TGWTG

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Doug Walker’s Birthday Gift to Man-Child Messiah

Posted by MCM Zevin on January 27, 2013
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , . 4 comments

1/22/13 was the one year anniversary of Man-Child Messiah, well, it’s when I registered the blog, the first posted content went up a few days later, but I digress, we don’t celebrate a baby’s birthday based on when it first spoke, so screw you guys.

Anyway, as you may remember, some months back I wrote an article reflecting on the end of the Nostalgia Critic and pondering where it all fell apart. Later I wrote a second article discussing the trailer for Doug Walker’s future project, Demo Reel and promised an article about that series in the near future that I never got around to writing. Now, as though part of some sick bizzaro birthday gift, this happened on our one year anniversary…

Doug has announced that he is ending Demo Reel a mere 3  months after its launch and reviving the Nostalgia Critic, albeit with some stipulations, namely that the series will try to rely less on repetitive memes, update only every two weeks as opposed to weekly, and throw out the cut off date so that any material is fair game for a review. What I found most amusing about the video is that pretty much every word of my original article is addressed in some form or another, right down to the comparisons to Lindsay Ellis. At most, Doug has seen my article; at the very least this video serves as more or less a confirmation that I was right.

If Doug does somehow ever read this, I’d like to pass along this one piece of advice; branch out. I know in this video you talk a lot about your love of film, but film is only one of a multitude of mediums and none of these exist in a vacuum. The tropes and conventions of film influence and are influenced by the world around it and by putting something other than film under the microscope you’ll expand your show’s frame of reference and open the doors to a more interesting discussion of your subject matter, film included.

I know your typical output is far less substantial than what I’m suggesting but if you’re going to take longer between videos so that you don’t have to rely on tired jokes and forced memes, then why not make your show more informative so that you don’t have to be constantly pushing out jokes in the first place. Hell, if anything the failure of Demo Reel proves that your popularity isn’t necessarily because your fans think of you of you as a comic genius. You claim to love film so why not show that off a little more instead of trying to fit as many memes into a 30 minute long plot synopsis of a movie most people never cared about.

The thing I’ve always found most infuriating about your material is that you’ve consistently shown that you can do all of that but you’ve also shown that you’re either too lazy or too strapped for time to really commit to it, which is worse than outright incompetence in my book. Red Letter Media has proven you can have jokes in a serious film review, so why not, right?

Feel free to prove me wrong but I seriously doubt any of that will happen though. I can’t see this resulting anything more than a more polished version of the turd we were getting for the last four years. To go full comic geek on you here; To Boldly Flee is Onslaught to Demo Reel’s Heroes Reborn but I somehow I doubt that we’ll be getting something comparable to Kurt Busiek’s run Avengers out of all this nonsense…

Goodnight Stale Prince: Reflecting on the End of the Nostalgia Critic

Posted by MCM Zevin on September 21, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , , . 1 comment

Pffffthahahahaha

I’ve been saying this amongst my friends in the months since To Boldy Flee was first teased, that this would be used as a sendoff for the Nostalgia Critic. I’ve felt this way for several reasons but the major one has always been that the videos seemed to be reaching more and more to find movies that fit the bill as “nostalgic”, a problem that never seemed more evident than when he reviewed The Cell back in November 2011. So here we are, just two months shy of the one year anniversary of that aforementioned review of The Cell, and Doug Walker, the man who plays the Nostalgia Critic, has retired the character, using To Boldly Flee as a sendoff for the character, and to that I must say to my good friends who told me he’d never do it, I told you so.

This has been a long time coming; I’ve long held the stance that a weekly release schedule on a production as demanding as something like a review series, where the videos sometimes push 20-30 minutes and end up employing a lot of editing of both your own footage as well as clips from the film, makes it difficult, if not impossible to maintain quality on a long term basis. Corners have to be cut in order to keep it up and looking at the 4 year run of Nostalgia Critic videos it’s obvious that the writing, particularly the quality/depth of the commentary and the humor found in those videos (which became reliant on running gags that got so stale Doug even made a joke about it once), began to suffer as time marched on.

God, I’m so fucking sorry. I feel so dirty.

