Are you a budding Australian historian with a love of music clips? Got a spare year or two to spare?
Then you’re either the kind of person who will be thrilled at the following news (that will totally make your afternoon/life), or you’re the very person who put together this amazing website.
Gizmodo has discovered an absolute digital gem among the rough of the internet, a slick web-based player that lets you watch every single episode of ABC’s legendary music video show RAGE from 1998 to today.
Entitled Rage Again, the website is the painstaking labour of love of one Patrick Galbraith, containing every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night broadcast of the program from the last four years – recreated with the aid of the ABC show’s listings and Galbraith’s innovative use of YouTube.
Writing on his own blog, Galbraith explains how he constructed his amazing website: “Since 1998 RAGE has posted all their episode playlists online. So I created a website that combines these playlists with YouTube allowing you to travel back through time and re-experience RAGE‘s recent history.”
No doubt compiled from hours and hours of data work, Galbraith laments that “scraping the data (particularly the 90s web pages) wasn’t easy due to broken and inconsistent markup so I have posted a database dump in case anyone else wants to play with the data.” Just incredible.
Even more spectacular is that the RAGE diehard has presented his database in such a slick fashion, complete with a year-by-year selection, skip and pause features, and even info for special events like guest programmers and thematic episodes.
We know how you feel – you want to dive in and start watching straight away, right? Well, Galbraith has put fair warning on Rage Again viewers who want to go on a viewing marathon. Watching the entire chronology of episodes, back-to-back, would take about two years; specifically “721 days, 17 hours, 1 mins” in length.
That’s 269,938 tracks from 1,680 playlists – just so we’re clear on the facts.
If there’s not some kind of web-based award for this kind of musical dedication, there should be, and Rage Again wins it hands down. A large digital congratulations Mr. Galbraith.
