Thanks for having me on

I am the Nanny Lynn, full name, Lynn Jeffrie Ochberg, now 79, who made the Nanny Lynn Videos back in the early 90's on a Commodore Amiga computer using a paint app and floppy disks and a midi sound system. I made them in my spare time from my 'job' as an elected township trustee in Okemos Michigan. I was a new grandmother and the little ones often needed me to babysit. The video stories were meant to put them to sleep with things that were familiar to them. They were extremely obsessed with dinosaurs, household items, pets, and characters from more conventional stories. I just put them all together pretty randomly with as soothing a voice as I could manage to lull them into dreamland. Someone from Such Video, where I had copies made to give to friends, made extra copies without my permission and later gave them to folks who posted them on various online sites. I was a math nerd as a teen in the 1950's and learned computer technology as an intern in 1960 with the Ford Motor Company's Willow Run Lab where there was a computer as big as an airplane hanger still using vacuum tubes, way before transistors or chips. I was taught Fortran to create programs to test car parts, but this was all before college and grad school where I ended up with a law degree.

I think some younger people have grossly underestimated how bored we were in the 80s and 90s. My friends made an entire movie about a rubber chicken leg (a dog toy) entitled “Bogota, the Enchanted Chicken Leg.” I mean we didn’t have Netflix, the internet was in its infancy and most of us only had access through school, if there was a new band we liked, we had to wait. Wait for it to come on the radio or MTV, wait until we had money and a ride to the mall. We had to get creative to entertain ourselves. If someone’s family had a camcorder, that was a big deal and movies and music videos were made. Seems like this family had money for a decent computer and animation software. We would’ve had so much fun with that.

In the early 90’s I was put into a children’s mental hospital. This reminds me a lot of one of the projects we’d be asked to put together. The idea was, you’d have each kid have a part. One would pick a theme. One would draw. Another makeup dialog, etc. After one project was done, we’d switch roles and do it again. The stories would always progressively get crazier, because kids would always feel like another screwed with their idea, so they’d intentionally get crazier and crazier trying to outdo each other. The teachers usually had some rules up front, like to no rape or murder, but would honor anything else. At the end, the teacher would read our created story. However, ours were animated like a children’s book. We’d make the covers and everything. I suppose a more advanced version could be like a movie.

Nanny knows her dinosaurs, I'll give her that.

This sounds like the sort of project where actual children collaborated in the story. The more nonsensical parts sound like kids ideas; "and then she started flying! And then she met dinosaurs!! and then the dinosaur ate her hair!!” I wouldn’t be surprised if some 4 yolds came up with parts of the story.

Psychologist: All dreams have meaning. My Dreams:

"She made some extra copies and would leave them randomly at parties..." This is how all true legends are born.

“he put some anti-anti-biotics” so... pro-biotics?

It sounds like children wrote it piece by piece. One kid says he makes a bug friend, and then the next kid teasing says: And then he eats him!

Nanny Lynn made these with her kids or grandkids for fun. Someone got ahold of her at some point and she was like "ohwow I didn't know people thought this was creepy it was just a bonding exercise" She wanted to learn how to do digital animation and that's why she made them.

Is the word "Massacre" seriously banned on youtube now? We're entering 1985's world of "Newspeak" faster and faster every day. In five years we wont be able to discuss ANYTHING serious what so ever.

My Hypothesis is that the story was written by a child, narrated by a family member, and copies were made as an attempt to share 'what a creative child they are' with the family. That's my guess and it kind of makes sense to me, more than it being some allegory for genocide or death. This would also explain the odd wording of some things, the narrator pausing for a child's messy handwriting or bad grammer. When I was in 3rd grade I wrote a version of goldilocks and the three bears that ended with goldilocks implied to be a serial killer, although though I didn't intend it, so children writing disturbing stuff isn't exactly unheard of.

