The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall
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- Опубліковано 17 тра 2024
- Clickbait Title: I remember it so you don't have to.
Mild flashing effects in the last 40s.
"Pink Floyd - The Wall" deals with mature subject matter and contains intense imagery some viewers may find distressing.
As a full disclosure, I was briefly a contributor to Channel Awesome for about six months in 2014/15. Channel Awesome CEO Mike Michaud severed the relationship after he received angry emails about an exposé of 8chan I had published on Medium and I refused to take it down or commit to not doing "anything else like that." Several of the songs are a roundabout veiled reference to #ChangeTheChannel, a hashtag that gained some traction in the spring of 2018 as contributors and former contributors to Channel Awesome spilled all the beans about CA's incompetence and mismanagement. What started as a bunch of people sharing stories about how the scheduling page never worked right escalated to Channel Awesome leadership releasing a counterattack letter in which they inadvertently admitted to covering for a sex predator.
Fantano (who I stole two lines from): • Nostalgia Critic's The...
Ms. Lola: • Nostalgia Critic Has a...
JAR Media: • The WORST Movie Review...
Written and performed by Dan Olson
Crowdfunding: / foldablehuman
Twitter: / foldablehuman
0:00 - The Wall
7:37 - Doug
19:13 - We Need More Victimization
25:51 - So Long, Weird Song
33:34 - Comfortably Dumb
34:48 - It's not that vague, Doug
38:44 - The Trial - Розваги
"Fascism and being beaten in school are fake problems, unlike being cancelled." - Doug Walker, presumably.
The sad thing is, that actually worked, because back in the day the concept of videos of people screaming or freaking out about things (more often than not over call of duty) was a novelty on the internet and it had spread like wildfire, and to a generation that never saw this kind of video before... I can humbly admit I used to think people like Doug could be onto something, thankfully he himself ruined it by starting to lambast media that was actually well received and beloved, lol.
@@Roler42 Yeah I remember.
AVGN was pretty good, but ironically his show lambasting riff content was misinterpreted by the masses and he spawned a generation of unironic shouty men.
Kinda odd. I beat up a fascist but was myself beaten by the poor.
(Edit: in HS. The poor got much more violent towards me after hs.)
@@deathdog1392 aw man! The poor took all of my means of production during the lunch break :(
@@deathdog1392Man, I dont know you, and you're intentionally not sharing the whole story, but the fact you even see yourself as being beat by "the poor" and not the people who beat you up, just kinda makes you seem like a jackass with terminal us vs them syndrome
Calling Doug Walker, a guy who has been in the game for over a decade, an aspiring filmmaker is such a sick burn
He was aspiring back in 2007
@@thisisawsome34253212yeah, exactly. by the time this video was posted, ideally he'd have reached such an aspiration. his ruination of the wall is the best "film" he's ever made. i say that agreeing with every single thing in this video.
@@zubetp A massive chunk of Doug's incompetence is from refusing to learn how a camera works and never hiring an actual crew.
If I can guess why the videos always look as bad as they do, then here are my points:
1. No Camera Focusing
2. No Lighting
3. No White Balancing
4. No Color Correction
That's all I've got so far. Please let me know if you can notice more.
@@thisisawsome34253212You uh...
Hmm...
Did you uh...
Doug good buddy, did you uhm, mean to leave the lens cap on there by any chance?
“Shit!”
“Not again.”
but this is not a sick burn, it's just reality. Guy refused to grow and stayed where he was decade ago.
Doug shares the most weirdly specific niche with CinemaSins
"My brand is based entirely on me deeply misunderstanding art and then insulting my own misinterpretation, and coming to the conclusion that art is inherently pretentious and I'm just smarter than anyone else"
Aka "Let me show this strawman i made and how awful the people who inspired it are"
I dunno, I feel CinemaSins intentionally misses the point a lot *just* to make a joke they couldn't make if they got the point, but Doug just legit misses the point, and I'm not sure which is more irritating lol
@@pasarasaki9007 to revel in ignorance out of your own free will is worse than be unable to understand
I've always thought it was for comedy and not to be taken seriously. they play characters
@Chi-Drumming I don't accept that excuse from either channel, for different reasons.
Nostalgia Critic was genuinely accused of sexually harassing the people he employed, and after those allegations came out, Nostalgia Critic's channel was suddenly filled with anti-cancel culture jokes. That point is mentioned in this video.
If you're "playing a character", and conveniently using that character to try to downplay sexual misconduct allegations made against you and to try to victimize yourself, you're a piece of shit.
And CinemaSins similarly has an extremely long and thorough history of being unjustifiably hostile towards a bunch of people, but then responding to anyone calling them out for it by saying "you're taking it too seriously bro, it's comedy"
You can't use "comedy" as an excuse to shield yourself from the consequences of your genuinely shitty behavior, which coincidentally both of these channels have a long, well-documented history of doing.
"The problem with using Fenna's horny edgelord steampunk furry OCs" felt like the verbal equivalent of watching someone load a shotgun before using every shell on a single target. Brutal.
It's even more impactful when Dan by his own admission has no clue who Fenna is. But his art (as art tends to do) exposes his true self by just looking at it.
@@spark154this response really made me laugh. So true
This analogy made me laugh so hard
43:25 for anyone looking to experience this multiple times
I mean, where is the lie, though?
"Doug wants to be a filmmaker, he wants to make art, but he can't because he's a fundamentally incurious person who isn't much interested in what other people think or feel."
Why did such a polite takedown feel like a gruesome murder? Jesus Christ. Please let me lead my life in such a way that Dan never talks about me like that.
There's got to be an equation to learn from this. The more insightful and less malicious an insult is, the more it hurts.
Because Dan is established as a person who doesn't do the angry shouty nonsense in any of his youtube videos, even for things that provoke genuine anger. Combine that with how Dan also usually tries to keep things professional and factual and then it's clear why him stepping out of that, even just a little, feels so vicious.
Stop! Stop! He's already dead!
@@nathanhall9345 I call it "disappointed dad" energy.
A lot of internet takedowns are like someone charging at their target screaming and swinging an axe. This was a slow knife between the ribs.
This video is just such a love letter to Doug Walker's The Wall
That's savage! Bravo!
Slow clap for that one! 👏 👏 👏
especially the ending. XD
noice
Fatality!
"soldiers sent to war don't die for their country, they just die"
I get chills every time I get to that part.
total gut punch@@simonoliver4751
This plus „The boys beat the Germans and came home just in time to build the atom bombs.“ might be my favorite part of the whole video
++++
One veteran wrote to a newspaper saying "I did not fight for a flag, I fought for my country". On many occasions, soldiers have said that when you are on the battlefield, you do not fight for your country, you fight for the people next to you.
its truly baffling how doug over-literalizes so much- until its actually supposed to be literal. during the fascism scene, a scene so literal it explicitly refers to "queers" and people who "look jewish," he reads this as... "yeah well that doesnt really mean anything, does it?"
Do you think this is because he thought it sounded just like a modern politician he's seen? Because that would be scary
I do honestly think he views Hitler as a reference you make when you want to win an argument and not like an actual person
also might have something with Malcom (the black guy in the NC vids) apparently being one of those "facts over feelings" types
Guy dressed as a fascist telling his followers at a rally to put jewish people, gay people, and black people against a wall: "hmm, I wonder what they meant with that"
I don't see that as literal tho because as an actual fascist we don't target those things we target those who "actually are Jewish" and who "look queer" 😊
14 yr old me: spends 50ish mins watching Doug Walker review a movie I didn't bother watching
24 yr old me: spends 50ish mins watching Dan Olson review a Doug Walker video I didn't bother watching
Character growth
oh, how the turn tables
Biggest babyface turn of all time
What happens at 34?
@@aparadise.9717 Creating your own reviews of Dan Olson videos that you didn't bother watching.
“Yeah, school sucks, stop whining about it,” is a pretty ballsy take from a guy who wrote a song whining about how Twitter sucks.
I'd honestly like to give Doug the benefit of the doubt and say he probably was just thinking of ways to fit funny lyrics into the song and just thought that changing the lyrics to be about Twitter was just funny without giving it too much more thought. But it's also like, just on a basic fundamental level, man..... That idea does not go with his other ideas about what's not important or handled properly.
"Is WWII with monsters too silly" doesn't really work when you took a song about fascism and turned it into a song about Twitter arguments.
It's just such a Doug thing to be so focused on trying to work jokes in that he doesn't even realize how hypocritical that makes his actual review.
Nobody ever accused Doug Walker of being too self aware.
@@dracocrusher I think you give Doug Walker too much credit, given the Change the Channel incident that saw the Channel Awesome site gutted for a large part.
@@AnakhaSilver Change the Channel honestly does prove my point a lot, if you read through the Not So Awesome document Doug doesn't really come off as someone whose that.... I guess I should say thoughtful...? He's egotistical, sure, but he just wants to make dumb jokes out of whatever he can. Like if you watch their first viewing videos, it's pretty clear that the first ideas they have watching a movie are basically the ones that stick. It's kind-of nuts how often Rob will just say a joke in the moment and then it'll end up in the review as-is word for word. And that HONESTLY feels like it explains a lot of this, doesn't it?
Like it really does seem like they were just watching the movie at the school part and Rob was just like "Yeah, fuck highschool!" and that made Doug laugh, so he put it into the review and worked the WWII joke around that one. That might seem super weird, but that's literally the level of thought we're dealing with here. And then once they had the script ready they just got cameos together and went through all this effort as usual without questioning it.