As someone who once called himself a fan of Doug Walker’s work, I’ve always held that his best videos are easily the ones where he messed with the format in some way. I’ve seen a lot of people give his Nostalgic Commercials videos a good deal of flak, but I honestly thought those were some of the best videos produced late in the shows life. At least he was commenting on something nostalgic and they featured one of the only jokes from the show that I made me laugh after I had become the jaded, cynical post-fan I am today (For the record, it’s the parody of the Lego Maniac song.)
In moving away from film he was forced to abandon a lot of the old standbys in his writing, namely complaining about plot eccentricities that no normal person gave two fucks about, not to mention that many of his running gags have a slant towards being applied to film more than advertisement. It was just more interesting to hear him talk about something other than a movie for once. Unfortunately these videos were the exception, not the rule and maintaining the strict weekly schedule that Doug held over his show’s 4 year run didn’t allow for him to spend much time experimenting with new topics and formats as frequently as he should have; he was too busy churning out new content.

Not only that, but the adherence to a weekly schedule was probably doubly detrimental to his long term appeal because so many of us just got tired of it much faster than we would have if he had allowed for longer gaps between videos. I mean, I could go on explaining this, but I think this image pretty much sums it up far better than I ever could dream of doing with mere words.

Chris “The Irate Gamer” Bores chimes in on the declining quality of Nostalgia Critic’s videos. Never was a sentiment more damning than this.

But it’s not just all of those things, Doug’s work has been surpassed several times over at this point. Doug himself admitted he would never review the Star Wars prequels because he felt Red Letter Media had done such a good job on them he could never outdo them (an exercise in Internet Reviewer hubris Blockbuster Buster was still marching toward last I checked,) but we don’t have to venture outside of Channel Awesome to see where Doug has been outshined, let’s compare Doug’s output to that of Lindsey Ellis, the unfortunately much less popular “Nostalgia Chick”. Ellis, while primarily a film critic, has made videos about children’s toys, 90s pop music, and cartoons, and mixes these in fairly frequently and uses this wider range of subjects to her benefit by allowing it to inform her critical insight on the rest of her material. Even when Ellis does do a movie review, she often explores the content of the film on a much deeper level than Walker ever even attempted to (especially with her last 18 months or so of content.) Instead of straight up maiming the recent Lorax film, she chose to take a comparative look at the themes explored across various adaptations of as a means of highlighting the most recent films problems. You know, actual critical insight from someone purporting to be a critic. It’s sad that can actually be considered fresh and innovative in the Internet reviewer community, but it really is at this point. Where Doug may opted for sputter-cursing, wildly firing a toy gun, or pulling out an oversized bottle of booze to illustrate how shitty a movie was, Ellis actually, you know, talked about the fucking movie. (and before anyone says it; yes, Ellis also make use of story lines, characters, memes/running gags, and other such things I’ve decried, but like I said, she also goes the extra mile to actually talk about the work in question, which has always managed to outshine the things I don’t like about her videos, so fuck off.)

In sending the Nostalgia Critic off, Doug is doing what he needed to do and I’ll give him credit where it’s due on that front. Doug has already announced a new series called Demo Reel; I’d actually like to see Doug give it that good old grown man try and make something that entertains me, contrary to what most my detractors think (as in Dodger of Zion and Blockbuster Buster’s wife) I’m not just some troll who wishes failure down on everyone involved with Channel Awesome; Fuck knows I’m probably going to want to say something about this new series when it starts, so I sure as fuck hope it’s worth watching.

Too soon? Nah.

On a side note, Doug has already revealed there will be a casting call for his new series and if you’re like me, you’re hoping this means it’s time for the long awaited Jaguarcats comeback.

One could only hope so! Be still my beating heart…

The Persona Problem

Posted by n7doctor on June 5, 2012
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Personas are tricky things, aren’t they? You need a high enough social link to unlock more possible fusions, but even then you spend hours re-rolling in order to get the exact combination of skills you want. Know what else is tricky? Talking about Internet celebrity personas.

