Don't Forget About Us 🪄
Introducing our new series: Neighborhood Watch
blog.sixty-four // When Shua, Moy, and I began working together in the fall, there was something we prioritized every week as we built our team culture: atomic essays.
Every Wednesday evening, we’d drop two hundred and fifty words into the #atomic-essays channel in our Slack.* We started by writing about YouTube videos that were inspiring us in the moment, before expanding to other forms of art and media.
This practice was useful not only in exercising our writing muscles, but also in pushing us to go find the good stuff, and consider it through a critical lens. And now, we want to bring an adapted version of those essays to you.
Introducing Neighborhood Watch, our new series coming to you every Thursday. Whether it’s a short film released on YouTube, a four-hour-long video essay about the disastrous Star Wars hotel, or anything (and everything) in between, we plan to approach these unique forms of expression the same way Roger Ebert would review movies, or Pitchfork rates new albums.**
Our promise: This won’t become yet another link-dumping newsletter bragging about superior “curation.” As we build this creative neighborhood, our goal is to provide a new space to celebrate (and interrogate) the art emerging from the Internet—no matter the size of a creator’s house.
Read on for our first review. And if there’s something you’d like to see us include in a future edition, hit reply or drop a comment below.
— NGL
P.S. Last blog, we recapped our full-day storytelling event, Short Story Long, and shared what made it great. You can read it here.
Video: “DON’T FORGET ABOUT ME” (2025)
Creator: Elle Mills
Review by: Nate Graber-Lipperman
Maybe it’s a sign that Internet culture has sped up all our brains, but I find that creator friends and peers alike are contemplating a certain word much earlier than past generations may deem relevant—if necessary at all.
That slippery, layered word? Legacy.
Legacies are often viewed as the sum of one’s impact, a measurement of the contributions they gave to the world. It’s usually a celebratory thing, a list of the accomplishments we picture appearing in our eulogies one day.
But for our cohort, the word legacy carries a connotation of fear. Because every minute, over five hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Given this onslaught of new media, if we don’t post today, how do we know we’ll still be remembered tomorrow?
This question seems heavy on Elle Mills’ mind. If you’re unfamiliar with Mills’ story, she began sharing videos online when she was twelve. “Imagine if Ferris Bueller had a YouTube channel,” she wrote in a New York Times guest essay from 2023, describing her videos as “[using] the style and conventions of nostalgic teen films to romanticize what was otherwise an ordinary life.”
Mills has never been the only person to view herself in this fashion. In 2017, just a year after graduating high school, her video “COMING OUT (ELLE MILLS STYLE)” exploded across YouTube’s Trending charts.
Here was a nineteen-year-old, touching on topics of gender and sexuality at a breakneck speed, leading The Washington Post to describe her as “John Hughes for the YouTube generation.” “I can tell when someone is doing something different but also powerfully good,” veteran creator Hank Green told The Post at the time.***
The following years of Mills’ journey may sound like a familiar story now, but the main themes—struggles with burnout, self-worth, and the performance of “authenticity”—were a novel road for a teenager to navigate back then. In her Times essay, Mills reflected on the public trap she found herself in:
“We place such a high value on visibility, so isn’t it only natural to feel as if our vulnerability is the price to pay to be validated?
“Documenting my darkest moments began to feel like the only way people would truly understand me.”
When the pandemic hit, Mills took a break from YouTube. Eventually, she stopped posting altogether.
Mills doesn’t look back at her journey as a complete loss. YouTube helped her find her true calling: directing. And after putting our her first film, Reply (2022), on the short-lived streaming platform Creator+, she released her follow-up last month: Don’t Forget About Me.
The film features Bradley Steven Perry as a grown-up, jaded actor, forever known for his role as a childhood TV character named “Magical Matty.” When two teenagers grapple with a consequential move, Matty magically appears, helping them navigate change in their lives—while tackling everything from school bullies to past flames.
At twenty-seven minutes long, it’s a sweet film that’s unafraid to take on standard, coming-of-age tropes (yes, one character stands in the back of a moving car, singing along to a song while sticking his head out the sunroof). The coloring and soundtrack do feel very comfortable, and homey—rendering it as the type of they-don’t-make-em-like-this-anymore movie Mills is going for.
The director, now twenty-six, wasn’t afraid to inject her style and voice, either, which has clearly evolved over the years. In one scene, a character spray-paints a wall, though Mills frames the shot so it appears like the red paint is spraying the viewer. In another scene, the teens ask Matty if he’s on shrooms (“That’s tempting…I don’t think so,” he replies).
But the meta arc is Bradley Steven Perry’s appearance in the film in the first place. He himself was a child star, known for his role on the Disney Channel sitcom Good Luck Charlie. Mills is clearly drawing a comparison here. Just like YouTube creators who hit it big early on, most Disney Channel child stars don’t necessarily find the mainstream success of a Ryan Gosling or Selena Gomez as they progress through their careers.
And even that pipeline has changed dramatically. Over the last decade, Disney Channel's viewership has collapsed from an audience of two million in 2014 to just one hundred and thirty thousand average viewers in 2023. The obvious replacement for Disney Channel’s beloved sitcoms is YouTube’s endless supply of fresh creators, yet as Mills’ journey has shown, sustainability on the platform will always be in question.
Nevertheless, films like Don’t Forget About Me offer a glimpse into where the coming-of-age genre itself might be headed: YouTube. Mills’ movie has a big heart—the same big heart that captivated her audience all those years ago. An audience that, like her, has also grown up. And Mills released the movie directly to that audience on her YouTube channel, in partnership with a new crowdfunding platform called Shibuya.
Even if Elle Mills, the Director is bound to pop up in our algorithms much less frequently than Elle Mills, the YouTuber, I’m endlessly fascinated to watch whatever she makes next. Because it doesn’t appear like her interest in the idea of “legacy” will expire anytime soon, as evidenced by an open-ended question posed at the beginning of Don’t Forget About Me:
“Even after all this time, there’s still people out there who care. That’s something to be proud of, isn’t it?”
Nate’s Score: 🌩️🌩️🌩️🌩️ / 🌩️🌩️🌩️🌩️🌩️
Thanks for reading! Shoot us a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—we respond to them all.
* Well, we tried to keep it to two hundred and fifty. Results may vary.
** Okay, comparing ourselves to the late, great Roger Ebert at this stage in our journey is dastardly work. Still, gotta have a North Star, right?
*** Note that Hank can also now be described as “Creator Mag Cover Star Hank Green” (ICYMI).