Powerthirst

Origin: eight people in Halifax¶

Powerthirst was made by Picnicface, a sketch-comedy troupe formed in 2006 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Its eight members were Mark Little, Andrew Bush, Kyle Dooley, Cheryl Hann, Brian MacQuarrie, Evany Rosen, Scott Vrooman and Bill Wood. The video went up on May 28, 2007; Mark Little provided the narration, delivered at a constant, escalating bellow. Credit for writing it is reported inconsistently — some accounts name Andrew Bush alone, others a group of members — and the first platform is likewise disputed, with the clip circulating on YouTube, CollegeHumor and Funny or Die within days of each other.

The target was the energy-drink advertising of the mid-2000s: strobing edits, aggressive voiceover, invented compound words and health claims stated as physical impossibilities. Powerthirst does not exaggerate that style so much as run it at full speed until it disintegrates.

The video¶

The sketch is 2 minutes of near-continuous shouting over stock-looking footage and text that flashes past too quickly to read. Verified lines include “GRATUITOUS AMOUNTS OF ENERGY,” “UNCOMFORTABLY ENERGETIC,” “MENERGY,” “TURBOPUNS” and “Electrolytes! Powerlytes! Turbolytes! More lytes than YOUR BODY HAS ROOM FOR.” Two flavours are advertised: Shockolate (“It’s like adding chocolate to an electrical storm”) and Rawberry, made with real lightning.

The promised benefits escalate into nonsense: enough energy for 400 babies, the ability to vomit a wedding, and speed sufficient to run backwards through time. Bursts of shouted names — RALPH, GARY — arrive with no explanation and no follow-up, which became the most-quoted running gag in the whole thing.

Spread¶

The clip moved through every aggregator of the era within a fortnight:

• May 31, 2007 — posted to CollegeHumor.
• June 2 and June 5, 2007 — I Am Bored and Break.
• June 16, 2007 — the first YTMND page built from it.
• June 21, 2007 — added to Urban Dictionary.
• July 2007 — a soundboard of its lines appears.
• November-December 2007 — Google search interest peaks.

It had passed 7.5 million views by June 2008 and has since climbed well past 20 million. A sequel, “Powerthirst 2: Re-Domination,” was released through CollegeHumor on October 30, 2007 and drew more than 13 million views over the following four years; a third installment followed on May 4, 2010.

Beyond the video¶

Two things happened that almost never happen to a viral sketch. First, in 2009, Powerthirst became a real product — a lime-green powdered drink mix containing 190 mg of caffeine, sold online. Second, the troupe converted the attention into a career: Picnicface ran for 13 episodes on Canada’s Comedy Network from August 31, 2011, executive produced by Mark McKinney of Kids in the Hall, and won three Canadian Comedy Awards in 2012 for Best TV Series, Best Ensemble and Best Writing. They also published a satirical book, Picnicface’s Canada, with HarperCollins Canada, and made the feature Roller Town. Bell Media declined to renew the series after one season.

Legacy¶

Powerthirst is one of the small group of pre-2010 YouTube sketches still quoted verbatim by people who have never seen it start to finish. It set the template for the shouted-parody-advert genre and for the deliberately unreadable flash-text gag, both of which resurfaced constantly in later YouTube Poop and edit culture. Its own troupe’s summary is the most telling statistic: the two-minute fake commercial has been watched far more times than the entire award-winning television series it earned them.