YouTuber Of The Week: The Guys Of EpicMakanTime Demo How Malaysians Can Really, Really Eat
To kickstart our first YouTuber Of The Week of 2015, we bring to you EpicMakanTime who embodies the inner beast that is within all Malaysians who love to eat.
By Darian Goh — 12 Jan 2015, 09:46 AM — Updated almost 10 years ago
There's THE EpicMealTime, a Canadian-based YouTube channel that devours monstrous food creations week after week, with 6.6 million subscribers.
And then there's the MALAYSIAN version of 'epic'. Meet EpicMakanTime, a local spin created out of the love of ginormous proportions and insane amounts of calories
Epic Makan Time, together with other YouTubers such as The Salad Show and The Ming Thing
Image via EpicMakanTime via FacebookWhen they were less occupied with food, we sat down with Anish from EpicMakanTime to ask some burning questions
One fine night at a barbecue, Anish and his friends pretended to be EpicMealTime. They were all still studying at Taylor's University.
Anish: It all started in college when we discovered EpicMealTime and could not stop watching at how ridiculous and huge their meals and humour were. One fine night, we were on a trip to Port Dickson and we had a barbecue. We thought "Hey, let's pretend we're EpicMealTime and just have some fun with this barbecue". So we just started filming on one of our phones throughout the night and had some crazy fun with it. Next day, we did some quick edits and just uploaded it and just decided to call it EpicMakanTime.
Anish: After all the laughter we had on the first episode, we decided to make an episode in between semester breaks during college. Soon it became something we look forward to every time a semester ends and we got more and more enthusiastic when we were brainstorming ideas.
From that night on, EpicMakanTime was born. Who's who in the group?
Anish: We're made up of a team of 6. From the left, we have
i) Chee Seng, our professional bacon handler. He's also EMT's official moon-walker!
ii) Benny the Blur, the busiest member of the team.
iii) Myself, Anish Dev. I narrate, edit, film and handle the videos.
iv) Brendon a.k.a Banana (because he can't speak a word of Mandarin)
v) EJ a.k.a Bacon, we get our supply of bacon directly from his stomach.
vi) Akhesh, the little one who is also my nephew
Anish: When we started this channel, we were all students studying at Taylor's Lakeside Campus doing Hospitality Management and this was actually a great way of bonding with your friends. We originally had no intention of using this channel seriously as we were just having some fun and uploading them for the sake of watching it. If you cater your videos to the people, you will probably get more favourable views and feedback, but just make sure you're having genuine fun with it.
One of the team's favourite videos is "The Curryseum" a meal made with curry puffs stuffed into two giant curry puffs, ketupats, and satays to make a gigantic creation in the form of a coliseum
Anish: Favourite video? We loved them all! Each one was a unique experience and was so much fun to make. If I really had to choose, it would have to be "The Curryseum." We went crazy and decided to build two enormous Curry Puffs filled with actual curry puffs, bacon mashed potatoes bacon, cheese and of course chicken curry and eggs. We managed to get these king-sized bananas that was tasty and fit for the occasion, and we built the walls of the Colosseum with Ketupat as bricks and Satay to hold them up. It was truly a crazy experience.
It does kind of look like the Colosseum in Italy, right?"
Besides the Curryseum, they've also constructed food mashups of other famous destinations like the Taj MaNaan and the Great Wall of Ribs
Though the group may not upload videos as often, they do know a thing or two about the whole YouTube world. "Don't let haters discourage you, just keep doing it because you love doing it".
Anish: Based on our experience, here are three things we would say to any aspiring YouTuber
i) Just do it. Honestly, if you feel like making a video, get up and do it. Borrow cameras if you don't have them. Bring along some friends and film. Why? Because you can.
ii) Don't worry about the haters. Every single YouTuber has haters. It's part of the mysterious world of the internet where people just suddenly say whatever they want for the sake of saying it. Don't let it discourage you, just keep doing it because you love doing it.
iii) When you have an idea, write it down, save it on your phone or something! Trust us, sometimes you'll come up with a genius idea but won't have the time to do it-and when you do, you may have forgotten about it. Writing it down goes a long way ladies and gentlemen.
Considering that most of them are furthering their studies in various parts around the world, meeting up to make videos tend to be a challenge for the team. However, they do promise that they will be making one when they can.
Anish: One of the biggest challenges is the availability of our crew. Some of us are in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and it's going to be pretty difficult to meet up all together as often. However, whenever we do, we're probably gonna make one. Not so soon, but there's one coming. So don't forget to like us on our FB page to stay updated!
Anish: Producing videos consistently and often is also another challenge. The thing is our videos take a full day to prepare and film. From grocery shopping, to cooking, building and eating. (Don't forget the nightmarish cleaning!). It's also pretty costly, which is why we can't produce videos as often as we'd like to.
With so much food on the table, do they ever finish their creations?
Anish: Guys, come on. We are huge eaters that we scare ourselves sometimes. However, we do take it to our respective homes for our families and sometimes our classmates! I mean, Malaysians love to eat right?
Their ability to turn local delicacies into monstrous creations has not gone unnoticed. In one of their videos, they were acknowledged by EpicMealTime themselves, and labelled the group and labelled the group the official parody account!
Anish: The craziest experience we had was having The EpicMealTime introduce our latest episode, The Taj MaNaan and being named The Official EpicMealTime Parody Account.
In 2013, they bagged the "Fave Makan-Makan Expert" title at DiGi WWWOW Awards in 2013
So if you're a foodie (we suspect you are if you're born Malaysian) who loves watching people create and eat epic food infused with Malaysian flavours, we suspect you'll love subscribing to their channel