YouTube can be used for all sort of things, some of them good (finding The A.V. Club’s expertly produced video content, for example), and some of them bad (getting radicalized into white nationalism via a downward spiral of algorithmic video suggestions because you watched the guy from Fear Factor interview Andrew Dice Clay). Here’s a use that’s good: some person has posted the same 7-second clip of Bill Paxton’s character Dinky Winks from Spy Kids: 3-D: Game Over every day, for more than three years.
“Somebody ring the Dinkster?” Paxton’s Winks asks as he descends from the sky on a parasol. The YouTube channel in question is called DinksterDaily and it delivers just that: this clip, once a day, for 1,241 days and counting. Each video is helpfully numbered, to let you know exactly which edition of the late, great Bill Paxton asking if someone has ringed the Dinkster you are watching.
DinksterDaily has nearly 34,000 subscribers, and breaks from the Dinkster only to occasionally share a compilation of people asking why someone would do this. While your typical Dinkster gets around a thousand views, the first video posted by the account, “Dinkster #1,” has more than 80,000 views.
DinksterDaily is hardly the only fount of online support for the antics of the Spy Kids franchise’s resident theme-park-owner. Three years ago, a Change.Org petition circulated in hopes of landing The Dinkster his own spin-off film.
“One can infer from a quick google search that The Dinkster is by far the most widely remembered character from the original Spy Kids films, even after the films themselves have fallen into relative obscurity,” reads the petition in part. As of this moment it has 29 signatures, and is no longer accepting additional support.