@@dracocrusher One critique i saw on another video was how if in kept in Run Like Hell he could have changed the lyrica a bit to be about two people yelling at each other on twitter. The guy even did a 10 or so second proof of concept. Idk who made the video any more if i or someone else finds i will do an edit
People really can't see the irony in a statement like "algebra sucks, you should be teaching us how to calculate our taxes and understand mortgage repayment" huh
wOtS tHaT hAvE tO dO wItH iT?
How have I never noticed that? That’s hilarious, gotta remember that.
Why do people go to the gym and lift weights? Who is going to spend their everyday life lifting heavy pieces of iron over and over? What a waste of time! 🙄🥱😴
@gothicchad6293(1) kids don't spend that much time in school and it's actually a huge problem now that both parents are usually working full time. If school's job is to prepare kids of adulthood then kids should be in school 9-5 every day just like they will be at work for the rest of their lives. (2) understanding the fundamentals is crucial because it gives kids a flexible foundation for life-time learning, which everyone needs if they don't want to be made permanently unemployed by automation. (3) schooling needs to teach less "just follow the instructions" and more "understand why the instructions work" because it is only the latter that allows students to think of new ways to do things - again which will be crucial to avoid them being replaced by robots and AI. (4) parents will not allow schools to actually teach the systems behind taxes & mortgages because its "too political" - e.g. you'd never get permission to teach kids that taxes are so excessively complicated because of a century of different governments pandering to different industries and voter blocks by writing in specific loop hole, exemptions, and tax credits that specifically favour them, or that audits are biased towards low/middle earners because the rich can afford better lawyers & accountants than the gov't agencies trying to police them.
I'm still stuck on "High school should teach people useful things like first aid and how to do taxes, but why are you complaining? High school sucks for everyone! Get over it!"
I think I might have finally realized how Doug is able to say all this stuff about The Wall and then say with a straight face that he liked it and wrote a love letter to it: it's because he really likes the music, but thinks the meaning is mostly superficial to the music. He doesn't realize that he's criticizing an art film which uses music to convey its story--he thinks it's a jukebox musical which uses a bare-bones plot as an excuse to deliver good music. He makes these kinds of weird, baseless takes all the time, it's foundational to his style, but it usually doesn't offend that many people because you can chalk it up to whatever layer of ironic humor. The reason it failed so spectacularly this time is because it was based off of such an egregious misinterpretation of genre: THE WALL IS NOT MAMMA MIA.
this is exactly it and reading it makes me want to rip my hair out
EXCELLENT comment, I think you nailed it.
The guys who gets mad at Rage Against the Machine for "getting political instead of just playing the music."
You're right, Mamma Mia is much more serious and a bleaker examination of a persons life
Holy shit, you are right. Fuck, that's even more infuriating.
"Certain things are going to take all week, no matter how half you ass them."
I'm going to start using that in my every day speech. No matter how half you ass them. Genius.
dido lol
totally love your channel to Knowing Better, i have watched the scientology vid a bunch of time's, very informative. how did you get Tom Cruise to cameo LOL.
Red Pill is also great as i also had to stop and ask myself "how many times have i been THAT guy" thanks for helping people know better.
hey it's my two favorite creators together
Look behind you! It's an alien!
I need a film written by Dan. His lines are always devastating.
I remember reading something on Twitter that really stuck with me -
"I want to have the confidence Doug Walker has when he calls a movie unfunny and in the next second he does a skit
".
savage
that made me fucking bust laughing
@@DayanaAoM a good joke doesn’t need a big budget
@@DayanaAoM yeah, doug's stuff is unfunny completely independently of the size of his budget
@@DayanaAoM Right, which is exactly why we have Monty Python and the Holy Grail being considered a classic of comedy cinema despite its budget not being massive, even for the 70's, coming up to about $2,000,000 in modern day currency with an extensive amount more put into the physical act of production than any of Doug's videos and not necessarily too much more in the writing department for what is capable for a human being.
Doug has been writing for 13 years now, plenty of time to actually become a good writer.
if Dan Olson ever publicly called me "incurious" I would simply blink out of existence
FUNDAMENTALLY incurious
That hurts so much worse somehow
years later, i *still* can’t get over how, even ignoring the visual aspect, Doug heard a song that contains multiple slurs across only a handful of lines and thought “yeah, this is vague enough to be about anyone”
"This sounds exactly like that modern politician, so it could be about anything"
I guess in a way, the slurs used in the song are meant to illustrate something; it doesn't specifically target those groups, because its purpose is to show Pink basically going "So you want me to have this power, all this power, no matter the cost to you, to me, to anyone? Okay then, then I'll use it, but I'll use it as destructively as I possibly can and hopefully destroy either myself or all of you in the process" - note that the line is "if I had my way, I'd have *all of you* shot", and my reading is that he's not talking about any specific group there, but rather lashing out at the people around him and the people who enable him in general.
So there's a point to it being vague, but not in the way Doug sees it. Sure, it's not a "Pink is turning racist" situation, but a "hatred is the false escape that deeply injured, damaged, angry people turn to - including those in positions of power" is still damn specific enough.
I distinctly remember Doug playing that exact clip of the movie, slurs and all, in his review of the Felix the Cat movie about a decade prior to illustrate how "crazy" some setpiece in the cartoon was.
the funniest part of the og review was doug saying the wall was "a little full of itself" while standing in front of a hall of giant framed posters of himself and his reviews and it wasn't even intentional
The whole studio looks like a tribute for himself
@AT Productions no, those are definitely channel awesome posters. see there's nothing wrong with having art of stuff you're proud of, i just thought the juxtaposition of him saying that and spending the whole review calling the movie self-absorbed and being surrounded by posters of himself was funny. hell, i have copies of art i've done
@AT Productions see I would have said Ready Player One myself...
@@THEmuteKi amusingly, I heard the RPO novel had way MORE Spielberg worship, and he made the screenwriters take a lot of it out of the film
@AT Productions - the suicide squad one thats fully in frame during that scene is the poster made for his review of suicide squad. Not fanart.
You know, one of the most ironic parts of Doug's criticism is that he makes such a big deal about how tone deaf it is to "compare World War II to high school", only to then clumsily compare FASCISM to TWITTER DISCOURSE
Right after that massive scandal where Channel Awesome was accused (with tons of evidence) of cruelty and abuse of its employees, as well as a hefty dose of sexual harassment. I've seen musicals about police brutality that were less tone-deaf.
@@zachflag6506 another ?
@@xXFlameHaze92Xx another what?
@@zachflag6506 another scandal
The sad part is there is an interesting comparison to make with fascism to twitter but he completely misses it.
I genuinely don't understand how Doug went from sarcastically saying "School is evil because it prepares you to get a job, how awful!" but also "School doesn't teach you about taxes or mortgages or job interviews, just useless stuff like algebra!" because... that means that even his basic, misguided surface-level criticisms are completely contradicting each other?!?
What we have to understand about Doug is that he doesn't actually believe that there is any struggle in school that can't be overcome... unless it's other kids comparing him to the cartoon character Doug to the point of continuing to angst about it into his mid 30s.
I also like that Doug Walker considers algebra "useless", even outside of my math-intensive job I use algebra to scale recipes when I'm cooking
@@Doubtfulgrace101 It would have been truly awesome if in "We need more Victimization," the theme from Doug played and he shat his pants right there.
Well, GROW A PAIR OF DAMN BALLS YOURSELF, DOUG. Pissing your pants because you were compared to a cute cartoon character, when Eric Cartman existed at the same decade!
For the record, as someone who entered school in the late 90's when South Park premiered who shares the same name as that psychopath, it's a genuine miracle that I wasn't compared to Cartman until recently, when a dumb shit right-wing gun nut mocked me and said "You're Eric Cartman, with his small penis!" *BIG eyeroll*
Maybe if I were a child, a lowbrow attack like this would have hurt more than it did as a fully grown adult.
I've thought about this too hard and I've come up with a few reasons for this. 1) Doug forces comedy in all of his reviews even at the expense of saying something focused, meaningful, or relevant. 2) he committed to this long form re-creation of The Wall, so he had to pad runtime by filling in whatever the hell he could say about the subject matter even if there are contradictions in his messages. And most importantly 3) he refused to engage with The Wall on its own terms, and if he had taken the effort to really get to know the movie on multiple open-minded viewings, he likely could've had enough honest and perhaps genuinely funny content to fill up the runtime. He has and continues to be just a hack.
Imagine making a heartfelt piece of art about your trauma from abuse you suffered at the hands of the system in a country struggling in the aftermath of a devastating war that also needlessly killed your father, and then like 40 years later some internet guy who is neither from your country nor was even born yet at the time of your trauma or when you made said art, tells you to get over it and compares the rise of fascism you witnessed first-hand to some Twitter drama he got into, then tops it off with a horny animated furry music video. All based off your trauma from 70+ years ago. I'd feel like I was going insane personally.
I'm not finished, but I just need to say.
Walking out to a room that says 'echo chamber', filled with public facing internet personalities who work for you and several of whom stood by you during a massive abuse scandal a year or two ago is........
I'm gonna go with 'a bold directing choice'.
It’s easily one of the biggest Freudian slips I’ve ever seen.
And the best part is Brad still goes on double toasted and things like that to defend him
@@Planag7 of course he would...
@@Planag7 Brad Jones, the Cinema Snob? I very much dislike how he kept totally quiet on everything and acted like nothing happened. If you cannot call out the abuses at the place you chose to upload your videos then you agree with them. Seems like that is indeed the case.
@@Fragenzeichenplatte there is an interview with him one of the double toasted hosted on a live stream where he basically thought it wasn't a big deal and because he was harassed he cited against the people who did that.
