Rhett and Link School: Lesson 1 Getting to know Rhett and Link

These two men you see on the pictures are Rhett and Link. I have started this school with one sole purpose. To get more people to subscribe to Rhett and Link and therefore expand the army of mythical beasts*.

. Rhett is the tall one and Link is the shorter one with stubble and glasses.

Ok class let’s start shall we.

“Rhett and Link are the comedy, filmmaking, musical and advertising duo of Rhett James McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln "Link” Neal. They are known for making viral videos and writing comedy songs as well as for filming low-budget commercials for local businesses across the United States on the Independent Film Channel series Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings. They upload their videos on two YouTube channels, one of which, the main channel, has over 170 million views and over 1 million subscribers.

Rhett and Link met in 1985 at Buies Creek Elementary School in Buies Creek, North Carolina where they attended first grade. They wrote a song about how they met.^[ And also, years later, they found their first grade teacher and made a documentary about the search: “Looking for Ms. Locklear”.

At fourteen they wrote a screenplay entitled “Gutless Wonders”. They had an idea to shoot a film, based on that screenplay, but they filmed only a couple of scenes and the film was never finished. They did, however, read the screenplay in multiple episodes of their YouTube morning show, titled ‘Good Mythical Morning’. In 1994 in high school they shot a 25-minute film-parody on the tragedy Oedipus the King, where Rhett was Oedipus and Link was his father’s servant.

Later, they were roommates at North Carolina State University where they studied engineering. They taught themselves filmmaking and are known for low-budget, DIY productions.

While snowboarding at Boone, North Carolina in 1999, Link was injured and lost memory for 8 hours, and Rhett wrote a story about the incident called “The Tragedy”.

Rhett and Link are self-proclaimed “Internetainers” (Internet + entertainers). As both Rhett and Link quit their jobs as engineers soon after graduating from university, making videos is now the only thing they do for a living.^] Their main channel on YouTube is one of the most watched, so they earn over six figures a year.^[12] They shoot web commercials sponsored by such companies as Alka-Seltzer, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Taco Bell, Sanyo, TV Guide, Hummer, Cadillac.^[13] But they made their first sponsored video, “Cornhole Song”, for a smaller brand, AJJ Cornhole, and they also integrated such small brands as Smule and iRESQ.

In January 2008 they worked as web correspondents on a Sundance film festival for IGotShotgun.com in partnership with Cadillac. Summer of the same year they spent releasing videos for the Alka-Seltzer Great American Road Trip. The series won the Gold award in the Consumer Goods category at Advertising Age’s 2008 W3 Awards, as well as bestonline campaign at Adweek’s 2008 Buzz Awards. The series also picked up two Golds (Best Campaign, Best Single) and a Craft award (Music) at the 2009 Bessies and received two golds in the interactive category for Viral Marketing and Business to Consumer website at the 2009 Advertising & Design Club of Canada Awards.

Also in 2008 Rhett and Link released web series “Seaborne and Roach”, sponsored by SpyAssosiates.com, and “Surrogate Sharers” series advertising Starburst candy.

In 2009 duo started to create free low-budget commercials for small local businesses throughout the U.S. – web series “I Love Local Commercials”, sponsored by Microbilt. At first they made 3 commercials for local businesses in their home state North Carolina – TDM Autosales, Bobby Denning Furniture and Redhouse Furniture. Videos quickly went viral on YouTube, especially the Redhouse one, with its controversial jingle “Where Black People and White People Buy Furniture”. So Rhett and Link continued creating commercials and for that they offered people across U.S. to nominate their favorite local businesses to take part in the web series. The success of Rhett and Link’s commercials have garnered the attention of major advertising publications such as Advertising Ag^] and AdWeek. Their commercials have also been featured on CNN, NPR,^] The New York Times, Forbes, and TMZ. One of the most popular is Cullman Liquidation Center commercial, which won Best Local Commercial at the 2010 Ad Age Viral Video Awards. In 2010 Rhett and Link produced a commercial for Donut Prince, George Lopez’ favorite donut place. Later they appeared in his show Lopez Tonight, where he called them “undisputed masters of bad local commercials”. The success of the web series led to Rhett and Link’s television show, Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings on IFC.

