Joel Haver is a YouTube content maker who has been producing a variety of different types of videos for years. From full length feature films to short comedy sketches, and everything in between. At one point he discovered a tool that would allow him to animate his footage, to add an additional comedic element to his sketches. This tool (EBSynth) lets you "paint" over a single frame of your footage and use that to convert the rest of your footage to the same style.
Back in August, 2022, Joel posted this video: https://youtu.be/IMKW-ifxikE entitled "Toilet Paper Bears". A silly story about a bear, who's family business is wiping with a certain brand of toilet paper.
About two months later, SNL ran this sketch: https://youtu.be/Z0xgH8wm_DE and subsequently uploaded the video to YouTube. It happens to be a silly story about a bear, who's family business is wiping with a certain brand of toilet paper.
The similarities don't end there. The entire plot of the SNL sketch is like someone took Joel's video to a 3rd party content writing sweat shop and asked them to rewrite it for them. As of now, I've seen nothing from SNL on their blatant plagiarism. Joel's fans have called them out all across the internet, but there has been nothing but crickets from NBC.
Shortly after the SNL video was released, Joel released this video: https://youtu.be/aNWbI8T42II speaking about the SNL ripoff. I felt his response was very classy, and about the best way anyone could respond under the circumstances.I mean, I get that art imitates art, and different people can come up with the same idea, but a large corporation like NBC could easily make this right by simply mentioning where the idea came from. If they really wanted to do the right thing, they'd invite Joel in to do a sketch for the show. Right now, it just looks like blatant theft of a great idea.
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