It's the awkward pauses and cuts for me. Nanny Lynn said she wasn't going to do a second take and it _shows._

Doing a prank video in pixel animation in the 90s is beyond todays dedication. It's a marvel of pre trolling

I like how he always say have a good night. As if I'm going to be able to sleep after watching this.

This is literally the most 90s thing I've ever seen. Srebrenica, Jurassic Park, bad computer animation, genetic engineering, dark nihilistic themes. The creator should have just called the film Cyberpunk Feverdream '97.

There's an irony about dinosaurs wanting feathers when now we actually know a lot of dinosaurs had feathers.

This reminds me of some of the absolutely bizarre and twisted "kids" programming from the 70s that was produced under the influence of copious amounts of drugs.

I did made stuff like this on my Amiga 500 in the 90s. You need an Amiga with Hard Drive,Deluxe Paint IV, Video Deluxe to add Sound, and a VHS recorder. If you give a creative Kid these Tools it can create something like this. Deluxe Paint was with all the animation features way ahead of its time. This person really spend a lot of time creating this and did a very good job. I like how she even was drawing a Character turning around at one point. I guess she had a great time creating this and i like how people share and discuss it today.

“That cat was a rat... and also a lizard at one point...”

my theory: this was absolutely written by children

I miss the days when every Whang! video wasn't about bodily functions.

this gives me a lot of "dream logic" vibes. Where the concept just grabs ahold of whatever it can and starts building off of that before moving to something else, kinda like how dreams sometimes work.

Only 90s kids will remember this video

We all think these tapes are weird and creepy, but imagine how it felt for the first person finding and playing this unnamed vhs tape

Welcome to a typical brainstorming session in a dorm room with some mind-altering substances in 1995. This has the hallmark of a college project written all over it.

Your almost tortured run down of the 'said ' video is critically priceless. 🤣🤣

I have this theory: Elementary school teacher finds out that a friend / neighbor / whoever recently got into home-made animation business and can make cheap "cartoon" videos for children. The idea sounds wonderful and the teacher wants to bring to life stories for kids made by the kids themselves. But the teacher can't commission a video for every kid's story. That would take too long and would be very expensive. So the teacher decides to make a class project. The children are going to write a joint story together. Every kid is going to pick the story right where the previous kid left it. That's why the story seems so disconnected from one part to another (girls writing about princesses, boys writing about dinosaurs, etc.). The name of the girl that was raised by wolves could come simply because some kid heared the town's name in the news and got stuck in his memory. The animation seems so crude because it was probably made by an amateur animator back home for the little money the school / teacher / parents could pay him for the video. The teacher is probably the one narrating the story, probably trying not to laugh at the bizarre stuff the children wrote (We all know children can think of creepy / bizarre / funny things when trying to make up stories, and it would sound even more bizarre in combination with other weird stories from the other children). So that's my theory. Of course I have nothing to back it up, and it is just pure speculation, but this (or something similar) sounds pretty reasonable to me. As Barely Sociable said, most of this stuff seems creepy, just because is taken out of context.

Didn’t show your whang. Disliked. Unsubbed.

The way "Nanny Lynn" delivers the lines sounds as if this is a live audio recording of a story she made up on the fly that later had animation added. It's pretty obvious she isn't reading from a script.

Your narration here was 10/10 I love that "informative but IDK WTF is going on" throughout

I honestly think it was an elementary school teacher who did a lesson where they all pitch in different ideas for a class built story and had someone animate it to present to them.

the lady who made them came forward recently and said this; "Hi Eudoxia Mystery collector, I am the Amiga animator who created the Nanny Lynn Videos you posted. I made them to entertain my 6 grandchildren when they were little, back in the 90's. They were inspired by the things that interested my grandchildren: dinosaurs, princesses, all kinds of animals, and anything exotic, vaguely scientific. We were all news junkies in my family, and the war in Bosnia was happening then. There are another couple of hours of those animations on other VHS tapes in possession of the boys in the story of Bob the Blob, Dylan and Jake Cinti. I'm Lynn xxx, age 77, now living in XXXX, XXXX, but those videos were made in Okemos, Michigan, and copies made from floppy discs at Such Video, also of Okemos, Michigan. Apparently Such Video kept some copies that eventually came into your possession."

