videos are up to 25 minutes long, which is much longer than the usual 11 seconds.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: Exactly two videos have nothing to do with rectangle slideshows.
- Gratuitous Spanish: One video is just a Spanish version of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every video used to be titled "aqua", and then later they began with "tmp" followed by random letters, and then later they were just random letters.
- Limited Animation: The videos are literally just slideshows, and this is even lampshaded within the videos themselves.
- Logo Joke: You can search the channel on Google and see a Logo Joke where the Google logo looks like a typical video from the channel.
- Mickey Mousing: The tone wave changes at the exact time the rectangles change.
- Minimalism: The generic rectangles and generic tone waves aren't detailed at all.
- Most Writers Are Human: Averted. The videos are made by an algorithm, explaining their simplicity.
- Never Trust a Title: Neither the channel name nor any of the video names indicate that the videos are slideshows of rectangles.
- No Plot? No Problem!: There's not really a "plot" per se to these generic rectangles.
- One-Word Title: The videos were titled "aqua" early on.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: Google probably couldn't copyright these wave tones if they wanted to.
- Recycled Title: Tons of videos share the title "aqua".
- Shout-Out:
- One video is just a Spanish version of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
- One video starts out normal until it turns into a silhouette of the rickroll dance, an obvious reference to Rick Astley.
- Strictly Formula: You should expect every video to be 11 seconds of red and blue rectangles.
- Word Salad Title: The later video titles are just gibberish letters with no meaning.