I completely agree him getting swatted and threatened was not cool but to buckle down it's kind of insulting... Especially with everything that came out.
Korey from that channel had him on a month back. So yeah. Didn't really press the issue
A guy who grew up in the aftermath of WWII made art about WWII with a scene where the villainous head of a fascist mob orders the execution of jews, homosexuals, and blacks, and this absolute gord’s actual reaction was “Ugh, everyone’s a Nazi to you.”
"absolute gord" is a most excellent.
Also, yes, all of this.
I feel like Doug is kind of a "Nazi without calories." Like, he's a shitty person with bad opinions and an awful form of storytelling, but he doesn't have the metaphorical backbone to actively support any of his opinions, hence why they all come off as very sarcastic, self-deprecating jokes.
It's not just him, there's a pervasive attitude that WW2 represented a sort of fairy tale where the good guys won. If you buy into that, it's very easy to use Nazi to start talking about anything you think of as "bad guys" without any reference to the nationalism and fascism. But it's also very easy to pretend it all went away and dismiss any criticism of these ideas set after 1945. And if anything, stuff like this gets more relevant every year.
@@Kaipyro67ALT The nicest thing I can say about him is he doesn't understand fascism. But then, the fact that this project was made in the heady, pastoral days of 2019 makes me suspect that he has, a la Adorno and Sinclair, chosen not to understand it. Hence a parody song not actually grappling with the content of the source whose great message is "people are mean to me on the internet"
And given that the backlash related to the way that the channel awesome organization was covering up significant abusive behavior came the previous year, I am not feeling very charitable about what Doug is trying to say here!
couldn't agree more, but we prefer to be called gay people lol and also "blacks" is a dehumanizing way to refer to Black people. completely agree w the point you were making tho
I'd never listened to the Wall before, but I did after watching this video, and the way Doug mangled When the Tiger Broke Free genuinely did not sit well with me. I wonder how deeply, catastrophically irony-poisoned you have to become to parody the strangled cry of rage and sorrow of a man crying out for his father, almost reverting to the child he was in his powerless anger, as just being whiny. What a bleak world he must live in, where sincerity and rawness need to ne derided, belittled. What a bleak, uncaring little man.
He’s the type of person that sees someone experiencing an emotion on a deep level and immediately wants to call them whiny. To him, the only valid emotion to have is blind rage at something you consider to be slightly wrong
and this guy made a career out of pretending to get super emotional about his video games.
I bet that's not the *only* little thing about Doug, lol.
This video also made me watch The Wall, and it made “the review” even more disgusting to me. Like it’s fine if you disagree with the film’s messaging or dislike the movie, but to dismiss everything at just whiny without even understanding it is so infuriating.
"Irony-poisoned" is my new favourite word, thank you.
I feel like it's important to emphasize that Doug couldn't get his message across even when literally writing words on his "symbols." And yet The Wall manages to convey infinitely more while looking like a mushroom trip.
The difference between someone who takes time to consider how to make their creative statement...and someone who scribbles over the result in crayon.
Ugh, you're right, he has to literally LABEL his imagery. It's pitiful.
"Cringe. There's no other word for it. This makes me cringe. It's embarassing."
It must have been tough deciding where to put this line.
Top tier comment.
Yeah, no kidding. What a cringe-ass video. And from a grown-ass man, too, which makes it doubly embarrassing.
It would have slotted perfectly into the Video's title Imo.
Or at least the Thumbnail.
He could've put it at every other sentence and it would've fit. I guess the challenge was where to put it best because if he overused it, the impact would've been less.
@@Josearnaldomanuel2. still, we can't complain about the final product.
Imagine deciding to become a film critic when you're fundamentally allergic to art.
I suspect it's not that Doug is allergic to art - he simply doesn't get it. He likes entertainment and views film primarily as a source of entertainment. Doug Walker likes movies, he just doesn't understand them - he wants to be a "film critic" so he can continue to talk about his obsession and make jokes. It would be charming, like the extremely low-quality VHS camera remake of The Lion King (with a Pride Rock made of wooden blocks and the characters played by like two stuffed lions) I made when I was 7 because I really liked watching The Lion King, if not for the fact he's made a whole career out of it and had a real impact on how his young audience looked at media.
He's never really been a critic. After AVGN blew up everyone came out with their own Performatively Caustic Review Dude. Doug just happened to be lucky enough to find an untapped vein in movie/TV reviews while everyone else was plumbing the depths of video games. He's a knockoff that just so happened to be in the right place at the right time
Doug’s audience doesn’t watch his videos to hear his opinions about the source material, but just to laugh. Criticism/review is more of legal defense then an actual description of his content.
Do people feel they are smarter by putting the word "fundamentally" before an adjective? The word "fundamentally" before "allergic" adds nothing, and it barely makes sense.
@@maurovazquez7043 It's not to look smart, it's just to add emphasis. Could've said "deeply" or "severely" for the same effect. The choice of "fundamental" is just extra funny to me cuz it implies that being allergic to art is core to his being, that his most fundamental character trait is his allergy to art, that he'd be nothing without it
39:19 - The mind blowing irony of Doug accusing the Wall of being a "misguided ego trip" while standing next to a GIANT POSTER OF HIMSELF
And the next shot is perfectly angled to capture his face *and* his UA-cam plaques. We can see where the effort went into the cinematography.
"Pink Floyd's The Wall is just pretentious, self absorbed, nonsensical, guileless, blunt, overly-vague whining with no story! It's not _reeeal_ art, like my skit reenactment review of Suicide Squad, or Suburban Knights, where me and my friends play dress up and pretend in my backyard, or To Boldly Flee, my three-and-a-half hour long magnum opus where I sacrifice myself to save the entire universe! And Roger Waters doesn't know true pain, like when I was persecuted on Twitter for nough reason!" - Doug Walker
Are you actually stupid enough to not realize that was intentional?????
Doug phrasing holocaust imagery as "a World War II reference" physically pains me. It truely shows how much he doesn't consume art or anything more nuanced than big company franchise shit. His complete lack of literacy beyond pure literalism probably also comes from that.
The only thing I can think of why he didn't refer to it as the holocaust is because he was worried about UA-cam being UA-cam
To him, WWII is just a reference you can make, like how you make a Batman reference or a Spongebob reference. That WWII was a real thing that directly impacted the life of the person who made the movie doesn't even seem to occur to him.
Same with the evil teachers. He seems to think that everybody's school life ever was like his own, where his biggest problem was that the other kids made fun of his lunchbox. That somebody could've grown up in a world where the teachers would beat you black and blue because they didn't like that you're left-handed is something so out there that he didn't even think of it.
@@DostwynTo be fair, a world in which kids can't imagine the possibility of being beaten sounds like a pretty ideal one.
@@farkasmactavishIt sure is, but it’s not the real world
@@Dostwyn also the irony that, while Doug and people like him may think they aren't affected by something like WWII, literally everyone to this day is still dealing directly or indirectly from the consequences of that. And you can say that about a lot of history, cause, like, history is how we got to this place.
Doug: This movie is completely devoid of subtlety
Also Doug: This movie is so vague I don't get it.
what he means is that the symbolism is clearly on display - rather than hidden in the background - but yeah, clearly he is unable to interpret or connect any of it.
This man didn’t get the very basic visual metaphors of Disney’s Hercules (featuring concept art by Gerald Scarfe, the guy behind The Wall’s animations). The Wall wasn’t going to threat him any better.
@@PMelling2293 Can you expand on what Doug didn't get about Disney's Hercules, please? I'm unfamiliar with that video.
Doug: this film is whiny and Roger Waters doesn't care about other people's problems
Also Doug: (uses entire song to moan about people on Twitter not liking him without even slightly attempting to link it to the film he's criticizing)
@Nate Clampitt quite probably. the tragedy being that good comedians come up with jokes that actually make sense while accurately expressing their ideas. That's their job.
Otherwise you're just telling jokes on the school playground.
This video is such a love letter to nostalgia critic’s the wall.
underrated comment
@@pwoolcoc we should buy this comment, to support the unsupportable
I'm investing everything I have in this comment
Well played.
that name and that pfp, u r me
Honestly the line right after the one calling it Oscar bait, "smoke a bong and it'll feel less wrong" is just SO disgusting because like. Pink is already dealing with heavy substance abuse in the film. Implying that all his problems are insignificant and he should just use substances to stop feeling them is just the absolute most callous and stupid thing possible to say in this situation.
I don't think that line is referring to Pink, rather the... well, honestly, insufferable crowd that smokes a shit-ton of pot and watches the movie while claiming that its the best thing ever, but actually misunderstanding the entire plot and just obsessing over the visuals of Goodbye Blue Sky (to their credit, though, that song does have sick visuals.) I don't know if you're familiar with these people but trust me, they exist. And they are annoying enough to kill someone's enjoyment of the film and/or album.
It's right up there with saying Pink shouldn't be depressed because he's a millionaire, which is a very shallow, materialistic, consoomerist mentality as it is, but it's salt upon the wound considering that Corey Taylor was friends with former Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, who despite being a millionaire, had psychological trauma from his childhood that he never recovered from (abuse, divorce, molestation, etc), and committed suicide in 2017.
But by Doug Walker's flippantly callous and egocentric (il)logic, Chester didn't know what it was like to be scorned on Twitter for being even worse at making movies than he is at reviewing them and as bad at accommodating his cast and crew as Billy McFarland was at putting together a music festival, so wtf did he know about pain? People circulated a _hashtag_ to persecute poor Doug! A *HASHTAG,* I tell you!
