Forgotten Weapons

About

Forgotten Weapons is a YouTube channel and blog hosted and owned by Ian McCollum. Founded in 2010, Forgotten Means grew in popularity over the next decade, as fandom surrounding its host increased. Fans of the show refer to McCollum as "Gun Jesus" due to his long hair and beard, which many believe resembles depictions of Jesus Christ.

Online History

Website

McCollum registered the site ForgottenWeapons.com on February 17th, 2009.^[1] The Way Back Machine^[2] archived the earliest available version of the site on March 18th, 2010. A description of the site reads:

This web site was founded for the community of Class 2 SOTs and home hobbyists who are interested in the little-known and rarely seen corners of firearms design. Until the birth of the internet, technical information on such weapons – often the only existing copies of such information – was cloistered in private collections or museum archives, inaccessible to outsiders. Worse, it is all too common for the keepers of rare information pass away and their unappreciated treasures are lost forever.

It is our goal to make as much of this data as possible freely available, whether in the form of formal blueprints or detailed photographs with reference measurements. We will also publish contemporary magazine articles and official evaluations as we can find them (and obtain permission from copyright holders).

On October 26th, 2010, McCollum relaunched the site.^[3] He wrote, "We hope you will enjoy this new version of Forgotten Weapons. Our original web presence, frankly, looked like it crawled out of 1994, and it was time for a change of face."

The Forgotten Weapons Youtube channel has over 1.74 Million subscribers as of June 2020. The popularity of Forgotten Weapons is partly due to Ian's apolitical and wholesomely educational demeanor which is welcoming to firearm aficionados as well as people who are casually interested.

YouTube Channel

On May 8th, 2011, the Forgotten Weapons YouTube^[4] account launched. Five days later, on May 13th, Forgotten Weapons uploaded its first video, "Forgotten Weapons Fedorov Avtomat disassembled." Within 10 years, the video received more than 147,000 views (shown below).

The following year, on October 15th, 2012, Forgotten Weapons posted "The Pig: M60 in Theory and on the Range." The post became the first video on the channel to reach 1 million views (shown below, left).

On December 22nd, 2016, the account posted "M134 Minigun: The Modern Gatling Gun." The most popular video on the channel as of July 2020, the video received more than 7.4 million views (shown below, right).

Fandom

On November 1st, 2015, Redditor^[5] Klaus_Goldfish launched the /r/GunJesus subreddit. Gun Jesus is a nickname for McCollum. The subreddit features memes about the show (example below).

On January 24th, 2017, the Facebook^[6] page "Small arms design that makes you go 'What the heck'" launched. The page is a meme page for the show (examples below). Within four years, the group received more than 39,000 likes and 40,000 follows.

Related Memes

Massive Giggle Factor

Massiv Giggle Factor is a catchphrase used on the show by McCollum. The phrase comes from the episode "Trejo Model 1 Machine Pistol: Shooting and History," which premiered on March 31st, 2017 (shown below).

The phrase inspired a series of remix videos in which memers replace the sound of the gun shot with various other noises (examples below).

Search Interest

External References