In 2009 Rhett and Link produced Fast Food Folk Song as a web commercial for Taco Bell, and in 2010 it won the Contest of Awesome for the Best Comic Music Video of 2009. The contest awarded them a trip to Los Angeles and a cameo in a Weezer music video.

In 2010 Rhett and Link created a stop motion video “T-shirt War” as a commercial for t-shirt printing company Rush T-shirts, in which they used 222 t-shirts with unique designs. The video already had 2 million views after only two weeks of being online, and quickly reached 4 million. “T-shirt War” won in Best Online Promotion at the Apparel Industry category at the 2010 Spirit Awards. After such success of the commercial Rhett and Link received a call from McDonald’s and Coca Cola, asking them to make a TV commercial with a T-shirt War theme. The commercial was also uploaded on YouTube, and this video, entitled “T-shirt War 2”, reached 1 million views in two weeks.

Also in 2010 Rhett and Link made a web commercial for SleepBetter.org – “2 Guys 600 pillows”. Video with the commercial was one of the Top-10 Talented Web Videos of 2010, according to Time Magazine, and won two 2011 Webby awards, including the Best Editing category as well as Peoples’ Voice Award.So Rhett and Link continued working with SleepBetter.org, and in November 2012 they made another commercial for them – Sleep Tight.

In 2011, Rhett and Link made a commercial for Ojai Valley Taxidermy, owned by Chuck Testa. The commercial was created as part of their TV show, Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings. After the episode featuring the commercial aired, Chuck Testa uploaded the commercial to his company’s YouTube channel. The ad went viral, topping 13 million views (as of January 2013) and spawning the “Nope! Chuck Testa” Internet meme. The Chuck Testa ad was included in Time Magazine’s top 10 memes of 2011, as part of Time’s Top 10 Best of Everything.

In 2012, Rhett & Link were number twenty two of Business Insider’s Top 25 Most Creative People in Advertising List.

In September 2012 the duo joined the Collective, a media company in Los Angeles.

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On January 3, 2011, the duo released a morning talk show, “Good Morning Chia Lincoln”, on their YouTube channel, “rhettandlink2”. This show was released every weekday morning from January 3 to February 28. This series consisted of 40 unique episodes in which Rhett and Link would sit at a table which had a Abraham Lincoln Chia Pet as a center piece and pick a topic, usually a personal experience or news story, and state their opinions on it. The series was cancelled as a result of the plant half of the Chia Pet dying. Due to the show’s success and popularity, the two decided to release a new morning talk show, “Good Mythical Morning”, very similar to the former show in most respects, but Chia Lincoln was replaced with a wheel dubbed the ‘Wheel of Mythicality’. The wheel itself was used to determine how each episode ended. Good Mythical Morning is also uploaded to YouTube on the rhettandlink2 channel every weekday morning at 6 AM EST. On August 6, 2012, they began “Good Mythical Morning Season 2” after a month long break from their morning show, during which, they released shorter videos called ‘The Rhett and Link Vault", in which they explained previous videos they have published throughout the years. The main difference between the two seasons was a different intro and a few minor changes to the Mythical Wheel, being colored spots (red, blue, and black) that they didn’t know what was under them, but their camera man, Jason, did. On November 12, 2012, the 200th episode of the show was released. Season 3 of GMM began in January of 2013.

In September 2012, the duo uploaded a video of them battle rapping about manliness and masculinity.

A few days later Rhett & Link uploaded a video of them singing All Night Long by Lionel Richie, literally all night long.

In January 2013 “Good Mythical Morning” series won Best Variety Series at the International Academy of Web Television Awards.

Source: Wikipedia

Videos by Rhett and Link to get you started: Epic Rap Battle of Manliness, My Hair Song and a good handful of episodes of Good Mythical Morning on rhettandink2.

And there you have it class the things you need to know to get to know Rhett and Link.

Next lesson:  Good Mythical Morning and The Wheel of Mythicality