@@DaMaster012ok
The second line in the album is basically calling out the image of the stoned audience member who doesn't care to listen to what is being said
Good observation, but I think the reason it's there is as basic that
a) "bong" rhymes with "song";
b) they probably think it hits with the 420/69 Internet meme kids (haha "bong" fUNnY wOrD, weed FuNnY).
Also, it really cemented my disgust and hatred for this idiot Doug Walker.
Ironically the introduction to Another Brink in the Wall is,
"When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children any way they could
By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids."
So it was made pretty clear that they weren't talking about every school or even every teacher, and that they were giving a specific time period.
Well actually paying attention to the media he is going to criticise isn't really Doug Walker's style..
Honestly, I disagree. Whenever I watched The Wall - as a kid, a teenager and an adult - I did feel like it's generalizing a lot. Except for this one line, it doesn't do anything to narrow the scope of its critique. All teachers you see on the screen are evil, the school is categorically shown as an industrial-scale slaughterhouse, all kids are victims and all adults are vile and offensive to pretty much all the senses. I don't see a single beam of light in this kingdom of darkness portrayed on screen. I don't see an attempt to show just how complicated that situation is - how children can be incredibly cruel to each other and to the teachers, for example. Or how some teachers literally throw their lives away for the sake of the children. I'll never forget how absent-mindedly our biology teacher loved his students, all while they mocked and derided him to his face and behind his back - in conversation with the music teacher during her lessons, no less!
I also feel that Dan didn't engage honestly with a pretty simple and obvious observation of Doug's, one of the few I agreed with: what about the school helping people get ready to earn a living and not starve I this late-capitalism system we live in? Sure, compulsory education sucks, but how the hell do you explain to someone so young that if you don't do boring stuff all day, get good grades and learn fractions, you're going to be royally screwed by this fucked-up system we all suffer in daily? If you follow their instinct - and that is to conserve energy and do fun things, like in all of us - they won't be able to earn a living and will be mauled by the system even worse. Sure, it sucks that you need to be a cog in this system to survive - but your odds of survival, and the quality of your life improve GREATLY if you're a cog in the system and not one of the unfortunate misfits under its boot.
@@kathorseesI can see where you're coming from, but The Wall is absolutely arguing against the point you're bringing up here. Being molded into a cog to fit the machine is really immoral and the reason the film relies on incredibly oppressive imagery and atmosphere for those scenes is to get that across.
The fact that resistance is miserable is a deterrent, but that doesn’t really solve the problem. Saying "oh, well it's easier to be a cog in the machine," is talking past the point because that is what the piece is saying. It's not only easier, straying away from being a cog is treated with violence, derision, and coercion. These institutions, especially in 50s English Primary School, scarred millions, physically and psychologically, to make them fit a mold. A system that treated them like they needed to fit a small square and be put in there place and stay there. Bricks in a wall. You're just kind of pointing towards the deterrence that is being specifically critiqued and saying "see, it hurts to disobey, so why doesn't Dan acknowledge that Doug has a point?" You’re arguing, intentionally or otherwise, for the status quo. In lieu of addressing that the system is doing this to people, you’re acting as though the fact that it does and will is incapable of being addressed. It's a very frustrating perspective because, and I need to stress this, the whole point someone else brought it up is to say it must be changed and you're just acting as though it cannot.
@@KingSandvich1 I don't think we're talking about the same thing, to be honest? What I want to say is "it's easier to survive if you know math, even though learning it sucks and you don't want to as a kid". Both in late capitalism, which can and should be changed, and in this physical universe, which probably can't be. As a living organism, you have to work to find sustenance. Until that changes, we have to teach our children to find sustenance, to fend for themselves. Ofc, it's not going to be easy for them or for us. Ofc, it's not made easier by the fact that some teachers abuse kids instead of teaching them.
What my comment seems to sound like to you is "it's better to not resist teachers who physically and emotionally abuse you instead of teaching you", which I absolutely did not mean. You should resist abuse. But you should also learn things to survive. And as a child, you often don't want to - even when you really need to.
Compare this to taking medicine. It breaks my heart to see children in hospitals cry when taking a shot, it really does (god, it must be so hard to be a parent). But not giving the shot to a child who needs one is cruel, it's neglect, it will lead to the child suffering even more in the future. In this situation, you need to act against the child's will, you put them through something painful and scary - and they can't understand it's necessary, they're just not developed enough yet.
Same with going to school and learning boring things. Sure, I can decide to not put my children through this - I can let them play all day and never go to school. I'll say, "This economic system sucks, it's unjust, we should change it". However, will the system change fast enough? To the point where my grown-up kids won't need to know math, or English, or science to get a "normal" job? I don't think it's prudent to act like it will. Imo, allowing your children to not get an education is cruel neglect. More cruel that forcing them to go to school.
A hunter-gatherer must teach his son to hunter-gather, or he will die/have a shitty life. I must teach my son to do math and to pass job interviews, or he will die/have a shitty life. Both systems are bullshit, of course, but bullshit we had to/currently have to live through. I should also teach him that hunter-gatherer societies are no more, and so we can and must find ways to improve our society as well. But I can't just ignore life's cruel necessities and pretend like he will never have to work to sustain himself.
I guess I'm trying to say that education is, to a degree, inherently coercive, even violent - just like parenting or surgery. It's a tragedy of life. I think that most pain children feel in school comes from this, not from the few teachers that actually abuse their power. It's the pain of an organism striving to sustain itself in this universe. We should always strive to explain to our children that they're suffering through this smaller pain now ("learn how to fend for yourself") to avoid a bigger pain later ("you're all grown-up and can't fend for yourself") - but they won't understand until they grow up.
And The Wall doesn't seem to understand that. Sure, it understands that beating or berating children to "teach" them is wrong, and that's true. But it lacks nuance to show that not all teachers are abusive bastards. That most are good people, trying to impart useful skills to a captive audience that doesn't understand it needs these skills to survive in a bullshit system/bullshit universe. Or that even the best doctors, parents and teachers are sometimes forced to make children take their medicine, go to bed or do their homework. And that's tragic.
@@stpyramids The Wall doesn't need to do anything, agreed. However, if a person says (sings, writes) something dubious or objectionable, others may, well, object or express doubt.
If it was a scared child saying these things, I'd try to comfort them and help them. For me, help often includes sharing your best understanding of the problem. IMO it's important for an adult to try and help the poor kid figure things out a bit.
However, this is not a kid - this a song written by an adult (and one with great talent). A song that millions of actual kids listen to and look up to. So I wish the song did a better job understanding and explaining the situation, both for the kids' sake and for those around them. So many people just blindly agree with the "school sucks, fuck them teachers!" narrative. I wonder whether this has any impact on, say, teachers being underpaid, undervalued and overworked all over the world. I wonder whether fewer talented, bright people choose to be teachers as a result - and make the situation worse for kids all over again.
If a song about a break-up has insightful, heartfelt, emotionally deep things to say - I admire it. There are songs like that, because there are people like that - they try to understand the sadness and anger, to work through them even while feeling them. If a song just gives in to those feelings and says objectionable, unhelpful stuff ("all women are stupid gold-diggers", "all men are evil and only want sex", "try to dump them first just in case") - I will groan and object and stop listening. Is that the same as dinging it? Not sure what you meant with that word :)
My favorite part is Dan explaining as kindly as he can to Doug that WWII exists beyond being part of Captain America's backstory.
Gold. I found gold.
Dan: "now, Doug, I need to remind you that this historical event mentioned in this piece of media is a HISTORICAL EVENT, not a fictional one, and thus actually happened, to real people, who were affected deeply by the reality/consequences of that event. This *shows picture of mad max* is fictional, and this *shows picture of movie about WW2* is a real historical event. Write that on the board 50 times before you leave."
Dan trying to explain that WWII's effects were felt even after WWII ended reminds me of my high school World History professor trying to explain to a jock that goths, emo kids, and Visigoths are unrelated concepts.
It's always so bizarre to me that people can be so disconnected from WWII when to me it's always been extremely close to home, both sides of my family was in the resistance and my granddad told me a lot about it. At the same time my mom's side of my family was tremendously shaped by her mom's trauma from being the kid of a high ranking resistance member during the war. I know it's at this point 80 years old but it's always felt more like 20 years ago to me, something that happened in the past but only just and a thing that people were still constantly talking about. It's like it hasn't quite receded into history yet but is still part of the lives of the people who are alive right now. Some of it might be location, it's probably also just closer when you live in mainland Europe. But all of this just makes it so weird to me when people seem to be mostly unaware of it, or don't really conceive of it as a real thing.
Also the fact that Doug's knowledge of WWII begins and ends with the Holocaust. Yes Doug, jews were killed during that time period but also more than half of Europe was left scarred beyond reason, not to say of what was happening in Asia. Why does he think is called WORLD War?
I have not seen The Wall. I have not seen Doug Walker's The Wall. Yet I still have an endless thirst for meta breakdowns of Doug Walker's The Wall
JAR Media's podcast took a dump on it for over an hour. It's pretty funny.
Yep that's why I'm here too
I have many media like that. I don't think I have played nearly as many video games as I have watched reviews of them by various streamers.
