GI Joe PSAs are a collection of animated shorts that parody the safety lessons found from episodes of the children's television series, GI Joe: A Real American Hero. ^[1]** The videos are considered some of the earliest staples in viral internet content of the pre-YouTube era of the early 2000s. ^[2]

Due to its viral success during a time when record keeping of views become the norm, view counts of all the videos produced have been practically irretrievable and completely lost.

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The videos were edited and produced by Eric Fensler and were initially screened around film festivals starting in 2003 before making its way into the internet.

^[4] Eric cut up footage from 25 episodes of the 1980s animated series, *GI Joe: A Real American Hero,*which had safety messages at the end of an episode that usually featured some of the Gi Joe characters. He also replaced the original dialogue in the videos with his own overdubs with masterful editing of inflection and tone. ^[4]

The videos were first released through eBaum's World and embedded through QuickTime. ^[7]By the time that YouTube entered its first summer as a video tech company in San Mateo, California, the Gi Joe PSAs were uploaded onto the platform and they began to spread like wildfire on the internet. The videos were shared on Myspace and linked to dozens of blogs and websites at the time. ^[8]

Because the 25 videos were uploaded onto the internet pre-YouTube, many of the original view counts have been lost. The videos have since garnered millions of views. ^[2]

In 2012, YouTube user Josebronxrican undertook the task of aligning Fensler’s original audio with hand-edited clips from the show’s uncompressed DVD release. ^[9]

In 2017, YouTube person L33T GUY upscaled the videos to 1080p and bundled them together into one video.

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