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A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It's 3 a.m. when, yes ...

... the phone rings.

Think you know who's going to be answering that call? Don't be so sure.

"Ghostbusters," says actress Annie Potts.

That's one of the many alternate endings to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he's expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), Sesame Street's Martian Yip Yip puppets and Alfred, Batman's butler.

It's the hottest election in recent memory, and the first of the YouTube era, so no wonder political video is whizzing around faster than you can tape your cat mouthing "superdelegate." Bedroom producers, the campaigns themselves and everyone in between is using online video to make a point, a profit, both, or neither.

Although videos like actor Jack Nicholson's popular pro-Hillary video, "Jack and Hill," made with help from filmmaker and Clinton supporter Rob Reiner, can score big on YouTube, you don't need to be a celeb or a Saturday Night Live writer to get noticed. Ben Relles put himself on the map when he and two partners brought the world "Obama Girl," the candidate's sultry, singing follower who rings in millions of page views every time she bobs onto the computer screen.

Steve Grove, YouTube's head of news and politics, said videos in that category had seen a "lurch forward" in popularity in the last year, and the last month has been no exception. Those Fox News videos of Obama's fiery longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, accounted for five of the top 12 political videos on the site, and the Obama speech that controversy engendered has been watched on YouTube more than 4 million times, the most ever for a video from a presidential campaign.

Political satire is flourishing too. Obama Girl, played by actress Amber Lee Ettinger, has become a hit factory for Barely Political. In her latest star turn, Ettinger is graphically inserted into a coffee-shop booth with Clinton, pleading with her to find her inner Obama Girl. "Can you see it's hopeless?" Obama Girl sings breathily. "It's becoming Obama Nation. Is there any chance you'll back off, so he'll get the nomination?"

Even solo video-makers working at home have a shot at a real audience. Lee Stranahan, a graphic artist for Access Hollywood who also makes his own videos, lucked into a paying gig with Greenwald's Brave New Films after a campaign-related comedy video of his struck a chord. His November video riffed on the news that Rudolph W. Giuliani had spent taxpayer money to protect his former mistress, now wife, Judith Nathan. "I ended up doing it in five hours. I sent it to TalkingPointsMemo.com — I was an avid reader — and to one or two other sites I liked." Joshua Micah Marshall, the founder of TPM liked it and posted it. The video ended up with 117,000 views on YouTube and more elsewhere.

Political video creators agree that there's no recipe for viral success but that having a group of loyal viewers doesn't hurt. "If we post a video on our front page, we are pretty much guaranteed that about 10,000 people will view it," Marshall said. If it works as viral video, "it will take off." While Fox clips like the Wright segments go viral on YouTube regularly, independently produced right-leaning video is harder to find. Greenwald pointed out that the right "does have clear overt control of certain primary media — Fox and the radios" so has less need for indie outlets. What's more, he suggested, "they're much more top-down. ... You can't drive a top-down message on the Internet," because videos are re-cut for response videos.

Marshall added that "the resurgence of progressive media has come online, largely, I think, because progressive media was so dead in the water for so long" that they had to find a new platform.