Some The Archive Rewind projects begin with an idea.
This one began with a sold-out night at the LA County Fair, a concert report I posted the next morning, and a folder of original files that were somehow still here sixteen years later.
Those files became our latest long-form The Archive Rewind video.
Selena Gomez & The Scene at the LA County Fair goes back to September 18, 2010, in Pomona, California. Selena was still starring as Alex Russo on Wizards of Waverly Place. Kiss & Tell was the album that defined this era of the band. A Year Without Rain was only three days away.
But putting the video together became almost as interesting as rediscovering the footage itself.
Going Back to 2010
I had been waiting to see Selena sing.
Through some rather unfortunate circumstances, I missed her show in Anaheim the year before, and it took almost a year for her to schedule another one in Southern California. I did meet her on the Wizards set that February, so I guess it all worked out. Still, a proper concert was something I hadn’t gotten to yet.
On September 18, that changed.
DCFans was covering Selena during her Disney Channel years, so I brought my cameras. I took photos, shot video, and the next day I wrote about it in My Selena Gomez Concert (Part 1).
I wasn’t recording a documentary. It was coverage. A concert report. The kind of material I was collecting while covering Disney Channel. The story went online. The original files went into the archive.
Building a Video From What Survived
One of the rules we’ve been developing with The Archive Rewind is simple: Don’t pretend we shot a modern documentary in 2010. There weren’t multiple cameras, a professional sound mix, or endless B-roll. I had my Fuji, a BlackBerry that produced a handful of extra photos, and whatever I thought was worth recording that night. That’s it. So rather than trying to disguise those limitations, the finished video embraces them. We went through the surviving footage and photographs and tried to reconstruct the night from what was actually there. Voiceover is used sparingly. Text helps provide context. Most importantly, the original footage gets room to breathe. The video stays with Selena’s own songs: “Round & Round,” “Kiss & Tell,” “The Way I Loved You,” “Naturally,” and “Magic,” which she introduced as the last song of the night. The cold open is the chorus of “Naturally.” After the end card, there’s one last unannounced moment from the fair. That is really what The Archive Rewind is supposed to be. Not recreating 2010. Showing you 2010.
A Night Between Two Albums
One of the details that jumped out, once we started assembling the night, was how precisely this concert sat in her career. The giant Kiss & Tell cards were on stage. That album was still the era. And yet A Year Without Rain was only three days from release. She even performed the title track and introduced it as the name of the new album.
Sixteen years later, you can feel that in-between moment in the footage. The band is still the Kiss & Tell band, with the next record already peeking through.
A Few Things That Didn’t Make the Final Cut
Long-form doesn’t mean everything makes it in.
Selena mixed covers into the set that night, including Taylor Swift, Weezer, Katy Perry, Pat Benatar, and Jason Derulo. I wrote about those in the original post. For this video, we stayed with her own songs and let that be the record of the night.
“A Year Without Rain” was the hardest one to leave out. It ties directly to where she was that week. The cut already had a good flow without it, though, and adding it would have pushed the video longer than it needed to be.
Most of the BlackBerry photos from that night were too blurry to use. One survived: a shot of the stage before the show.
And then there was “Crush,” or rather the lack of it. I recorded every other song I could, but that one is the gap I already confessed to the next morning, when I was just glad I’d packed a second battery.
Why We’re Putting This Online Now
That’s ultimately the point of The Archive Rewind.
A lot of this material was originally created for a completely different Internet. The concert report went up on DCF the next day. The files sat in the archive. I had no idea I’d be revisiting them sixteen years later.
In 2010, these files were current coverage. Then the years started adding up. DCFans changed. Disney Channel changed. Selena’s career changed.
The recording didn’t.
None of this was created with 2026 in mind. It was just a night at the fair that seemed worth documenting.
Sixteen years later, I’m glad I carried the cameras.
And I’m even happier that the footage survived.
Watch Selena Gomez & The Scene at the LA County Fair on The Archive Rewind:
There is plenty more sitting in the archive.
We’re finally rewinding it.