Okay, I got Repel Light, but I still need Bufudyne since I dropped Chie from my team…

See, the easy way to deflect criticism for anything you say is to have a ‘persona’. The correct way is to admit fault, but why would you want to do that? Let an offensive comment slip? Didn’t do your research? Just pull the ‘persona’ card! Take Man Child Messiah’s favorite whipping boy, Linkara, for example. Lewis (who goes by Linkara, funnily enough) likes to pull the ‘persona’ card whenever somebody notices a mistake in his video. He’s claimed that his supposed fictional version of Linkara is far more arrogant than he is, which makes absolutely no sense if you’ve watched any AT4W video ever.

Any episode of Atop the Fourth Wall contains a bad reading of the comic with the occasional quip from Lewis. Think MST3K but with comics and no humor. Compare this to, say, The Jimqusition on The Escapist. Jim Sterling’s on-screen persona (because the Jim who does the voiceover work is obviously vanilla Jim…which is admittedly pretty weird) is exactly what you’d expect a persona to be. I mean, in one of the episode tags, ‘Jim’ asks to be worshipped akin to a deity.

Just look at this guy. Lectern, sunglasses indoors, giant chainsword, it’s just so obvious that he’s a parody!

The supposed Linkara persona does nothing of the sort. Watch a random AT4W (a name I still don’t understand) and then watch a Linkara Vlog. We can play a game of Spot the Difference! All you need to do is find the parts where Linkara acts differently than Lewis! Spoilers: there aren’t any. Angry Joe is another ‘character’ that I’m suspicious of. Joe Vargas and his irritated counterpart don’t seem to have any noticeable differences in character or beliefs. Joe Vargas is fairly angry himself, and Angry Joe complains about the same things that Vargas hates. These characters are almost completely indiscernible from their real-life counterparts. Sure, Linkara occasionally fights copyright law by dueling Pyramid Head or something, but those are situations, not character elements. I’m sure the Linkara character acts similar to how Lewis imagines he would perform in such a situation.

Blatant lies.

Now, reviewer personas aren’t inherently bad. The Mr. Plinkett character allows for entertaining asides in the midst of insightful commentary. Plinkett and Mike Stolaska (one of the three guys most commonly associated with Red Letter Media and the mastermind behind the Plinkett reviews) certainly share views, yes, but Plinkett is a 100-year old psychopath. Take a piece from his Phantom Menace review, for example. After an excellent bit about how expanded universe stuff doesn’t make plot holes irrelevant, we cut to Plinkett’s creepy basement, complete with bones and a tied-up hooker. I somewhat doubt Stolaska’s basement contains similar horrors.

It’s not really that hard to put together a successful reviewer persona. You can go the Jimqusition route and have an exaggerated self-parody, or you can explore the Plinkett road and create a totally unrelated character that shares the same views. If your persona acts like you and thinks like you, then aforementioned persona is you and falls under the self-insert banner. And god knows Linkara would never make anything with a self-insert character.

But we’ll get to that…

Storylines: Linkara VS Plinkett

Posted by n7doctor on May 13, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , . 11 comments

Something you guys should know about me out of the gate is that I’m a big fan of Mike Stolaska and Jay Bauman; better known on the internet as Red Letter Media. The Plinkett Reviews (that 90-minute Phantom Menace review, for those of you who might not know the names involved) are basically film classes mixed in with pitch-black humor, their B-movies are great fun, and Half in the Bag allows them to just talk about movies as themselves. I usually look down on critics putting storylines in their reviews, but the Red Letter Media guys make their stories work. They can be subtle/in the background (like Plinkett’s wives in the Star Trek reviews) or in the foreground (like Nadine). When looking at review stories, you should consider how to factor them into the review first and foremost, but it’s also important to make sure that you’re writing a good story.  Here are some of the factors that I think are necessary when a critic gets the filmmaker itch and is too lazy to write some original damn stories.

Fuck movies!

1. The people behind these reviews and the storylines attached are actual filmmakers.

Now, I’m not asking for all critics to be professional filmmakers or game designers. There are many great writers who haven’t taken forays into the medium they criticize. However, I’m not saying that it doesn’t help. Mike and Jay obviously have a better understanding of movies and how they work than, say, the guys from Screened or even myself. And don’t get me wrong; I love pre-BermanBraun Screened. Alex Navarro and Matt Rorie do great work. But they don’t have a filmmaking background. And that’s necessary when making your review plotlines entertaining.

