No, The Quibi Show “Memory Hole” Wasn’t Stolen
On April 6th the new streaming app Quibi released a show called “Memory Hole.” That afternoon, tweets from “Everything is Terrible” accused Quibi of stealing (1) their former logo, (2) their format and (3) the name of their 2014 YouTube channel.
A brazen theft by a billion-dollar corporation run by evil Shrekmonger Jeffrey Katzenberg. Sounds plausible.
But as the creator of that Quibi show, I was confused. Because I didn’t, in fact, steal anything. For anyone curious, I’ll briefly explain why the accusations are false.
(1) No, Everything Is Terrible’s former logo was not stolen
The universality of the “retro grid and space” design aside, the evolution of our title graphics is well documented through emails. I’ll share examples.
January 2018: The first logo, which I made myself.
March 2019: Logo made by the showrunner. At this point we were thinking of the “memory hole” as a black hole in space, with a set inspired by Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.
August 2019: After selling the show we hired a graphics specialist to design a logo. This is one of several space-themed samples we got when we described what we wanted.
The producers and I felt this might confuse people into thinking the show was about space, so we asked for a more “retro” feel. The showrunner sent the graphics guy an old Nintendo ad for reference. The next batch of options included the following two samples which we liked.
But we ultimately went with this one, from the same batch.
(2) No, the concept/format was not stolen
Everything is Terrible makes edited remixes of old VHS videos, part of the “found footage” genre pioneered by TV Carnage in the 90s. The 2014 project they accused me of stealing, called “Memory Hole,” is a YouTube channel that remixes people’s private home videos over ominous music.
2020 Memory Hole is a pop-culture clip show. It’s a common format, but my angle was to focus on old videos.
(3) The name “Memory Hole” WAS stolen… from George Orwell.
It’s possible some people who accused me of plagiarism were unaware of the commonly used expression, “memory hole,” coined by George Orwell in one of the most famous books of the 20th century.
Orwell is one of my favorite authors and when I tried to think of a title for a show about embarrassing old pop culture videos, Memory Hole was the first one that came to mind.
I checked IMDb and confirmed that no show had used the title before. The show’s producer did an additional title search before we went into production and concluded we were clear to use the name.
Unfortunately, rather than reaching out privately about their concerns, allowing us to explain the above, EIT published these tweets falsely accusing the show of plagiarism.
The production company, with my input, published a single tweet in response. My mentions turned into a sewer for a couple of days and that was that.
