[3] Forms of remix culture have existed long before the internet, with DigitalTrends's Luke Dormehl listing the cut-up technique of William Burroughs and sampling in hip-hop as examples.
[4] Dormehl also says that "aesthetically", YouTube Poop is similar to the "frenetic editing style" of MTV in the 1980s, which featured "fast, non-linear cuts" that focused less on character or plot than on evoking a feeling.
[4] YouTube Poop also draws on elements from the vidding scene,[5] in which fans of a piece of media would create music videos using footage from the work.
[4] It remixes clips from the 1990 animated television series The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 as a primary source,[4] using the video editing software Windows Movie Maker.
[8] eMarketer principal analyst Nicole Perrin speculated that the reason why the genre had "fallen to the wayside" was as part of a larger YouTube "shift to glossier more corporate-friendly content.
[4] Additionally, YTP has followed the general YouTube trend of increasing professionalization and editing, with lots of special effects and elaborate writing.
[12] Some videos may involve completely or partially repurposing sources to create or convey an often self-aware story, while others follow a non-linear narrative, and some may contain no storyline at all, instead regarded among the lines of surreal humor and artistic experimentation.
[4][8] One famous sentence-mix from the YouTube Poop "Robotnik Has a Viagra Overdose" by creator Stegblob takes a scene from an episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog titled "Bogey-Mania" in which Doctor Robotnik accuses his henchmen of "snooping as usual" and cuts out everything but the second and third syllable to leave only the nonsensical word "pingas", which was construed to resemble the word "penis".
[10] In an interview, Sonic the Hedgehog co-star James Marsden was asked a question about the word, in which he erroneously guessed that it was Doctor Robotnik's original catchphrase.
[8] Political scientist and author Trajce Cvetkovski noted in 2013 that, despite Viacom filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube in 2007 explicitly concerning YouTube Poops, in particular "The Sky Had a Weegee" by Hurricoaster, which features scenes from the animated series SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Shanghaied" and Weegee (a satiric caricature based on Nintendo's Luigi as he appears in the DOS version of Mario Is Missing!