Since Mike and Jay know what they’re doing, everything is shot very well, the dialogue flows, and the acting is either intentionally campy or pretty damn great.

2. There’s context for these plotlines that isn’t just “Hey, isn’t it funny that this character is interacting with the reviewer now?”

We’ll get to The Man in a Black Cloak Who isn’t a Registered Trademark of Lucasfilm (“Ahh, I see you know my name.”) later. What the Plinkett and Half in the Bag reviews have in common is their respective overarching plots are original material. Nadine wasn’t in the Star Wars prequels; she’s there because Plinkett is a psychopath who keeps hookers locked up in his basement. And I’m fairly sure The Avengers were never homeless VCR repairmen. Elements related to the movie of the day make occasional appearances, like George Lucas trying to kill the Half in the Bag crew during their The People VS George Lucas review, or a parody of Jack and Jill after the titular Half in the Bag review, but it’s never to the point where you see Mike and Jay becoming Power Rangers and fighting Pyramid Head or something. Because that would be copyright infringement. And we can’t have that.

I hope they serve pizza rolls in Hell.

3. Originality

All I’m going to say about this one is that you don’t see Mr. Plinkett fighting Admiral Bonetopick and his Nefarious Creature or some other generic name like that. When copyrighted characters show up, they’re played for laughs. Other than that, the characters seem to be RedLetterMedia-created.

Did you figure out where this is going after that last comment? Yeah, I’m talking about Linkara and his review “stories”.

Here, we see an example of Linkara’s Spoony envy.

I don’t know much about comics. That’s just not my division. From what I’ve heard, Linkara doesn’t seem to know much about comics. (Not to make my Whiskey Media boner too prominent, but that’s what we have Comic Vine for). No, I’m here to talk about the absolutely terrible storylines Linkara cooks up. We’re going to look at his “work” through the lens of the 3 criteria I listed earlier in this article. Of course, the stories are fairly bad on their own and refuse to die (coincidentally like the bloated continuity of modern comics), but let’s see if we can point down why they failed. I think the criteria I listed earlier could help unravel this mystery. Let’s start with…

1. The people behind these reviews and the storylines attached are actual filmmakers.

NOPE

Linkara is just not a professional actor, director, or literally anything else required to make a good short film or series (since that’s basically what these things are). He’s either doing these things alone or with his girlfriend/family (also not professionals), so the camera angles are usually flat, the acting has the consistency of paper, and the fight scenes lie squarely in the second dimension.

2. There’s context for these plotlines that isn’t just “Hey, isn’t it funny that this character is interacting with the reviewer now?”

NEIN

Let me ask you a simple question: What does Mechakara or Lord Vyce have to do with what the audience knows about Linkara or the world around him? Lord Vyce comes out of nowhere, with a motivation that comes out of nowhere. There’s really no context in the reviews either that doesn’t involve direct copyright infringement, which I’ll get to later. Why is Linkara in Silent Hill and why is he fighting Pyramid Head? Because Linkara is reviewing a Silent Hill comic. That’s it. When The Man in a Black Cloak showed up, it was to parody how the Emperor in Star Wars would manipulate characters with little to no resistance as well as the Vader scene in Revenge of the Sith. The character was played for laughs in a comedic review. Pyramid Head in Linkara’s first Silent Hill review is a serious character for the most part. He exists only for a fight scene.

3. Originality

ABSOLUTELY NOT

I recall doing something similar when I was 9.

You can kiss this one good-bye from the outset, and not just for the Pyramid Head example. During a Power Rangers Zeo comic review, Linkara becomes a Power Ranger. Not a parody of a Power Ranger, as one might hope. A Power Ranger in all but name: morphing sequence, colored suit, even a Megazord.

That’s just on the copyright infringement side. Linkara’s “original” characters might as well have watermarks on them. There Lord Vyce, who is perhaps the most poorly named villain since Darth Maul. Vyce is running from “The Entity”, which is saddled with an equally unfortunate title. (Also, “Judas Liz”? Really?) I stopped watching around that point, but apparently “The Entity” turns out to be infamous Pokemon glitch MissingNo. You gotta be fucking kidding me. We’re back to copyright infringement again?