Seriously this must be how people in the early 2000s felt when they saw The Room. It’s been a year and a half and I’m still ecstatic to see another video on it
same
What I don't like about the CGI section is something many inexperienced animators seem to struggle with. In traditional animation there's a trend to animate as little as possible because any movement is incredibly time consuming. It's art in itself to be able to choose what has to be animated, what should be, what could be and finally what should be left unanimated
CGI animation gives more freedom in this regard. You can make characters move without so much sacrifice. But it too often results in characters moving too much. Like this mutated squirell. Small animals move a lot but they don't do it all the time. They shortly freeze looking for danger and then move quickly. Big animals tend to move even less, saving energy for important things like fighting and hunting. Seeing creatures constantly moving in this strange, fluid motion make them look fake. Especially when put next to a typical human who doesn't move a lot. What's worse it makes them less intimidating. If you see someone swaying constantly and mumbling some crazy stuff then you're not really surprised when that person lunges at you. People who act composed are much more scary. I'm pretty sure that those creatures were meant to be predators. Animate them as such and even the character design won't make them less intimidating
Like we all see big cats and wolves as cute, fluffy creatures which deserve all of the pets in the world. They still look scary when they hunt
As a first year animation student, this comment is really enlightening, so thank you.
@@aptalsandvic5355 Look into the 12 principles of animation; they all still apply in 3DCG. And then we should all ask Fennah to look into it too.
this is really good take down on why the cg visuals don't work from an animation perspective :) I'm glad you don't fall into the trap of "the animals aren't literally acting like animals, therefore the art has failed", but instead explained why it doesn't look good. it's convention breaking in a way that looks lazy and unskilled, and you articulated that really really well.
Also, why was that one guy's hair inflating? Does he have a balloon in his head? It's distracting as hell.
I was wondering if maybe the weird wavy ~~sexy~~ oversexualized movement of especially the blue wyvern thing was actually intentional, it's trying so hard to do a ~sexy walk~ that it just looks like a kitten with swimmer syndrome
I still struggle to overcome Doug saying "high school" when both the film and original song aggressively make clear it's about grade school
You know, I didn't even think about that part but you're absolutely right.
Roger Waters: "The lingering trauma of my fathers death in WW2 haunts me into adulthood."
Doug: "God! not everythings about YOU, yaknow! Some people have to deal with getting dragged on Twitter!"
"Not everything is about you! Grow up! Now let me make this song about the rise of right wing extremism in England about me!" You can't make this up...
Doug was being an idiot.
@@PlahaKumar "jokes on you! Doug was being an incurious and obtuse dumbass on purpose"
@@atortarr Sure...
WHY DOES IT LOOK LIKE VEGAS ?
I have such a hard time understanding how Doug can want to be a filmmaker and have such a rudimentary, if not non-existent, understanding of art and abstract concepts. You can dislike The Wall, or find it difficult to watch, but to call it heartless is just objectively wrong. Also: Hat Dan. Oh you.
Arrogance outweighs competence, for some, I guess...
I think he understands them, but he just...refuses to put the effort in if he doesn't like the work, or acknowledge that it might have more meaning to someone else.
I have never connected with Blade Runner on any level beyond a kind of detached appreciation for its craftsmanship or thinking "ooh, pretty", but I absolutely understand why so many people love it. I get that there's more beneath the surface that I'm just not invested enough to get into. ....I get the sense that Doug has never thought about a film that way, has never thought "I don't like it much, I don't care enough to unravel it, but I can see why other people might."
I think that's what I found most interesting: He's spent about 20 years making videos/movies, and he's STILL doing the same stuff that most kids used to do with a handy-cam and Windows Movie Maker. Only difference is he's just got better/more expensive filming equipment.
The unwillingness to grow and rigidly stick to the most basic of formulas (same dutch angles for the same overdrawn sketches and the same bad impressions, same royalty-free music for everything, always using the camera's onboard mic for bloody everything!, etc) all because he thinks his fans don't expect better.
Ironically, as Doug asked in his Cat In The Hat Review:-
"Have you ever considered the possibility that maybe people don't know what's best for them, and by continually giving them the same crap they'll never know what's different so they'll just keep asking for the same crap?"
@@AstraVex Well, there is one other difference. When he started out, he actually seemed like he wanted to be doing what he was doing.
I haven't watched any of his stuff in years and I don't intend to ever again, but there was a period of time where I'd seriously soured on the Nostalgia Critic but could enjoy his thoughts on, say, the Disney films, and I think a large part of that was that he wasn't obviously going through the motions in those videos. ...It's a lot easier to forgive amateurish flaws in a work if that work feels like it's coming from some kind of place of passion, and there's none of that sense in his...I keep wanting to call it his "recent" output, but this started almost a decade ago. His post-giving a fuck output?
Thx for your vids rose keep it up.
Thinking back on Nostalgia Critic, one thing you really notice about him is that he's always more interested in having the normal, average opinion about media than in having his own opinion. As a critic, it never feels like he's telling you what HE personally thinks; instead it's more like he's trying to figure out what the "the public's" reaction to a piece of media was and then invent an explanation for why that's right. I think that's a part of why I and probably a lot of other people watched him? He was a class in having the right, normal reactions to media.
And I think that makes a lot of sense why he cannot deal with the Wall. He's invested so much in being normal that a work which is angry at the status quo, which asks you to judge things that are normal and whether they should be normal, can only upset and repulse him. He doesn't do that; he's scared of it, and seeing someone else do it makes him angry.
I'm five months late to this comment, but I think you perfectly described a feeling I've had about NC in the back of my head for ages. I was a big fan in middle and early high school before the whole change the channel thing, so I'm sure more of my approaches to storytelling and media criticism have been influenced by Doug than I'd sometimes wish. On the one hand, I think he did inspire me to look at media more analytically. But like you say, maybe because of his whole "angry reviewer" angle, he made me very scared of having the "wrong opinion" about things, and embarrassed when I felt like I did. It's a pretty detrimental way to try learning about yourself and the world around you, and pretty much guarantees looking at everything through the same, irony-filled lens that Doug seems to.
it feels like over the last few years, there's been a big push of critics who don't want to be seen as critics. it's a weird form of populism where "the critics" are the stuck-up ivory tower (probably leftist) snobs who only like niche indie films and "art", whatver that is, so obviously they're not critics, because they like Marvel movies, but not when they're woke.
@@FirstnameLastname-he1ov I'd go beyond just Doug but the internet in general is cynical and anyone who fully puts their heart in to something unironically often gets torn apart. It starts to seep in to how you view everything and its very unhealthy.
Lines up with his inclusion in Big Joel's conservative comedy video, talking specifically about the The Wall review and how it centers sympathy to authority
"I just wanna be angry so I can be tweeting". Ah yes. I remember when the official Pink Floyd social media accounts were up in arms and yelling at people back in 1982.
Every word demonstrably true.
Well, the modern age still has Rog's ANNOUNCEMENT video
The funniest thing about this is Walker calling Roger Waters a selfish, whiny asshole when the whole purpose of the album was Waters examining himself to find out WHY he was becoming such an asshole.
The inspiring incident for the Wall was Waters spitting on a fan in disgust at a concert. He was horrified by his action and more horrified by the fans EXCITEMENT at being spat upon which led to Waters basically putting himself on the therapist couch for the album.
that's fascinating
Yes! One of my parents grew up in an abusive household and listened to Pink Floyd as a coping strategy (being a similar age to roger waters + experiencing a lot of similar things) as soon as the album was available, and I grew up hearing it constantly around the house. I was talking to them about it the other day after my therapy appt and said something like “I think it’s kinda depressing how people of your generation didn’t have access to mental health services and were just kinda expected to Keep Calm and Carry On, like, sometimes I think that ppl ur age didn’t go to therapy they just waited for someone in their age bracket to become a musician, make an album about their trauma, and glean as much emotional support as possible from it before going back to suffering internally” and they just looked at me like 👁👄👁
It’s like, sometimes I come back from therapy and talk about it w/my parents and they’ll say “well when I was a kid (insert fcked up thing happened) and that was normal and fine!” And I’ll look at them and go “👀 no. it wasn’t. You didn’t deserve that. They shouldn’t have done that to you. Your feelings about it were and are valid, and you deserve to be able to feel/discuss them without fear of worse retaliation.” And they’ll like, scoff?
It's ironic. Doug has become the exact kind of person The Wall was written to warn about, and yet he possesses zero self-awareness.
@@TheBonkleFox Personally I think that's WHY he missed the point so much, If he saw it for what it was, he would've seen himself.
@@doctorwholover1012 For the sake of my curiosity - what, in words, were you trying to get across with those emoji after the first paragraph?
The one thing that immediately stands out to me is Doug's inability to meter his lyrics.
Listen to the way he sings < || OUR e-DU-ca-TION sys-TEM'S broke > at 20:52. It's metered completely wrong. He could've easily done it < our || ED-u-CA-tion SYS-tem's BRO-ken >. Not only is it more grammatically correct, but it also aligns better with the metering of < || WE don't NEED no ED-u-CA-tion >. That's just one instance of it. It's a frequent thing across the album. For someone who makes his living critiquing the audio-visual arts, especially someone who's been doing it for 15 years, you'd think he'd have caught onto something as basic as emphasis and sentence metering. If you can't closely speak it the way you sing it, it's stilted and janky, and you should rewrite it.
I always held that Doug was a hack, but that one weird thing is what drove it home for me.
Doug wouldn't know meter if he was struck by a yardstick.
God, yes! The one that really irritates me is at 21:03
THIS is pan-der-ING LIKE HELL
Good lord, the grammar 😑 Why didn’t he just say:
THIS mo-vie is pan-DER-ING
Man, I really wish this was the only kind of flaw in his review. But all in all, it was just another brick in his Wall.
7:36 "Good ol' ♩ Pink Floyd ♩ made a movie ♩ devoid ♩ of even ♩ theslightestbitof ♩ subtlety..."
