A puppet of a cockroach lies on its back, flailing its arms wildly. A mouse cursor hesitates over an order on the website “Poison Depot” before changing it from one bottle to eleven. A gleeful Victorian marriage proposal goes awry when lightning strikes a nearby tree.
Each story is told in just six seconds of video. And there are more than a dozen such short recreations of classic books from the Western canon, all promoting YouTube’s new brief pre-roll ad format.
