168 - The Nostalgia Critic

For what is worth AJ, your critiques always come from a place of kindness and grace. Your podcast persona seems very sweet and gentle. So no buddy, you are nothing like the nostalgia critic.

I think that the most astonishing thing about The Nostalgia Critic is the sheer fucking inability to improve in any regard, even on the most basic technical levels. Everything about the series is frozen in time, and even with all the money and new people they bring in throughout its entire existence, nobody ever improves the editing, the filming, the fucking sound, nothing. And this isn't even mentioning the writing. All of his criticisms are completely valid and lack any real understanding of the text or intentions of the filmmakers, to the point that you have to really wonder if he even understands what makes movies work. I think that Folding Ideas put it best when he said that Doug is a fundamentally incurious person, that he wants to make art like the movies he enjoyed when he was a kid, but he lacks any real creative intuition or desire to improve on his skills. Doug himself seems to be a perfectly decent person, but there's just a fundamental lacking in every aspect of his creative abilities. I do actually agree that The Show Must Go On is by far his best creative work, partly because he is working off of his own ideas and insecurities for inspiration, and that he's making something genuine with it, but also because he's ripping off another actual work which is actually competent. It's him working through his feelings of failure and inadequacy, and how by going back to the formula which is unoriginal and uncreative but which is successful, he has to betray his desire to be an actually creative person. It is in a lot of ways a horror story where the protagonist is fully defeated and gives into banality and failure. It's brushed with quality, but immediately loses it. Also, as a huge fan of The Wall, an album that meant to much to me as an emo teen, it feels like a violation to hear the Nostalgia Critic version. It's just so fucking stupid and bad and just shits all over this thing that I love in the most asinine ways possible.

As someone who still actually follows Cinema Snob but (also still) finds Doug Walker nauseating, I was very disappointed when Doug was in the Black Christmas 2019 review and I couldn't watch it. I still think about it every day.

https://youtu.be/mmHpxZHWX1E I think about this video a lot

🍪 but only for AJ

Those wall clips were actually agonizing

Pink Floyd: The Wall wasn't nominated for any Oscars, but you know what was? Quest for Camelot. FULL CIRCLE!

Kind of an old episode, but I felt the need to say some stuff cause this is a topic near (and dear??) to me: I was an avid Nostalgia Critic watcher from the time I was 12-15, being recommended his videos around the time he started doing the clip less reviews. He was kind of like Baby’s First Media Criticism for me. It was the first time I ever began to think about movies, and as a little tiny baby artist I began (like, tiny tiny steps towards analysis because like you said his analysis is dogshit) to realize what made it didn’t make a piece of art tick, which eventually became very important to me. I mildly fell off before change the channel because I was growing out of him, and when The Wall review came out I firmly rejected him at last because The Wall (album) and Pink Floyd generally was influencing me artistically far more than Doug ever did. Aj’s fear that he will become Doug Walker is also, weirdly, something I fear, not in terms of being a critic but in being an artist, especially since becoming familiar with the failure of Demo Reel. I am an aspiring writer, and my fear is that I will try things, fail, and get pigeonholed into a role I do not want to play and stagnate into a lack of self awareness. I worry as well that I could be making bad stuff and I’ll never know. I don’t WANT this to happen (I try to constantly gain new perspective on my art and the art of others), but my fear is that it will just happen to me because there is something in me that is incapable of creating what I desire. Much like Doug Walker Great episode, seriously ❤️ I did in fact sign up for your patreon for this episode BUT I’ve also been listening to a lot of your free shit in the past few weeks, and you guys are just so fantastic!

AJ’s ending on this resonated with me, and the earnestness and vulnerability made me tear up. It was fantastic. (I worry so much so much that my creative output is accepted by people who are just humoring me) Additionally Brian and Josh’s affection for their friend and high opinion of their work is so touching I never engaged with the Nostalgia Critic but that speech made this one of my favorite episodes

Recently a French podcast about bad movies "nanarologie", did a 3-parter podcast about the 3 Channel Awesome movies. They managed to have as guests the two frenchmen who were in those movies : Benzaie for Suburban Nights and SadPanda for To Boldly Flee. They basically coroborate everything that was said about the production of those movies.

It's bizarre how Doug Walker has somehow made out better after Not So Awesome than most other people

The Not-So-Awesome doc was brutal in the way that it shattered many of our delusions about what fun it must have been to be a TGWTG reviewer in the early days. Obviously the actual crimes were the worst part, but I was really sad to learn that the Walkers were so dictatorial about their shitty "style" of reviewing and filmmaking to the point where they didn't trust other reviewers to deviate from Doug's exact formula. This was at its worst when filming the crossovers, where other reviewers weren't given any opportunity for creative input into their own characterization or dialogue. I turned a blind eye to it at the time because I was so excited to see my faves all on the same screen, but looking back on it it's abundantly clear that everyone is playing bizarre Flanderized versions of their characters. I'm sure it's lost now, but I'd love to see the alternate takes where they were allowed to punch up their lines (which Rob would allow them to shoot to placate the cast, but never had any intention of actually using).