Music is a time-based language/art, so the ENTIRE point of lyricism is to get the syllables of words to form a rhythm copacetic to the beat of the song. Trying to write music or poetry with improper use of meter is like trying to be a mathematician when you count like King Arthur in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, or using AI image generation and claiming you're an artist.
I never really thought of that but what makes it even funnier/sadder is that the word "education" is already in the original to provide an example of how to enunciate it.
Doug comparing Looney Tunes to Mad Max: Fury Road somehow seems disrespectful to both of them.
I didn't see the original review so I thought that roadrunner praise was gonna be in isolation. When he compares Fury Road to it I busted out laughing at the absurdity.
I tried to find the context of him talking about looney toons, because him reducing them to simple slap stick gags 'with little' put into them is infuriating. There is so much craft and effort put into old school hand drawn animation. What makes them work is the artistry of the animators putting subtle detail into fluid motions and expressions. Not to mention the voice actors ( well sometimes just voice actor ) and the orchestral music. Is he really completely blind to all that?
Hat Dan being filmed shot reverse shot thus not needing to be green screened in yet still green screened in poorly is a better joke than Doug has ever made in his life tbh
True
I also love the added touch of the finger gun bursts still appearing where his fingers would be, even when his fingers are cut off by the intentionally bad greenscreening. Just so many layers of visual comedy on display
That’s hat Dan. The Dan with a hat. He could shoot you all up with one wave of his hands. I advise not getting shot by him. His hat contains the souls of its victims.
So true
@@zegreenemachine8160 And yet, Linkara turned out to be a decent human being.
(Old heads know.)
"Is world war two with monsters too silly?" Doug, the most famous giant monster of all time is literally a metaphor for the end of the war.
Literally what I was thinking!
DOGzilla??
Prog-Zilla, if you will
Cthulhu?! /s
@@PyckledNyk Godzilla
The pettiest thing that drives me crazy here is how Doug's review keeps insisting The Wall is talking about high school, when it is clearly elementary school, these are clearly preteens, he keeps bringing this up and it is just literally, factually wrong.
Nothing lives more rent-free in American minds than high school.
You know, I've long suspected that Doug first watched The Wall when he was a teenager, and his (wrong) opinions and (false) perceptions about the film that he put into his """review""" have remained almost entirely unchanged since then, and your comment sort of indirectly confirms my suspicions. Like Dan said, The Wall has a way of forcing you to put your own emotions on the table in order to reflect on it, good or bad, which would explain why Doug is incapable of removing his own ego from the production, and why it's so petty, spiteful, dismissive, sociopathically devoid of empathy, and used as nothing but a platform for self-aggrandizement.
Doug once said his favorite episode of The Simpsons is "Bart Gets an F," purely because of how much he said it mirrored his own experiences with some of his teachers having to be very accommodating for how poor of a student he was *(gee, I wonder why).* So with such a superficial, supercilious interpretation of Another Brick in The Wall, Pt 2 as nothing but Roger Waters saying "school sucks and teachers are sadistic," 15 year old Doug clearly went: "NUH-UH! Teachers are AWESOME!" That's why he keeps blathering on about how much he thinks the film is about saying "high school sucks," because he was probably in high school when he first saw the movie, and completely transposed his own shallow emotional reactions over what The Wall is actually saying.
It's like Doug never grew out of that puerile and iconoclastic mindset a child, when they want to kill the main character in their favorite show so they could take their place... but he made this review when he was 38.
It was only very recently that I first listened to the Wall, and I have still never seen the movie. And yet if you had asked me 5 years ago about Pink Floyd, the one and only thing I would have known them for was the "We don't need no education" song, specifically the part being sung by school children. Not knowing that it is a song about elementary school is absolutely baffling to me.
In addition to all the other contradictions noted, I love that Walker both complains that the movie "lacks subtlety" and is also "too vague." Lacking subtlety implies that the ideas and points are overbearing and obvious, while too much vagueness implies that you can't tell what the author is saying. These can't both be true, it just goes to show that Walker really doesn't have the ability to put together a coherent viewpoint, he just throws any artistic insult he can think of at the wall (pun definitely intended) whether or not it fits--whether or not it directly contradicts one of the other artistic insult he's already lobbed.
There's nothing more ominous than a whole segment just called "Doug"
Even if it was about the cartoon that would still be ominous.
@@Stephen-Fox lol
/whistling theme song intensifies
It has such a threatening aura, especially when you know all the channel awesome controversies.
"Father...am I Doug?"
"Yes, son. I'm afraid so. The doctors insist you live."
Can we take a moment to appreciate that Doug said the wall was devoid of subtlety then still managed to completely miss the point.
I think I'm gonna call this the bad-faith catch-22 of symbolism "If I get it(or think I do), it's unsubtle and preachy, if I don't get i, it's pretentious and meaningless." like, he saw some stuff he recognised and so derides it as on the nose but anything he didn't get he just dismissed as random nonsense.
I remember the moment it hit me that he was complaining it was too obvious while completely, utterly missing the point.
@Ultramechabotron, multiversal defendinator I mean of course he is.
He needs to claim its unsubtle or else he seems dumb. If he says, "You need a smart mind to understand it" and horrifically misses the point then he seems like a fool, but if he paints it as unsubtle and pretentious, no longer is it that he's missing the point, it's that he gets it and if you don't then you fail to understand something so basic
Doug Walker saying that ANYthing lacks subtlety is one of the craziest things I've ever heard
@@unk4140. Please, he wouldn't even know what subtlety is, especially if it hit him with a sledgehammer!
There's something so ominous about having a chapter simply titled "Doug"
This is the most respectful and calculated aim at a man's jugular that I've ever seen.
>Deeply incurious and uninterested
>Respectful
>Wheeze*
Discombobulate
@J N No, you were just like others back then. Internet humour was different back then and has since evolved.
Doug just didnt evolve with the times. He keeps making videos that belong in 2009.
Not really.
It's just a dude's ranting about something... Jugular? Way to be overdramatic!! But that'S why this video was made, drama. And a lot of people love drama on UA-cam. Especially those having difficulty creating good content. Like Folding ideas...
@@Shawouin Nah this was a good video. Great love letter to Nostalgia Critic's The Wall ;)
Dan Olsen calmly saying, "I'm going to have to say some unkind things," is really a wonderful moment where we get to see him politely remove his gloves before committing a murder because he wants everyone to know it was him
😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅5😅😅😅😅😅😅😅5😅😅5
😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅t😅😅f
😮😅
😅
5tttþþ
The number of visual "metaphors" that are directly labelled in this reminds me of Ben Garrison cartoons
🤣 sadly accurate.
Thinking back on it, i really cant say i miss the "pissed-off pop culture reviewer" craze. The best in that scene either mellowed-out or cashed-out.
Yeah, I like to think we mostly grew out of it. I think people only tune into the new, like, AVGN stuff, for a kick of nostalgia.
You could argue Angry Joe was a part of that fiasco, but even he’s making improvements by doing less skits and shaking up his content from time to time.
Scott the woz is still going strong, he makes pretty well made short film videos every once in awhile. It's a little goofy, but borderline forever is legitimately a fun watch
“He’s a fundamentally incurious person who isn’t much interested in what other people think or feel”.
That’s probably the single most articulate and spot-on criticism of Doug I’ve heard. Not to mention beautifully savage.
In layman's terms, Doug feels like he already knows everything there is to know so he doesn't bother with bettering himself. He is perpetually stuck in the middle school phase of his life.
@@lordquaz7154 Yeup. He was also one of UA-cam's 1st big names so his ego is through the roof. All his films have shitty camera work, bad sound design and mixing, and boring cinematography. He thinks his "star power" is all the audience wants.
"Incurious" is such a violent critique of anyone who sees themselves as an artist.
@@whosaidthat84 As an ex fan it worked for me. But back then I was a dumb kid.
@@FernieCanto I don’t think Doug understands what art really is. He seems to be the type of person that thinks art is this perfect thing acclaimed by critics and is so full of himself that he thinks he’s capable of deconstruct media, when in reality he’s just a clown that watched too many movies
"Doug wants to be a filmmaker, he wants to make art, but he can't because he's a fundamentally in-curious person who isn't much interested in what other people think or feel, and all his ideas boil down to 'wHaT iF bAtMaN mEt MaRiO?!?!'"
God fucking DAMN
This sentence was the rapture. I’m in heaven now.
And he said it so calmly and mellow I had to rewind.
Right?? Like you did not have to KILL him like that 😂😂 but he did that for us. (And himself) Its amazing
I mean... yeah? He's not wrong about that.
Folding Ideas eviscerated the entire career of Dough with that quote. He could have said just that and his career wouldn't be any less roasted beyond recognition.
31:20 - The idea that anyone could think Roger Waters is insincere is insane. For all his many faults (and there are many) he has always been obviously and relentlessly sincere in his art.
I like your comment but I want to keep the 69 likes. My hands are tied.
It's at 70 likes now. You have no excuse
Waters thinks the west caused Russia to invade Ukraine. Did he forget he made a movie about civilian traumas of war? Waters is ruthlessly insincere
@Wveth
"THE BLEEDING HEARTS AND ARTISTS-"
projection | noun | prə-ˈjek-shən
6b : the attribution of one's own ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or to objects, especially : the externalization of blame, guilt, or responsibility as a defense against anxiety
Doug Walker really needs to look that one up.
16:10 "Doug wants to be a filmmaker, he wants to make art, but he can't, because he's a fundamentally incurious person who isn't much interested in what other people think or feel and all his ideas boil down to 'what if Batman met Mario?'"
