On This Day in LG15 History: Lazy Eye Released

Two years ago today, on July 22, 2006, Lonelygirl15 released the video My Lazy Eye (and P. Monkey gets Funky!).

This was the video that personally made me first fall head over heels for Lonelygirl15. While it was not the first video I watched, I was taken aback by the brilliance of the way she expressed feelings so common to the teen experience. I guess I wasn't alone, because until Girl Tied Up smoked up the YouTube charts in January 2008, Lazy Eye was the most viewed Lg15 video of all time. This vid's thumbnail was also her profile pic on YouTube for a long period.

Views on Aug 29, 2006: 740,336
Views as of Oct. 4, 2006: 990,000
Views as of July 22, 2007: 1,495,287
Views as of today: 2,399,590

The inspiration for Lazy Eye came from the introduction of Rebalancing the World by Carol Lee Flinders, the mother of Creator Mesh Flinders.

An excerpt from the book:

"When I was just a few months old, it became apparent to my family that my left eye had no burning interest into entering a working relationship with the right one, Normally, the brain takes in information from both eyes, and as long as their readings differ only slightly, it can collate them, so that when we look at a tree or a face, we see just one tree, just one face, but we see it whole and in three dimensions. If the difference is extreme though, and the brain can't reconcile the two images, it effectively ignores one of them.

...

Corrective treatment started when I was three or four years old, with a patch I had to wear over my right eye: this was the only way the left eye would find out what it could do and become strong enough to work in tandem with the right one.

...

I started paying weekly visits to the doctor's office, where I would sit for an hour at a time in front of a series of machines that worked the muscles in my eyes much as a room full of exercise equipment works the muscles of today's eager body sculptor.

The machines were of several kinds, but the one I remember most vividly involved a lion and a cage. Through one eyepiece I could see a cage, through the other a lion, and my job was to turn the left eye and hold there for a few seconds so that the lion was inside the cage....

The ability, and before that the willingness to ... see things with both eyes, isolated and integrated, and address them in their wholeness--is perhaps the essential task of human understanding. It's invariably hard--at least as difficult as putting lions in cages.

Sadly, this video does not appear on lg15.com because of the use of the song "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado in the P.Monkey dancing segment.

Lazy Eye fans should also check out this animated remake which came out in October 2006:



Lazy Eye on LGPedia