The short itself is based on the stereotypical American family sitcom;s opening credits, which would tend to show a character doing something 'representative' of their character, while showing the actor's name on screen that played that character. Without too much spoilers for the video itself, the names popping up is a pretty key aspect of the video itself.
It gained a pretty good following in 2014 when it came out, and I guess someone on the YouTube UI team thought it would be a fun addition to add the text style from the video onto the video page itself. I remember being happily surprised the first time I saw it (similarly to the first time I saw someone added the Wadsworth Constant[1] as an actual feature, though that's unfortunately since been removed).
[1] A user on Reddit once posited in 2011 that the first 30% of every YouTube video was a waste, so they would just click to around the 30% mark to skip to the important part. A reply deemed this the "Wadsworth Constant", after the user, and it tumbled from there. Eventually, YouTube had an official feature where if you added ""&wadsworth=1" to a URL, it would start the video 30% in, for any video! I'd used it several times when sending instructional videos to friends who didn't need to see the intros.
There is another video, that I can't find right now, where YouTube has paused the views in the <100s. It's part of the joke or title but I always thought that was neat too. Not sure if it was just cosmetic or they did something in the backend.
You probably think of Numberphile explanation of why YouTube videos (used to) stay at 301 views for a while - leading to lots of confusion when the site showed 301 views with 5728 comments and 37592 likes.
Watch the video; its definitely just 'someone at YouTube really liked this video'. The styling of the title is attempting to mirror the actor nameplates in the video.
Wow, I was wondering at first how good a video had to be for a YouTube engineer to add css like this—and after watching this twice now, I'm deeply startled by how many brilliant and resonant choices were made by the folks who created it.
Next Christmas, or next time you’re feeling Christmas-minded, find the Adult Swim Yule Log movie, aka The Fireplace. It’s on Max, among other places.
It’s Casper Kelly’s (the creator of Too Many Cooks) first full length feature—a 90 minute horror-comedy film that Adult Swim stealth-released a couple of years ago disguised as an airing of a Christmas fireplace video. It actually has very little to do with Christmas, though a surprising lot to do with Yule logs.
Max also has an Adult Swim series called “Infomercials,” which is where Too Many Cooks originally debuted a decade or two ago.
The series consists of a bunch of other very creative short films in a similar vein that aired very late at night. The TV guide block Adult Swim created for them just said Infomercials, much like what every other basic cable station scheduled after hours, except these were all designed to go off the rails partway through and mess with your head.
Too Many Cooks is the only one with a catchy theme song though!
