The Nostalgia Critic

The Nostalgia Critic was a very early example of the type of entertaining internet personality who doubled as a media critic. He gave reviews and retrospectives to old works with a flair of sarcasm, injecting some funny jokes and insights. Over time his reviews have become a bit bloated and straying from the point, but I still like them.

I'm not usually one to pay attention to Internet celebrities or web series. But I fairly recently discovered the Nostalgia Critic, and all I could think after watching a few of his reviews was, where has this guy been all my life? I could watch his videos for hours.

The Nostalgia Critic is best known for ripping apart movies and television of the 1980s and '90s that he finds corny or otherwise badly written/acted/executed, but recently he's branched out into the 2000s or even something currently in theaters. Chances are, at some point he's going to take a big steaming dump on something you love, pointing out all of its flaws. Even so, I can't argue with most of the points he makes, especially if I'm in tears laughing. He's known to be very loud and profane, and I admit that sometimes he goes overboard with the screaming and hysterics. But I think he makes up for it with clever writing and editing. He's not just a guy yelling at a camera. A lot of thought and effort goes into making an NC episode, and there are plenty of behind the scenes videos to prove it. It also helps to know that the Critic is just a character that Doug plays and he's not really that angry in real life.

Recent NC episodes have featured some sort of subplot with supporting characters, which fans seem to either love or hate. I personally find the subplots hit or miss. Sometimes they're funny and entertaining, and other times they just detract from the review. I think I will always prefer the older episodes with just Doug talking, but it's nice to see the chemistry between Doug and his Channel Awesome co-stars.

The Critic offers more than just exaggerated bad reviews. Sometimes he'll positively review something, and his editorials and top 11 lists are entertaining and insightful. My personal favorite material of his outside of reviewing movies and TV shows are his commercial specials. It was a brilliant idea to review TV advertisements of the '80s and '90s. Watching the commercials for those products you begged your parents for feels just as nostalgic as watching your old favorite Saturday morning cartoons.

To sum things up, I love this guy. He's hilarious, talented, intelligent, and just plain endearing. If I could spend a day making fun of laughably bad movies with anyone in the world, it'd be Doug Walker.

This is the worst YouTuber just watch his review of the wall and you'll see why. he is just a rip off of avgn who's good. if you watch him your supporting a bad person.

On one hand, the Nostalgia Critic is one of the most important figures to me, at least in internet culture. His content introduced me to the world of critical culture, which is watching analysis on their takes on media. And I'm not going to pretend that N. C.'s old content were always bad. These episodes weren't either clever or deep compared to today's contemporaries. But these episodes, Batman and Robin, The Room, Dungeons and Dragons, the bizarre animated Titanic rip-offs, they had their charm and at least was entertaining. He was alongside AVGN as these forefathers of this emerging genre.

But on the other hand, the N. C. Is also the most outdated and ironic critic in all of YouTube. Since his revival and since his Jurassic world review, the N. C. was going to rely more on using live-action skits to evade copyright issues. In theory, this could possibly work if you have enough creativity, quality production, and, great acting and writing. But in execution, Doug Walker had none of them. The skits are, and continue to be, the worst aspect of his more modern episodes. These episodes are plagued with such puss-poor production that it makes The Incredible Bulk look like a James Cameron film, impressively bad and repetitive comedy that feels ripped off from Seizer and Friedberg, horrible pacing that causes all of the scenes to be unintentionally awkward and unbearably boring, sets that are either a lazy green screen or be set in this unbelievably dull office building, and even the music is this repetitive, stock "epic" tune that feels way too overused. But even then, most of the later episodes aren't consistently bad either, just extreme hit or extreme miss (though it's more the later). And these episodes just get worse and more dumber as the years go by.

But then comes the lingering elephant in the room: "Change the Channel," which, long story short, recontextualized him and his company, Channel Awesome. Gone was the perception of a flawed, yet passionate filmmaker who made a company so that others can accomplish their dreams, instead revealed Doug Walker as an inept, out-of-touch, and egotistical idiot. While there were far more insidious individuals who turned Channel Awesome into a toxic workplace of nepotism, sexual harassment, and gross mistreatment, it was Doug Walker who enabled this to happen. He is still complicit with their actions. And as such justifiably resulted in the largest exodus of creators from a YouTube company which brought the death knell for community-based YouTube Channels.

Watching the Nostalgia Critic turn into a parody of himself is genuinely sad. I truly did grew up in that golden age of YouTubers. He was the reason why I got into cinema and the arts, why I became obsessed with how movies get made and why I follow that weird genre of YouTube Critics like him, but more sophisticated, earnest, and actually funny. He's a trailblazer lost making his own trail in circles. He's the Nostalgia Critic, we remembered him because he doesn't anymore.

As far as I'm concerned there are two "Nostalgia Critics" those that were before "To Boldly Flee" and those that came after. Whereas not all the ones before TBF were gold or necessarily all that good, they were a far sight better than what we got afterwards. Let me take a few steps back.

Doug Walker was a man with a dream. He wanted to be the next Stephen Spielberg. He went to school to study filmmaking and when youtube was still new he came up with the idea of being an internet reviewer. His first reviews were fresh, a little raw around the edges, but they were reviews as done by a screaming, sarcastic, angry guy. But as time went on they became more polished and, dare I say it, enjoyable. I genuinely started to enjoy this and through him I discovered other that I still watch to this day. But time changes things. Whereas before he would have small asides, snide comments and short little skits, as time went on they practically became the driving force. Too much time was devoted to them and less on analysis or just having fun with it. And while reviews like "The Room" are still among one of my favorites they're just not like that anymore.

But Doug got tired of the whole NC shtick and wanted to move onto different things. So he killed the character off, started up "Demo Reel" which was unwatchable, tried his hand at a game show called "Pop Quiz Hotshot" which was equally painful and because the fans wanted it he went back to being the Nostalgia Critic.

It wasn't the same. Now the skits took up a good portion of the review. In some cases they practically were the review. And it became less about the movie and more about Doug and the Chicago Crew, all of whom are community theater actors at best. The show just got to be unwatchable. And then came the whole Change the Channel bit.

if anything this served to sour me on the whole NC show and the cast of characters that seemed to grow with each passing month. Too often there would be recurring characters with no hint of subtlety. It was all in your face obvious and there was literally none of the magic that the show used to have, It was reduced to a paint by numbers set and I finally signed off forever.

I would love it if he went back to his old way of doing things. One camera, short asides, maybe a thirty second sketch and actual care taken to review the movie whether it was good or bad. But sadly he seems stuck on this new way of doing things. Sadly he will never really achieve his dreams but will be playing this character until it stops being profitable and then will fade into obscurity having accomplished very little.