I've honestly taken this quote to heart. It's really made me realize just how important it is to see characters on an emotional level, than just the surface you see them when cobbling junk together in a fanfiction. How important it is to hear the opinions of others. I mean fanfiction does bring people together and is important, but at some point you need to move on, if you want to make a hobby into a career. Some people just get stuck in that "what if Batman met Mario?" phase because they're fundamentally incurious people who don't want to hear the opinions of others, and as such, only write for themselves.
I cannot get over the fact that Doug, a grown man, seemingly needs someone to explain to him why "Lol, that sucks. Grow a damn pair of balls" is the wrong response to give to someone opening up about the abuse and trauma they suffered at the hands of an authority figure in their life.
Doug’s intentionally pretending that abuse and trauma are either exaggerated, not true, or safely in the past.
The one comment about Doug’s literalism might help explain the strangeness of his apparent contempt for the song. Doug frames this is a millionaire whining about hating school. And takes an odd position In which he argues that this song clearly makes teachers seem ‘like monsters bwahaha!’
Doug’s trying to both sneer at Waters for not ‘getting over high school like we all did, you wimp’ while bullying the specter of young Pink to suck it up and stop complaining because he can’t possibly know how the real world works.
He’s treating the song like it’s just saying ‘I hated going to school’. The song is about Waters reflecting that his teachers (the monsters) abused kids (the whiners) because they came from a society that encouraged it. The Wimps (adults like Waters) are people embracing their trauma and understanding ‘I wasn’t a punk or a whiner. I was a kid. I didn’t deserve to get beaten, humiliated, and made fun of. And those adults I was supposed to respect don’t deserve it if they picked on us all just cuz they got picked on.’
I feel comfortable guessing that Doug knows some of that but…a better ‘parody’ in his mind is pretending the song is just empty whining. Or maybe he does.
Either way he’s disingenuously pretending what happened in your childhood (school) someone stops mattering when you graduate (grow up) and that complains about it means your weak.
Yeah. There is only a 150-year-history of that not working in psychiatry and a 5,000 year history of that not working in civilization or we would have all become enlightened beings by about the time of the Roman Empire.
It could also be that Doug allegedly abused and traumatized those who worked for him. Read "Channel Awesome Criticized by Former Contributors for Alleged Mistreatment" by Paul Tamburro.
That's basically how Doug and his boss treated former contributors to Channel Awesome. Thankfully, they left en masse to make their own careers years ago.
Maybe its just a coincidence. But people with that facial hair pattern usually do.
"Doug wants to be a filmmaker, he wants to make art, but he can’t, because he’s a fundamentally incurious person who isn’t much interested in what other people think or feel, and all his ideas boil down to “what if Batman met Mario?”"
What a description.
I've seen quite a few people who could also be described as such.
But what if batman did meet mario tho?
It's like that guy in school whose sole purpose for communicating with anyone else was to recount funny moments from movies like: "hey, you remember that episode of Family Guy where the dog does the Peanut Butter Jelly Time dance???" before collapsing in laughter. Doug is that person at 40.
See, I see where the description comes from, but I don’t think that’s an entirely accurate depiction of Doug. Someone like Linkara WANTS to be a filmmaker, or story teller, or artist of some kind. The problem with Doug is that he thinks he already IS a filmmaker, despite even his best work being mind-numbingly devoid of value.
Just a love letter to Doug Walker, I see nothing wrong here.
This is one of the sickest burns I have ever heard and it is not even technically an insult
“Is World War II with monsters too silly”
Meanwhile Godzilla is literally a metaphor for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and King Kong has been theorized to represent slavery.
Meanwhile, Lord of the Rings is built from the experience of Tolkien during his WW1 days.
I recall a discussion we had back in one of my English classes in college, where each era's popular monsters represents the fears of the day.
E.g, in the 50s it was all about Attack of the 50 Foot Whatever because they represent the nuclear anxiety of the day. Aliens were big in the 60s to the 80s because of the Red Scare. Anything that serves as a metaphor for terrorism and hacking was in vogue in the early 2000s. Zombies were the hot thing in the 2010s because they stand for the mindless masses that we view our ideological opponents as. It's my belief that the New Twenties' monsters will be metahumans (representing our fear of AI supplanting human artists) and bioweapons (representing COVID and the antivaxx movement.)
Sorry to ramble, I just have Many Thoughts.
Dan I want you to know that "no matter how half you ass them" is permanently etched into my lexicon from this
Roger Waters: sings a song explicitly about the child abuse he and his classmates suffered.
Some internet guy 40 years after the song and 60 years after Waters’ schooling: Everyone thinks school sucks! Stop whining and pandering!
The critic that is
@@lanterns_glow "The critic" didnt write the script
He also doesnt seem to grasp the idea that his experiences in education in the late 80s are not equivalent to the experience of someone educated in the mid 50s.
@@hairohukosu433 then who DID
"Ugh, come on, 1950's British education was just like 1980's American education!"
"Oh yeah? Your whole childhood was mired in the shadow of the greatest tragedy in human history? Well GROW UP, I hated school too!"
Doug Walker makes me want to remove my arteries by hand.
i can't stop thinking about the phrase "world war ii reference". if you'll permit me to do some armchair psychoanalysis, that phrase implies that Walker views the second world war and all of the atrocities therein not as real things that happened to people as a collective trauma over a significant portion of the world, but as akin to a fictional work referenced for aesthetic value. if we read the scene as alluding to the Holocaust, Walker doesn't view that as a way to draw a historical parallel between the united kingdom and nazi germany to point out the hypocrisy of fighting fascism when it's profitable but secretly copying their notes, he views it as the equivalent of a first person shooter developer putting a master chief bobblehead in their game as an easter egg. it is implied that he does not believe in the ability for art to explore real-life events through allegory, rather that art should say nothing of the world it exists within and be wholly self-contained, voyeuristic affairs, and any allusion to actual events is a manifestation of that voyeurism. that fiction doesn't exist in parallel to reality, but in opposition to it. and i do not like that implication one bit.
edit: also like, even though it's clearly about elementary school, high school *does* suck. why does he see that a lesser systemic criticism.
damn
++
Even I don't think Doug Walker is so flippant and callously detached from reality that he thinks World War II (What's Your Favorite Flavor of Socialism Edition) is just a made-up war that half of all first person twitch shooter developers collectively decided to make all their games based on, but rather he is so solipsistic and so ignorant of the repercussions of the war that he's incapable of engaging with it. The only experience he's had suffering the effects of the war started by the National Socialist German Workers Party is being called one on Twitter.
I am legitimately horrified to think of Doug Walker watching Schindler's List...
@@DaMaster012Favorite flavor of socialism? WTF? Are you implying that Nacional "Socialists" were actually socialists just because they name themselves that?
To a T. In Doug Walker's world, WWII is Captain America's backstory and nothing else. I'm not saying that he doesn't think WWII happened, but that he hasn't thought critically about the effects such a historical upheaval would have on media, especially as autobiographical works from people who actually lived through it (like Waters). This is first-year-of-college-tier media analysis and Doug still dropped the ball.
Especially stupid considering that the target demographic for Doug's content, millenials and zoomers, have our own miniature version of this effect. Think of how many pieces of media had to be altered as a result of 9/11, and how to this day, over twenty years later, it's still taboo to depict a plane being intentionally crashed into a building. That's the effect of trauma, applied to an entire society. And we saw it happening in real time. Doug has a handy, obvious, contemporary example of historical trauma filtered through media right at his disposal, and he won't take it.
Rant over. Doug sucks, Dan's video doesn't.
Every time I watch this video, I forget that long-running character Hat Dan (the Dan with a hat) is coming, and every time it absolutely kills me.
I, too, write love letters telling the recipient that they’re whiny and full of themselves.
Is this the fabled "tsundere"?
@@fernandoc5536 “I-it’s not like I liked your movie or anything, b-baka!”
That, or it's the equivalent of someone getting rejected, and then turning it into "Oh, yeah? Well you're not even that hot, I was just hitting on you out of pity!"
Roses are red
Violets are blue
You should smile more
Then maybe I'd like you
I mean, I have conflicted feelings with a lot of my favorite stuff
I’m sure Doug making a “satirical” song called “We Need More Victimization” only had to do with his criticism of The Wall. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Not-So-Awesome document which called him and his friends out for blatant mistreatment of the female members on the site and hazardous negligence on their film sets. Nope, nothing to do with that at all.
And that wasn’t even the worst thing in the document.
I mean, it's not like they made an official statement that amounted to "We're sorry they felt that way, but please be nice on the internet pls oh and oops we totally outed which now deceased member of our channel was a sexual predator by badly editing an image of some DMs!"...
Channel Awesome is a mess, and that it still has defenders baffles me.
He and folks like The Cinema Snob are ALL ABOARD the "I'm not racist/misogynist/phobic, I just hate PC culture" train. They are ONE mean tweet from going full alt-reich and BLAMING "culture war" for it.
@@Joe90h wait what?
@@josephineparsons78 Don't want to get into the specifics as reading it all yourself is recommended if you're curious enough and have a couple of hours to sink into the topic. There are probably more videos on UA-cam covering it than Nostagia Critic 'reviews' by this point.
Big Joel's video about conservative comedy sent me here. I am someone who has literally never once watched a nostalgia critic video and knew nothing about The Wall either. So when his video referred me here I figured I'd watch. What a brilliant commentary!
