Mathieu Sommet

About

Mathieu Sommet is a French Youtuber who hosts a show entitled Salut Les Geeks. ("Hello Geeks") The show consists of humorous reviews of various media, including viral videos, and is quite popular on French Internet with 1.3 million subscribers and 166 million views on May 2015^[1].

Online History

Origin

After participating in the production of several short movies with the company Kick Production during the late 2000’s^[2] Mathieu Sommet started his own Youtube Channel in March 2011, when he uploaded the first episode of Salut Les Geeks, simply titled "Pilot Episode." The show consisted of a humorous review of three viral videos.

Sommet stated in an interview^[3] that his goal was to adapt the concept of RayWilliamJohnson’s show Equals Three for a French audience, a common and successful practice. However, Mathieu Sommet also kept his show original, introducing several memorable characters and funny musical segments which became an important part of the show’s popularity ^[4].

Spread

The show had a small audience during its first year, but gained a notable increase in popularity in July 2012, after Mathieu made a cameo on LinkstheSun’s show “Point Culture”^[5], which was more popular at the time.

Overall, since its creation, the series has produced 96 episodes over five seasons, plus four special musical videos for the show’s anniversary. The most popular video, entitled “Internet j’suis ton enfant” (“Internet I’m your child”) was posted in March 2014 for the third anniversary of SLG and gained over 3,000,000 views by May 2015.

Since the middle of season 3, Mathieu began to focus more on satire, caricaturing the different social aspects of the videos he reviewed. Some of his fanbase accused him of turning into a left-wing Social justice warrior, which he partially admitted in a Q&A video^[6].

SLG has 625,000 likes on Facebook^[7] and significant fan cultures on both DeviantArt and Youtube.

Plot and Characters

Warning: may contain spoilers

The main character cast, all played by Mathieu, includes:

• The Boss, a sexually perverted man always represented wearing a black suit vest, a dark shirt, and sunglasses, holding a cigarette in his mouth.
• The Geek (sometimes referred as “the kid”), a caricature of an immature child wearing a baseball cap.
• The Hippie, a caricature of a stoner.
• Master Panda (“Maître Panda” in French) sometimes simply referred as The Panda, a cynical and snarky character always wearing a panda costume, in charge of the musical segment (called “L’instant Panda”) of the show since the beginning of season 4.
• The Professor, a mad scientist wearing a bow tie, who was in charge of the humorous Q&A segment of the show until the end of season 3.

At the end of season 4, Mathieu added a side storyline to the show, revealing that all those characters were in fact just part of his schizophrenic personality. Season 5 centered on Mathieu trying to escape a mysterious psychiatrist.

Collaboration with Antoine Daniel

During the last years YouTubers Antoine Daniel and Mathieu Sommet collaborate frequently on videos for conventions or special events. On January 18th, 2015, they both starred in a video entitled "Super Crayon" (Super pencil) in which they reacted, with other French Youtubers, to the Charlie Hebdo Terrorist Attacks, showing their support for the victims.

During a live joint conference at the 2014 Polymanga convention in Montreux, Switzerland^[8], Mathieu and Antoine admitted they also found several shipping fanfictions involving them.

Notable popular episodes

Related Memes

“T’en as trop pris, gros!”

“T’en as trop pris, gros!” (can be translated as “you took too much of it, dude!”) is a catchphrase quoted several times throughout the show by the “hippie” character from SLG when a video they are reviewing appears exceptionally weird, implying it was made under influence of drugs. This catchphrase became popular on the French internet as a reaction Image.

Jeanne

Jeanne is a main female character introduced during the season 6 premiere of Salut Les Geeks. In the series, she is decpicted as an AI managing the virtual program where the mind of Mathieu was traped into after the climatic ending of season 5. Since the release of the episode, she gained a notable popularity among the SLG fandom, inspiring notable fan-made works, acknowledged by Mathieu Sommet himself.

Search interest

External references