Why am I even explaining this? Review stories should be either entertaining (Nadine) or seamless (Plinkett’s wives).  Linkara’s stories are neither, having the extra problem of being saddled to a guy who abandoned comedic timing a long time ago and who refuses to change up his formula at all. I’m going to go weep over Whiskey Media’s demise. You guys have fun, and watch out for Captain Imabadguy and The Mysterious Big Bad Character.

Man-Child Messiah: Year One – Angry Joe at the VGAs

Posted by MCM Zevin on March 13, 2012
Posted in: Articles. Tagged: , , , , , . 1 comment

In the beginning I didn’t think much about the stuff I saw online. “Hey look” I would think to myself “the funny man inside the computer box machine said ‘fuck’!” and many laughs would be had. It was a simpler time when I would have been amused by something like Forget About It.

Even when my brain began telling me something was wrong, that the jokes had grown stale and the personalities had grown nasty, I managed to block it out. After all, Linkara just told me that this Frank Miller comic sucked and that Frank Miller has lost his damned mind! “Such quality content, I could not find this anywhere else on the Internet!” I’d lie to myself as I fell asleep to the sounds of “Break Me” by the Irresponsibles.

So here I was, it was late 2010 and I was jammed so far up the anus of Web 2.0 after kissing so much Internet celebrity ass that I barely had time to shout memes at my friends from across the quad.  I would constantly gush about how these YouTube celebrities and the folks at That Guy with the Glasses were on the cutting edge of new media and really shaking things up. I wouldn’t dare think to criticize them; the TGTWG guys were changing the way we thought of and received entertainment. Who cares if the method was demonstrably flawed in ways that could be easily remedied?! Alas, such bliss could not last forever though, I think too much and even if it takes a while for me to feel and act on those thoughts, it’ll still happen. I was dropped suddenly into the boiling waters of enlightenment by Angry Joe.

This video is such a fiercely stupid blow to the head for most people that I’m not even sure if it’s been fully dissected in any significant manner, but like any scabrous wound fester much is laid bare for the world to see once you start to pick at it.

Here we’ve got Joe trying to spin a personal shortcoming as bad PR for the VGAs and judging by the comments, succeeding to some degree, in part due to the insular fanboy circle jerk that TGWTG has built up around itself by tyrannically pruning dissenters from their great fandom tree and in part due to the general ill will that the internet harbors toward the VGAs. Prior to this Joe had spoken out several times against the VGAs and on December 3, 2010 Joe had announced to his audience that he had been in talks to do an interview with the executive producer of the VGAs, Geoff Keighley (pronounced here “GEE-OFF KAY-LEE”, GAMING JOURNALISM folks!) and asked his fans, the “Angry Joe Army”, to submit questions for him to ask Geoff during the interview.

Now one would think that Angry Joe, with all of his hardcore gamer posturing about how poorly the VGAs represent his demographic to the general public, would be able to come up with a handful of questions to ask Geoff on his own, but whatever. Maybe he’s going with the user submitted questions because he wants to be a representative of his base to Geoff, the man in charge of the VGAs, I suppose those are noble intentions, even if my cynical side tells me it smacks of laziness. Joe’s real failing here is not that he went with user submitted question but that he put virtually no research into his questions. Many of Joe’s concerns had been already been addressed (the removal of the corporate sponsorship on the best independent game category) were wrongheaded (arguing for an MMO category despite not being able to name enough MMOs worthy of praise to fill the category out) or were addressed with easily found information that was available publically (who nominates the games). It was clear that the extent of Joe’s research involved having watched the VGA’s in the years prior and having his near-illiterate fans submit ill-informed knee-jerk questions for him to ask.