This is the sort of brain-rot imagery that I succumb to whenever I'm stuck in a waiting room.

Thank you for tackling the information from multiple angles. This is something mainstream media can learn from creators like you. As for the story, it sounds like a bit of dark-ish trip under some influence. Perhaps that person had money to spend and wanted to immortalise their vision regardless of how obscure and absurd it seemed.

This reeks of "Wealthy Grandma has Grandkid's stories animated verbatim for their birthday." Seriously, anyone who has had to entertain a 4 year old will tell you this is exactly like something a kid would write. "Nanny Lynn" is probably the kid's Grandma and the "Company Name" is probably just a cute little gag to make it look official for the kid. May even be that the "Nanny Lynn Goes To" trademarks were for actual videos she made and that's why she had an in with the production company.

Are we just not going to talk about how incredibly good at pronouncing complicated dinosaur names this woman is?

this sounds like the kind of thing I would write as a kid, and get my mom to narrate into a video cassette recorder (I grew up in the 80's)... it was probably created by kids for themselves, as a project mom or grandma indulged them in... I wish I had some of those tapes still... I found some stories I wrote going through one of my mom's closets... it was weird and disturbing to adult me, heh...

Not to be a nerd but I’m taking an Earth Science course right now. The asteroid that made the dinosaurs extinct didn’t kill *most* immediately. They died after the asteroid destroyed the atmosphere and environment and they ran out of food. So I guess storing food would have helped.

Just sounds like a teacher put all her students funny stories together.

Parents: Ah, yeah. That was written by a child. They just animated it. Internet: ohhhhh mystery.

From a technical standpoint what stands out for me is the quality of the audio. If the graphics do date to 1997 then I would put it down to something created on a 16 bit home machine rather than a PC. My gut feeling is that the audio was intended for something with higher production values but when they evaluated it the whole thing was scrapped. The graphics in the first episode may just have been placeholders ie a storyboard. My feeling is that the audio was recorded in a studio. Over to you Hanson.

Srebrenicia's story actually bears a striking resemblance to the Old Testament story of Joseph. A beloved young child is taken from their family and raised as one of those who kidnapped them. The child grows up and becomes very powerful, and decides to use this power to try to save a massive group of people by telling them to store up food. Around the same time, they reunite with their birth family in a situation that starts as a conflict.

"I know you're not a dinosaur, we're all extinct! I'm just a dreeaamm dinosaur!" Words to live by.

You mentioned the *copyright* at the beginning of the film. But it’s not a copyright. It says copyWRITE. Which is not the same thing and doesn’t protect it as a copyright. Copywrite isn’t even a thing. The term is copywriter, and that just literally means someone who writes copy. Makes me wonder if they added that at the beginning of the film to make it seem more legitimate or if it was just an oversight

"at the end it did state this" (ad plays) RAID SHADOWLEGENDS!

this made me remember my own granny and how she would doodle in animation programs on the various computers we had while I grew up, and how she would encourage me to play on them too. I did legit see it as playing when I was little, too, even the frame by frame little drawings and the transitions I would find. I was born after the age of the Amiga, but this makes me remember my fond times with my granny and why i enjoy drawing in the first place. I hope Nanny Lynn is doing well. I hope if she's still on the tech, she's playing with blender now or something like it.

this show’s narrative sounds like it came straight out of the courage the cowardly dog show

This reads a lot like stories written by a child or more than one child. One of the parents/adults involved probably had access to a computer to animate them and did it as some kind of gift or presentation. Little kids have a lot of fantastical ideas which create some crazy stories. Many times these can verge on disturbing to more adult minds.

Nanny Lynn sounds like the narrator of “Possibly in Michigan”

That dinosaur asking for the kids to come out and play then the dino living all alone is the saddest thing ive heard in awhile, wtf

This feels like a child wrote it. It has a sort of Axe Cop logic to it.

