Click here for the Series Finale Click here for all episodes of our LOST series

As Jack would say, “WE HAVE TO GO BACK!”, only we never left the Island even after the real LOST ended earlier this year.  

Our show “LOST: What Will Happen Next?” that turned into “LOST: What Will Happen Now?” once the real series ended, has been one of the most popular online series of all time, which looking back still is a bit mind boggling.  When you include views across other sites such as Break.com, CollegeHumor.com and more, it has nearly 20 million total views across 19 episodes that really was the beginning of our climb to where we are now inside of the YouTube ecosystem, and is a peek to our origins online.

As many know, we came to the web with a trilogy of feature films starring action figures (“GI Joe: The Epic Saga”) which also was our first mega hit (a pre YouTube mega hit!), in which we spent 2 full years creating our 3 hour epic. Following the show’s demise from a cease and desist, we were done with toys until Comic Con 2007 when we saw to our surprise…they make LOST toys!  We loved the show and knew we had to do something, we just had to figure out what.  

We only planned to make one episode, and hoped with LOST returning to air for Season 4 in January 2008 that it could make it to the coveted homepage of YouTube (which used to mean A LOT in the web video world back then). Within the first 24 hours we uploaded it, YouTube featured it.  It had a million views in one day (who misses the old editorial homepage of YouTube?!), and almost half a million on the Break.com homepage. We got over 4,000 subscribers in that one day, which at the time was a massive number, and we’ve been growing ever since. 

From there we realized more episodes needed to be made, and as luck would have it two very random decisions in that first episode led to it creating itself. The first was in the writing phase, where we realized not everyone watched LOST so having a character from another area of pop culture was essential to try to engage more people. This led to  Darth Vader appearing out of the bushes, and future episodes would always have another random cameo (this evolved into the marketing strategy of the show - episodes were conceived at times based on what major movie or TV show was coming out and would get it featured around the web based off of that). The second, was Rafi’s random idea while shooting it, “Why doesn’t Vader kill Hurley?”, we shot it both ways, one with Hurley living, and one with him dying. What we decided, as fans of the show know,  became history. Once Hurley died, we realized we had our hook, our “Kenny from South Park” even though we honestly didn’t realize the similarity until hundreds of comments came in. Hurley has now died 19 different ways (more if you count the interactive game, and zero times if you follow the Series finale of the “What Will Happen Next?” version where we find out Hurley was never on the Island at all).

There is of course quite the history with us and the series itself, which is interesting for web video history and shows the power online content can have with a TV show or Film.  We got written up in the print issue of TV Guide the same week the real LOST debuted a very similar action figure show to our own.

Disappointing as that was at the time of not getting to work with the real show, we pressed on, and even were contacted by LOST directly a couple of times which led to part of our “Yankees” episode being screened at the LOST Comic Con 2009 panel. Though we didn’t get to meet anyone from the show, it was great hearing a cheer from the audience when our show popped up on the screen. 

This past year was full of controversy as well. Our parodies took a turn to more biting satire thanks to some of the frustrations from LOST fans over the direction the show took in the final season, but we watched every episode, know them backwards and forwards, and even created a hit music video for the final season which was posted by one of the editors of the show and Hurley himself on his blog- which was exciting.

Though we all know our status as fans did end up revoked by series creator Damon Lindelof the week of the finale (and spawned a subsequent article in New York Magazine about that ordeal), we still continued to produce our series, months after the end of the actual show on television, to entertain hundreds of thousands adding to our passionate belief in how to synergize TV and the web.  We look forward to getting the opportunity of creating TV shows and making the online content for it fun, smart, and yes, sometimes critical of the show itself. If you do it right you not only have more eyeballs for your show, (we can’t tell you the countless comments to this day of people telling us they started watching LOST due to our parodies) but also give it the opportunity to live on after it is off the air by still having extra content online that your rabid fan base will continue to eat up.

We could continue our LOST series probably forever and still have interest due to how big of a show it was on TV along with the audience we have built for it, but we are letting it go.  It is time to turn the corner on this little and somewhat amusingly controversial series that we’ve loved to make.  We may dust off the old toys again sometime in the future for a special or two, but for now change is in the air, and another action figure series must rise….later this month get ready for Harry Potter!

Thanks for coming along for the ride with us, the castaways, and the other toys that had to substitute for a lack of figures being made by LOST (NBA All Star Kevin Johnson <Michael>, Mohinder and Claire from “Heroes” <Sayid & Claire>, Giant OJ Simpson doll <Walt>, and random toy that we had custom made into a funny looking Ben.

The toys will now go on display like they were always meant to be……or maybe we’ll give some away to you guys……stay tuned.

-Benny & Rafi Fine