I love how Joe seems to be pissed that Geoff came prepared for him. This isn’t Geoff’s first rodeo, he’s been knocked around and humiliated by journalists in the past when he went on Fox News to defend Mass Effect back in 2008. Of course he came prepared, Joe is coming on to his turf, asking him to defend the show that he’s put a lot of time and money into producing, Joe arranged the interview in advance and I’m taking it that he familiarized himself with Joe’s work (he seems to know that Joe would “post a video about it” and that he’s going to “rip the VGAs this year”, which implies that he knows who Joe is and how he operates, but this is pure inference) He came prepared in exactly the same way Joe didn’t and as a prize Geoff got to walk all over him and make him look like a fool.  Of course Geoff is going to treat Joe like shit, it was his big night and Joe was wasting his fucking time with his stupid bullshit. The interview went south because Joe dropped the ball; childishly losing his temper towards the end and constantly hounding Geoff about the same stupid bullshit in the press room afterwards only served to solidify this.

The first time I watched this video I was stunned, it’s still hard for me to watch because it’s so damn embarrassing for the guy that I’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t being such an astonishing jackass. Joe displays a spectacular amount of near sighted arrogance; he just can’t seem to realize he dropped the ball aside from not going in there at his angriest. He props himself up like some everyman hero who got dicked around by the man, but in reality Joe was just a chump incapable of seeing when he had bitten off more than he could chew. The fact that Joe later goes on to comment that he felt like the interview was “like two juggernauts going at it” only goes to show that the interview was just another attempt to stroke his ego, that he can’t possibly accept failure, and that the video was put together so that Joe could get congratulatory dick sucking from his fan base for another job poorly done.

Pic only loosely related, but hilarious nonetheless.

Before I start wrapping this up, yes, I know Joe asks his fans to tell him what they thought, but have you seen his reactions to Imagesfromapoet’s video? All of the early comments were deleted when she initially closed the comments section but have been archived here. In them you’ll see Joe illustrate exactly how much he appreciates a negative opinion of his work by twisting what she said and putting words in her mouth, which only further soured the experience of watching the original video. (It must be added that the current comments section on the video is golden too with fans of Joe claiming he is misunderstood because of the “mudslinging” coming from Imagesfromapoet and others of like mind.)

So I was at a crossroads, having had a nice long look at Emperor Joe’s naked ass I realized exactly what his clothes were made of and just how many of these other Internet celebrities had been following the same fashion trends. I was forced to realize exactly how small these people really were and how their near sighted egotism, self-congratulatory circle jerks, and Internet celebrity posturing could only be detrimental to the progress of new media, which I personally find to be an interesting innovation with a lot of potential. I had decided that it was time to think critically about this stuff and begin challenging the norm.  We live in such an A-for-effort society, no one seems to want ask “how could this be better” but only say “That was good enough, job well done”. I wasn’t going to stand for it anymore; bad content is bad content and the only way to fix it is to have its faults identified.

I don’t aim to please anyone with this site. If you enjoy what you read here and agree with me that’s great but I’m not writing with intentions of preaching to the choir, I want to spark discussion and debate on the quality of this stuff, I want to piss people off and hopefully get them thinking a little more critically about the stupid bullshit they take in on the Internet the same way Angry Joe did to me.

Author’s Notes:

1.)    Yes, I know this video happened a long time ago, the point of the article isn’t to make a statement on Joe’s character in the here and now (I’ve not watched an Angry Joe video in ages), but rather to explain how and why this single instance of Joe’s behavior influenced me in the creation of this site. Besides, people are still arguing about this in the comments sections of roughly 20 different YouTube videos, so it’s still open for discussion here as far as I’m concerned .

2.)    A bit of trivia, the site name “Man-Child Messiah” was a reference to Joe that came from a conversation about this video I had with a friend shortly before launching the site. We were originally going to be called “The Kitchen Heat” in reference to the old adage “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen”, but I think Man-Child Messiah fits the tone of the site better.

3.)    My next article will be a lot shorter and not focused on TGWTG.

Forget about it? I wish I could!

Posted by MCM Zevin on February 22, 2012
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Forget About It is a That Guy with the Glasses show I never really paid any attention to until it was recommended to me by a friend who apparently likes it unironically, but I can’t tell you for sure because I refuse to talk to him now. The show is hosted by Sad Panda, the same guy who does all of those droning, horrible end-credit themes that Phelous and Nostalgia Critic have in their videos these days.