I'm not gonna lie... I always loved JonTron. And then I listened to this episode and I rethought like everything I've ever supported... Besides this show obviously!!

Coming soon to NBC at 8pm (7pm central): Vaggle & Foobie. This zany new comedy duo will have your sides aching!

Grinning and tearing up at once at the end there AJ, thanks all of you for being yourselves and sharing that. It’s incredibly special and makes me think more carefully about the world

I heard you guys on Lions Led By Donkeys last week and was instantly hooked to subscribe when I saw this topic. Great stuff!

You've got to a least admire the insanity of making a whole terribl musical "parody" with corey taylor for a movie you feel completely indifferent about like why the wall to do a review musical of. I'm sure theres got to be other options, I really wanna know why the wall specifically but feel like the answer is gonna be something stupid like corey taylor or his son mentioned he liked pink floyd

🤾‍♂️🍪

Your greatest episode yet

Corey Taylor’s kid used to be a regular at a coffee shop I worked at and he would always come in and loudly sing along to music he was listening to on his headphones while in line and then he’d order a vanilla shake in a fake English accent, ending the interaction with "thanks, bruv."

You guys need to watch area 88

I was in the middle of work when I listened to this this morning and had to fuckin pause where I was for a hot second when that drive-by mention of HAWP happened because it sent me back 15 goddamned years

Brand hecking new patron here - that ending had my heart.

I am exactly the right kind of elder millennial that I’m scrubbing through the episode to see if the tangentially-related person I had a quasi-date with is mentioned

First you referenced the kayfabe of AVGN Vs The Critic and later you talk about how he's parodying a guy while also being that same type of guy. That is *also* wrestling. Ric Flair wasn't a good guy flaunting his money and talking about all the women he'd slept with, but slowly he unironically became that guy, completely losing his self awareness. Also you just got me to watch the first 10 minutes of Gervais meets Shambling and omg does this kid get destroyed by Gary.

They gave him a bat credit card!

Love to be the final collaborator, the audience, with TWoaPW

Greatest interstitial of all time, oh my god

23:45 I paused immediately because I thought I knew who that was. So much of that review was written with the same weird phrasings and pointless adverbs you can find in Ben Shapiro's writing

🍪

Some of us are still on FARK. And I think it's worth pointing out that Drew Curtis decided many years ago that exploitative soft porn, homophobia and other negative content did not belong on his website, and got rid of them.

Mopetuah, Pander on that hell

This showed up in my inbox, like "oh NOOO!"

Don't worry Brian, /I/ was impressed by and envious of your All State Choir brag

As someone who watched too much of this stuff way back when I’m fascinated by Doug(and his team)’s lack of progress, the anniversary films in particular. Whilst Kickassia isn’t good, the basic idea – a group of friends invade and take over a country, but it’s just a weird micro nation in Nevada – isn’t bad, I could imagine an old Danny McBride property using a plot like that. Suburban Knights is less inspired, but the basic plot of a LARP accidentally getting involved in real magic is the plot of several (likely also bad) small budget nerd movies. Finally you hit To Boldly Flee and it’s just…nothing, it’s an Epic Movie, just a series of references to other movies with less coherence than a sketch show. No wonder this one was the last straw for so many involved, I can’t imagine coming back year after year to a project that gets worse each time, even aside from the terrible treatment many were subjected to.

Holy shit that essay reveal hit me like a ton of bricks. That was very brave, AJ

I never cared for Nostalgia Critic or AVGN. Any Homestar Runner people here? That was my jam, and unfortunately(?), my entire sense of humor for years.

YouTube went from 10 minute videos to an eight hour essay on an isometric horror game. Damn, run times have really inflated over the years

the MST3K comparison really confirms my suspicion that all of the good parts of our modern culture started on minneapolis public access TV

Yippee yippee!!

I like the idea of a Worst of All Possible Chicks but there is a risk they might progress stylistically really fast and end up being a Hugo nominated essayist with a legitimate career as a fiction writer and…I dunno, it’d make for some really weird comparisons.

oh my god. oh my god it's happening

Nostalgia Critic and I go waaaaay back. I watched him after my relative told me about him; she probably thought I was a good audience for his content. Why? I was watching Irate Gamer at the time 😭😭. No other episode is making me itchy to talk about this with the fellas!!

🍪 toss

This is going to be roughly as much of group therapy for my childhood as the Adventures in Odyssey episodes.

Nearly three hours on the Nostalgia Critic? Well I know what half my workday is going to be listening to.

🫴🍪

I received Chuck Norris' autobiography when I went through confirmation at my church.

This feels like a topic designed specifically to exorcise the cringiest parts of me