Storing up food would actually help the dinosaurs. A majority of them died due to a lack of food (from a global winter caused by the meteor).

My first thought was that it sounds like when you try to get children under 7/8 to come up with a story collectivelly. It can start pretty normal, and gradually deteriorate as they try to surpass each other's creepyness. I cannot tell why, but they LOVE showing off they can come up with horrific scenarios. But then there are some sophysticated concepts children ( in my experience) do not include in their stories: the specific naming of that War-torn town, the science fiction elements in the last one.

15:09 I laughed out loud at this part😂

Lost media like this is more common than you think. I once found a “vanity record” from a local college. As it turns out, their jazz band was well-respected during the 1960s, under a certain conductor. This record was made when they played in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to Seattle. If I recall correctly, pieces were scored just for this event. It was also one of the few remaining copies. The family recording burned in a house fire. The college’s recordings were stolen sometime during the late 20th Century. I turned the LP over to the conductor’s son. He’d never heard it. One piece was named after a family pet.

It's almost like it was written by young children. It's like someone took careful notes on a long meandering story told by a toddler. "And then he shooted a rocket up the cat's butt. And then he eated the cockroach but then he was sad...."

I'm an out-of-work animator - I'm still trying to figure out just what absurd sum of money would be enough for me to wade into this minefield of mental trauma 🤔

This has been solved. Nanny Lynn came forward and said she just made a video of silly stories for her grandkids.

"They launch a nuke into a cat's ass" fam, this cracked me up so hard, that I literally can't laugh anymore.

This screams art school project to me. Usually a solid source of confusing pointless fuckery.

Nov 18, 2020 update = the Amiga animator (now age 77) who created the Nanny Lynn Videos mailed a redditor to say she made them to entertain her 6 grandchildren when they were little, back in the 90' in Okemos, Michigan the narratives were inspired by the things they were interested in , this lady copy striked "Nanny Lynn goes to China"

Haha, oh jeez. I live right near that zip code. That doesn't surprise me that something so bizarre would come from here.

Anyone else notice it said "copywrite" instead of "copyright"?

“At the end of the video it did state this...” ARBYS HAS THE MEATS

imagine starting a project out of shock value and your publisher decide to not take it serious and destroy anything of it and decades later someone finds it claiming a mystery behind the project...

i just want to know where their animation skills are now. that style was nice. that wolves eating scene 13:10 when the baby just randomly started petting the wolf, then realize he liked the feel, then went harder at it. like that wasnt part of the story the animator was just flexing. and even if its just like that guy who draws superheroes from his kids doodles, these kids stories are still wild and dark as fuck why did bob have to die so much? its like "the Regular Show" but horrorcore directed by eric andre. i love it i'll take 4 more seasons

"Children's Stories" doesn't refer to who the story is for... It references the author's age. Which is why it's so bizarre, random, derivative, and uncensored as a child would be. Probably the parent(s) animated it as a hobby/practice with animation while also indulging their kids' creation. The Srebinica reference likely in the kid's vocab from hearing parents or news mention it, and thinking no further than "that's a pretty name" with complete deference to how appropriate that would be.

Honestly, this isn't as bad as those KZfaq "elsa spiderman "kids" animations". Tho- those gave me nightmare once..

One thing I can't fault, is that Nanny Lynn did a lot of animation on an Amiga! 60 minutes eh? She put the work in alright!

I know exactly what this is, it's 3 different years of elementary school kid created stories written by kids and then animated and narrated by an adult. -- *I basically did something like this when I was a kid with my classmates where we would take turns adding on to the story. It had a disconnected feel just like this. *When we did it we also watched "last year's" video, these kids did too so that's why there's meta-reference. *It's got kid-edgy but it's too innocent to be adult edgy. *Each story seems to have progressively less effort with the third one seeming like something that would get the yearly exercise canceled because someone was tired of doing it. (...Oh, people have already concluded that.. Well... Yeah.)