Panda is one of Phelous’ cronies and probably owes his position on the site, or at least much of his popularity on the site, to his cameo and crossover appearances in the aforementioned’s videos. I always felt like Phelous sort of slid him into the site under everyone’s noses in the same way that Nostalgia Chick slid Nella and Elisa in and became “Team NChick”. I don’t know enough of the site’s behind the scenes history to make a definitive statement on that nonsense though, so it’s all speculation. I’d probably look a little more into it if that were the point of this article and I was giving more than a negligible amount of fucks, but that’s life.

The hard and fast premise of Forget About It is that Panda reviews movies that he hasn’t seen in a while, and only covers what he remembers from them.

Essentially, Panda feigns stupidity while he talks about a movie. This doesn’t feel at all natural. It’s obviously been scripted from top to bottom with no room for improvisation, which is something that would greatly benefit the kind of humor Panda is going for here. I don’t believe for a second that this is all the man remembers from the Harry Potter films, this is just the only opportunities for pop culture references he could think of. Hey guys, Natalie Portman sure is a female actress who has been in movies! Hey, Ron has red hair! Fuck Gingers am I right guys? There’s a castle, can I mention Camelot? Ok, here’s a clip from Monty Python! Get it, it’s only a model! THAT WAS IN AN ACTUAL FUNNY MOVIE! FUCKING LAUGH YOU PLEABS!!

Humor is a powerful tool in adding to or changing our understanding of a subject, some of the most memorable comedians have the reputations they have because they made us think while they made us laugh. Not deviating too far from the subject matter at hand, go check out Red Letter Media and their film reviews(both Plinkett and Half in the Bag) to see what I’m talking about. With that said, here is my question; what does this say about ANYTHING? What does this do? How does this serve to inform anyone’s opinion or perception of anything? What purpose does this serve aside from entertaining the easily entertained?

But it’s not even just that, a common criticism of TGWTG is that the ego of some of its producers is over inflated when “anyone could do what they do” and I don’t entirely agree with that because some of the people on that site are honestly pretty good and put a lot of work into their videos.  (Sure, it’s not very many of them and the percentage shrinks almost daily with every new contributor picked up by the site being more of an unfunny, derivative, ass kissing hack than the last, but that’s a different discussion for another article.) That isn’t the case here though; this is too easy, it’s too lazy. Anyone could do this. Heck, I can do this. Don’t believe me; I’ll pull a random piece of media off my shelf and do the same thing here, in text form. So, without further ado, welcome to the first and only episode of…

MAN-CHILD MESSIAH CAN’T REMEMBER FUCK!

Castlevania: Lament of Innocence

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a point and click adventure game in the Metroidvania style made famous by earlier entries in the Castlevania series, such as Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest on the NES and Bram Stoker’s Dracula on the Sega CD. In this installment you play as Sephiroth, in a baffling bit if interfranchise continuity between Final Fantasy and Castlevania.

Sephiroth with his trusty Buster Sword

Along the way you meet others in the castle, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who is in the castle looking for her boyfriend, famous Russian pianist and vampire hunter Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter

But before all of that, Sephiroth gets all of his weapons taken away by SpoonyOne as the Gate Keeper.

Send $5 to my paypal now and get this high quality photograph of the SpoonyOne signed by the SpoonyOne himself printed on professional grade paper with a cool glossy finish!

As the game nears its conclusion, we find out that Buffy’s boyfriend is under dark spell of Shaft, unfortunately they could not get Richard Roundtree to reprise the role, so I don’t even understand why this character is in here.

I'm just talkin' about Shaft.

Shaft plans to resurrect Sephiroth’s father Edward Cullen and plunge humanity into 1,000 years of darkness or something.

All evil vampires are Edward Cullen. It's funny because Twilight was a bad book about vampires. SUCK ON THAT TEENY BOPPERS!

Geez, this is fucking stupid, I won’t go on any further, later episodes don’t fare much better and even start abusing the “Meta means pointing out that we do stupid shit and still doing it anyway” gag that so many TGWTG producers have been using the last year to try and validate their dead horse shticks. Point is, this isn’t clever, it’s lazy and stupid.

Next time, we’ll look at the origin Man-Child Messiah in…
MAN-CHILD MESSIAH: YEAR ONE