Dear Abridged Series'

You are awesome. Honestly, you are often better than watching real TV. The only problem is you tend to update very slowly and sporadically, but that's fair since it's generally just a couple people doing all the work, and it's not exactly a real, paid job.

You were basically invented by LittleKuriboh, who now has the username CardGamesFTW thanks to some completely illigetimate legal claims against his account getting it banned (multiple times). When he first created Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series, he probably thought it would be some small, fun little thing. But it quickly become insanely popular, and I'm not hesitant to say that I love that series. It's hilarious, and always entertaining to watch.

Since then, tons of other abridged series' have popped up, the other most notable in my opinion being TeamFourStar's Dragonball Z Abridged, which is frankly pretty amazing. Part of why I love it may be due to the fact that I loved DBZ when I was younger, but even if you didn't it's hard to watch this series without laughing. These two abridged series' are honestly two of my favorite shows to watch, including everything on actual television.

It's unfortunate that often they are faced with legal issues, because they are clearly just doing parody, which is completely legal. Sadly Youtube's policies with copyright issues are mostly along the lines of "if someone complains enough, we'll just take it down to prevent any actual legal problems". In theory, this is a decent policy that minimizes costs for them, but a certain subset of their content get's damaged by this. For some reason the actual owners of the content being abridged always seem to hate abridging, and so they complain even when they have no actual case whatsoever. This is backwards, because it's just giving them free publicity. Watching DBZ Abridged just makes me want to go and re-watch the actual DBZ.

Keep on making those abridged series', and try not to be discouraged by false legal allegations, you're hilarious and awesome.

-SF