This was recently solved on Reddit and apparently these were just videos she made for her grandkids for fun !

these are literally animated fever dreams

Idk why but the music during Whang's section drove me absolutely nuts

The fact that this so creepy. And everyone wants just say its a kids story is eye opening!! Something so eerie that make most people call a kids story of a lovely rich grandma and move on. Definitely makes me think there is more to this.

i feel like this isn't really that disturbing but it is just weird

I am so amazed "massacre" has to be censored.

Dinosaurs were mad popular in the 90's... funny to think about it, every kid had a dinosaur shirt or some shit like that, popular dinosaur magazines and stuff were a thing

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was animated by one person and narrated impromptu by another as some sort of project or challenge

Happy Halloween 🎃

18:43 - "He put some _anti-antibiotic_ in a needle and put it into a little rocket." Pharmacological knowledge on point.

I personally graduated high school in 1994. There was a lot of l.s.d. use at the time. It really seems like there was plenty of "Felix The Cat" around to watch and alot of time on the people who made this's hands, so they made a cartoon on there computer to watch while they tripped. I've seen Dee Jay's do more complex things to show at underground dance clubs to show while they mixed.

The second story for some reason has a strange way of resonating with me, as obscure as it is ... But then again, I'm already a left field thinker...

When that dinosaur had to live her life alone that hit hard, pain 😔😔😔😔

That whole dinosaur plot sounds like an Empress Theresa sequel

How do I feel nostalgic viewing the footage from these tapes when there is no way I've seen this before?

"and this is Barely Sociable, and good night" - yeah, like this stuff can ONLY be watched at night! great stuff

Barely Sociable: "At the end of the tape it did say this..." Ad: "AT&T mobile is upgrading it's network nation wide!" Me: Did it really?

There's actually a really simple explanation for why the stories are so bizarre: haven't you ever heard a little kid tell a story? They're rambling, incoherent, repetitive, and full of things that an adult mind would see as disturbing. These stories, especially the Bob the Blob one, come across as adaptations of stories a really young kid made up for their parents. I can easily see, like, a Roberta Williams type writing down a bizarre story her kid told and making a computer animation out of it.

muting the word... "massacre?" squeezing out the last few pennies i see

Just to be clear, storing up food absolutely would have been a solution to the asteroid strike. It didn't incinerate them- it altered earth's environment such that plants died, the plant-eaters died, and the carnivores died because their food chain was destroyed. Like, this story is actually fascinating.

My theory: This has a strong "Mad Libs" vibe. It feels like a teacher might play this sort of long-form mad-libs with her class and then animate it to show the class what they collectively created. .."Billy, give me a noun" "a dinosaur" "Suzie, give an occupation" "a princess", etc. etc.

Honestly, people are just weird. I imagine there's endless crazy homemade shit like this on the internet right now, the only difference was that it was more rare in the 90s.

Hearing the “nanny”, straight CHILLS!

I Think you will find more about this topic, of "outsider art" at the Chicago Institute of outsider art. One artist in particular, Henry Darger, painted gory children's story's and wrote a 15,850 page book to go with the art. It is considered to be the longest novel in history. No one ever knew the artist, even though they saw him everyday for 35 years. No one can even pronounce his name, as he did not say it much, and when he did he would pronounce it differently to each person he met.

“Teacher” kind of sounds like Sigourney Weaver lol

I feel like I used to see a lot of shit like this when I was younger. We had lots of horrifying vhs tapes with cutesy cartoons on the outside. They were usually labeled in other languages and were just given to me because my parents thought i would like to just watch the colors or some shit.

"She would then loot one of the bodies of the deceased dinosaurs" 😂 best gamer description of a palaeontologist, love it 😍😂

sounds like the sort of rambling story my kid would come up with...and then be helped to write down by their grandma. As such, it may just be the product of a child's incoherent imagination and a grandparent's willingness to introduce their grandchild to the medium of digital story telling