Evan is 19 now and looking back at his life. “My brain was still developing when I was that young,” so he doesn’t remember every detail of how it all happened, he told me when I visited him at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he is finishing his first year. He can’t recall why he wanted his own YouTube channel, only that he and his father sat at the computer and chose the name “EvanTube.” Evan and Jared uploaded their video and forgot about it. Within several months, it had 70,000 views. Ultimately, it reached 11 million.
At Christmas that year, Jared bought a haul of Angry Birds merch at Toys “R” Us — action figures and magnets, erasers and gummy candy, hoodies and blankets, backpacks and plush toys — and recorded as Evan showcased them, one by one, in front of the family’s dazzling Christmas tree. Since the show-and-tell video, his patter had become polished.
“Thank you for watching my video,” he said in his outro. “Happy New Year. Please subscribe.” The video has nearly 13 million views. It was obvious how, before the camera, Evan “came alive,” as his mother, Alisa, put it when I visited the family in a Northern California suburb.
Toys began arriving at the Lee family doorstep, boxes and boxes and boxes of them. Mash’ems, Lego and Nerf products. Barbie Dreamhouses, Skylanders games, anything “Star Wars.” It was “crazy,” Alisa said, like a “snowball.” Jared bought lots of toys, too. Evan unboxed, reviewed, explained, built and played with toys and games after school while his father recorded him. When the toys were boring or the instructions complex, Jared would “feed me the line and I’d say it back,” Evan told me.
