The Nostalgia Critic

Like a lot of people I became familiar with The Nostalgia Critic and his portrayer/creator Doug Walker in the summer of 2007 on YouTube. At the time, he didn't have anywhere the budget he has today and because of YouTube guidelines his videos had to try to be less than ten minutes. His content then was very to the point, had legitimate and researched criticism, and above all else was actually funny. Not to say he had a perfect thing going on, he did make a few trivial mistakes with his early videos, but for the most part it a harmless string of YouTube videos.

He grew in popularity which led to various others trying to mimic his style of review, getting his own website where he'd not only create content but others as well( many of who became internet stars in their own right) becoming a guest at conventions, and being able to reach out and get people like Mara Wilson("Matilda") and legendary animator Don Bluth("Secret of NIMH") to appear on his content. However, the popularity only went to Walker's head and the content did not get better, it became worse with age.

As time went, the videos became longer than they needed to be, became pretentious( see his woeful editorials, vlogs, and sibling rivalry videos with his brother) more material was not researched better( or at all) and a lot of the humor became mean spirited and condescending to the viewer. The nice and reasonable personality Walker usually portrayed off-screen with fans appeared more and more like a facade than genuine with how eerily similar his views and general attitude of them were to that of his character - Not the night and day difference he used to display when he first started out making videos. Like a lot of the shows and film franchises Walker usually rants on about as "not doing anything new" and "trying too hard to be trendy with today" he too has ironically fallen victim to this and the majority of his newest content is just unwatchable. Furthermore, Walker seems to really think that he is a legitimate film critic and that his character qualifies as such, not quite as the purpose of creating the character was originally just to riff on things for laughs. How fame can really conquer rational thinking...

Walker made a good call ending the character some years ago and decidedly wanting to create newer programs for his social media, but made the mistake of waiting too late in the game to announce it and thus created a backlash from his fan-base so out of worry he brought the character back, but it was never the same - He started making reviews of films that had just came out recently( contradictory to the word "nostalgic"), did more and more crossovers, had skits that ran longer and didn't go anywhere, and the style of humor was unsettling in a similar sense to contemporary Family Guy.

I would only recommend his much earlier content, nothing he's done in recent years. How the mighty have fallen...Ironically, many Nostalgia Critic imitators are proving to do it better than he has in recent years, go figure.

I didn't get into The Nostalgia Critic until fairly recently, as I have several friends from IMDb who are fans of his. As I have said, out of all the internet stars, The Nostalgia Critic is my favourite. No matter how random he can be, he is hilarious and pretty consistent. There are times where Doug overdoes it a tad with the shrieking and the rants, but there are many funny moments in his reviews I can't help chuckling.

My favourite reviews of his are:

Titanic:The Animated Movie- This is an instance when the review is a million times better than the film. The film itself is for me one of the worst animated movies ever, poorly animated and edited and a shameless rip off of films(infinitely better films too) from my childhood. When the rapping dog arrived on the scene, I knew I was asking for trouble. In fact the only redeeming quality was Holding Me. The review of course was absolutely brilliant, with some of the funniest moments I had seen in my life, so much so I almost died laughing.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie- Man I cannot describe how awful this film was. Without a doubt for me this is one of the worst movies of the 80s, poorly written, horrible to look at with terrible acting and incoherent storytelling. Another instance of where the review is better than the film.

Quest for Camelot- I have to admit this was funny. I don't hate this film as much as some do in fact while it has a lot of problems(ie. the mismatched singing voices) it does have its interest points such as the song The Prayer, Devon and Cornwall and the fact the excellent and underrated Gary Oldman does a voice. Once again, I thoroughly enjoyed the review, the Ogre's butt comment especially was hilarious!

Batman and Robin- I especially liked this review for the Bat Nipples comment, that was funny. And I do have to admit this is a movie I don't like, in fact I consider this the worst of the Batman movies. Nice costumes and sets, but a bad script and ridiculous overacting(Arnold Schwarznegger I am looking at you) really bring the film down.

Troll in Central Park- Another great review with nice observations that even I didn't think of, and I have to say the film itself I consider one of Bluth's weaker efforts. I actually like Don Bluth, The Secret of NIMH, Anastasia, American Tail and Land Before Time especially are wonderful, but this film while having some sweet moments, nice incidental music and a very good voice cast is forgettable, mostly to do with the lacklustre plot and uneven animation quality.

Is there a review I didn't like so much? I have still yet to see more of Nostalgia Critic's work, but I agree with another reviewer about Last Action Hero. That film is very underrated, it isn't perfect, but it was smart and fun, and I felt that Doug missed the point of the film plus it wasn't as funny as his other reviews I feel.

I also enjoy his lists-: Top 11 Scariest Moments, Top 11 Saddest Moments, Top 11 Villains and Top 11 Villain Songs. In regard to the latter, I personally don't think any villain song list is complete without the mention of Hellfire from the underrated Hunchback of Notre Dame. That is a brilliant song, operatic, haunting, intense and goosebumps inducing and brings a demonic side to Frollo's character, and to think he wasn't complex enough already.

Overall, if you haven't seen any of Doug's reviews I suggest you do so. Whether you agree with him or not is something else, but he is so entertaining often I am past caring. 9/10 Bethany Cox

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.

To be honest, The Nostalgia Critic as he currently stands deserves one star-- the additional three in my rating are for the entertainment value the series had back in the day, which, unfortunately, the passage of time and the addition of unpleasant hindsight have considerably eroded.

I watched the NC religiously as a teenager in the late 2000s. His reviews were unpretentious and packed with a joke a second. Humiliating as it might be to admit, I still recall his reviews of A TROLL IN CENTRAL PARK and THE TOM AND JERRY MOVIE fondly. These reviews were hardly profound or even that well-made, and many come off as quite dated today, but for the time, the NC was a lot of fun and an internet superstar. His angry critic schtick was copied by just about everybody between 2007 and 2010.

Understandably, Walker wanted to move on to different projects. He was tired of screaming in front of a white wall, even with the addition of skits and special effects to shake things up in later episodes. However, Doug was taken down by his own ego and bad writing. His follow-up series DEMO REEL was a spectacular failure (I saw the pilot the day it was posted and that was enough for me), forcing him back into the NC role. Unfortunately, the new NC was little more than DEMO REEL 2.0-- at that point, the internet review show had outgrown the simpler style that made Walker famous and he himself was only treading water. The horrifying revelations of the Change the Channel documentation only further sealed Walker's fate as a disgraced has-been.

To watch current NC videos is like seeing SUNSET BLVD's Norma Desmond descending the stairs to perform her antiquated Salome before an audience of embarrassed cops and journalists. No one is there because they are entertained: they're watching a train wreck. While reviving the NC might have been a wise move from an economic standpoint, artistically, it's trapped Walker in an eternal adolescence.

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.