Doug believes that "Hey! Teacher! Leave us kids alone!" is a reference to his teachers telling him to stop chewing gum in class, and not corporal punishment. Like obviously if you apply that song to your own schooling experience it seems over the top, but when you put into the context of which it is about, which was a horribly cruel system of physical and verbal abuse of children on a widespread systemic level, the song makes a lot more sense.
Doug also seems to think that the existence of good teachers in the movie would invalidate the "complains about the evil teachers" (even when the lyrics explicitly say "CERTAIN teachers")
The fact that he green screen himself over a picture of a livingroom instead of just moving the camera to a different angle really made that final gag work
Ha! I didn't even think of that, that really adds something brilliant.
Also that Hat!Dan is filmed in vertical video format.
Also he messed up the white-balance of the background!
Also his arm is cropped
Also it's not levelled
What sticks out to me most rewatching this is how Doug insists that comparing high school to WWII is like the most inappropriate metaphor they could have used. Meanwhile, he’s literally using explicit imagery of fascism to complain about film-Twitter. Jesus Christ.
What do you expect? In this same review Doug constantly bitched about how vague and subtle certain things were only to turn around and complain about how blunt and in your face it is.
But he is doing it "IrOnIcAlLy."
@@willnash7907 Genuinely caring about things is cringe, that's why Doug only cares about how much other people care about criticizing him
To be fair, Doug's understanding of the explicit fascist imagery is so poor that he _literally says_ it could be used for anyone you don't like. Doug does not recognize it as fascist imagery, so we can't really judge him as someone who uses fascist imagery to complain about Twitter.
Whether this is a defense of Doug or an accusation of a far worse mistake is up to interpretation.
I mean…isn’t that the point of the parody, to show how ridiculous he thinks it is to compare those things? I think you’re actually missing Doug’s point, even though it’s I’ll-conceived.
enough time has passed; I'm ready to say it. the comparison between Mad Max: Fury Road and The Road Runner is unironically funny
As someone who loves Fury Road, I'd argue that the characters aren't even "simple", it's just that Fury Road is very efficient with its non-verbal storytelling, and so a lot of complexity is communicated with its imagery and visuals alone.
Take Miss Giddy - a character who is onscreen for probably less than 60 seconds across two or three scenes. What do we know about her? She's knowledgeable and experienced enough to survive to her age, she's considered trustworthy enough by a cruel dictator to trust her with his wives, she's literate, she'd dedicated enough to whatever her craft it to tattoo it across her whole body, and she's wise enough to not fall for Joe's propaganda of himself - yet clever enough to have hidden it this whole time. AND she is considered valuable enough that Joe does NOT kill her for what she did - she's ALIVE later and is seen comforting the dying Angharad.
She has two lines in the film. And none of what I said is learned from expanded materials (which clarify that her tattoos are in fact written history, which is neat, but the film doesn't say what they are). It's all just from visuals.
@@SaurontheDeceiver you are so right
i remember after i first watched fury road i didn't get it, it felt to me like another action movie like Bay's transformers or whatever, and even then Doug's review felt very shallow to me, like he didn't enjoy it but had to reach for reasons why it was good (because general audience really loved it and he didn't want to enrage ppl with his honest opinion that it was mid)
after i rewatched it at home couple years later i realized how incredible this movie is, how every single shot or character's movement serves a purpose in the narrative, and how much is conveyed with its minimal dialogue. it's been my favorite movie ever for years now, and now Doug's review just makes me laugh at how he, a 30-something cinema critic seemed to have missed everything really profoundly great about fury road, just like i did. but i was 16 at the time, what's his excuse??
I always forget about it when I come back to rewatch the video and I burst out laughing each time
What's even funnier is that even his interpretation of The Road Runner cartoons is pretty shallow and superficial. The Road Runner cartoons are funny because they work on a comedy motif called "the impossible task," where the protagonist is attempting to accomplish a task, only to never be able to finish it for whatever reasons, or to accomplish it, only for that accomplishment to be rendered redundant. _The ENTIRE bit_ of those cartoons is Wile E. Coyote is trying to catch the road runner, and despite all his plans to catch the road runner, the laws of physics and the universe itself will break themselves just to prevent the coyote from catching the road runner; almost every punchline is how the universe itself will screw over the coyote.
Ironically, and somewhat humorously, I actually think Doug Walker has a sound point in his statement that comedy is rooted in pain, and The Road Runner cartoons are almost quintessential proof of that. But instead, he plays that card to say "Fury Road is successful because Road Runner. What? They're both zany chases in the desert with little to no talking; they're basically the same thing!"
It's like watching the arguments of a child who hasn't done enough critical thinking exercises to grasp comprehensive pattern recognition... except Doug said that when he was 34.
"This is Hat Dan; he's got my back."
"I advise not being killed by him... his hat is said to trap the souls of its victims."
that hat, of course, is the safest in its class
"His hat's on! We can end this."
So what, you're saying this is some kind of Hat Squad?
incredible
@@antiguy360 the hat that can climb anything
Nobody's pointed out just how Hilariously Cynical the ending is where everybody sings the spongebob squarepants theme.
I watched a lot of Doug's side-content (ie. vlogs, sibling rivalry) back in the day and one thing he's gone on record saying is that he doesn't get the hype around spongebob and largely views it as something only Gen Zers or children like (much like his opinion on the pokemon franchise). It's fairly clear that he's aware that most of his original core audience from mid-late 2000's youtube is gone (either growing out of it, or unsubbing after the the "Change The Channel" document surfaced) because he's starting making more reviews of movies from the 2000's/2010's (ie. stuff that's nostalgic for teenagers nowadays) because he is now trying to pander to a younger audience (he covered the Angry birds movie and the emoji movie in 2018... those aren't even close to nostalgic).
Taking all that in mind, he suddenly has access to Cory Taylor, this iconic metal artist (all because Cory's son is an NC fan) and uses that as justification to make this all-out video tribute "review" (it's barely a review at all, honestly) which he thinks is gonna be a hit and thinks everybody watching will be stoked on, so he decides that he'll end the video with some kind of "Grand Finale" as a cherry on top. His thought process was probably that he wanted to pick a song that his audience could identify with, so he just went with the Spongebob theme. Didn't bother to look up what the most popular slipknot song was or even get Taylor to play a song from the Wall Album, just went with the spongebob theme because he's at the point where he can't really even relate with his core audience base any more and is desperately trying to do something, anything, to pander to them.
It was the sad, internet reviewer equivalent of the Steve Buscemi "How You Doing, Fellow Kids?" Meme.
This is a month old, but it's apparently an in-joke of Corey Taylor's where he'd end sets with the Spongebob theme. So don't worry, it's not THAT dystopic
As a man once said, "this is pandering like hell"
@@FM-cp6kcyeah if anything this is just another indictment of Doug’s abilities as a creator, in that the extent of his ideas are just direct references to things others have already done. he saw the video of CT ending a set with spongebob and thought “man, it’d be really funny if my parody ended with this!”
i can give you his thought process
"Oh wow, Corey Taylor, guess this guy is pretty notable. Hmmm let's do a UA-cam search... Hey! He did the SpongeBob theme one time at a concert as a joke. Ha! Fans love references! Let's just do that!"
Honestly…I’m trying to not mean any shade with this….part of me kind of loves the irony that in this video essay about how Doug lacks context or worse refuses to engage with said context, you wrote a small essay in itself on how you lacked any context for an inside joke of Slipknot’s 😂
Not saying it still doesn’t deserve some criticism though because while it KIND OF works okay on it’s own, if you’re not a Slipknot fan it comes across as random for the sake of it
The thing to remember about Doug’s The Wall review is that it came out long after Doug decided he had done all he wanted to with the Nostalgia Critic character, retired it, tried to do something else only to not find adequate support for it, and forced himself back into the character to stay afloat. His decision to even review The Wall is completely calculated - he saw that he had success and warm reception before when he reviewed certain movies from the past in a certain style, so he assumed that if he just picked out an old movie connected to something fondly remembered, watched it while already planning to make fun of it, and applied his usual schtick with some added production value and celebrity cameo that it would work.
That’s why the review seems both hastily shoved out and weirdly labored over at the same time. It’s a specific kind of jaded business scheme that could only come out of the fast-paced online video content ecosystem of the past 10 years or so.
Doug also just kind of sucks and is a complete nit wit.
Nothing has ever quite highlighted the way Doug views art like him calling imagery that evokes the Holocaust “a World War II reference”
*Sees swastika*
"HOLY SHIT is that a MOTHERFUCKING WORLD WAR 2 REFERENCE???"
Yup
it reminded me of when obscuruslupa was speaking to doug and he asked her about a joke voice she did (not sure exactly which one) and what it was referencing. when she said it wasnt a reference to any pop culture and just an inside joke she found funny he geniunely didnt understand how something humourous couldnt be a reference to pop culture. like this man lives and breathes references
in this day and age you can't really say the hard H word without invoking the ire of the sani-bots
@@iwakeupandboomimarat he's like abed from community with none of the heart.
This is the calmest and most mature murder by words I have even seen.
Dan just went full Hannibal Lecter!
yes. "mature".
Thats the word I was looking for to describe a video breaking down a video over a year old by someone that YEARS AFTER HE STOPPED WORKING WITH THEM, he cant let go.
Mature. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Now petty, childish, "pandering to the CTC lynchmob", or "being a male Lupa" - tbose do come to mind.
I love all his content but this - this is horribly disappointing
Canadian. ⊂(ᗝ𓂋ᗝ ∩͜ )
@@cthulhupthagn5771 Why do you consider this pandering? Last I remember, people were canceling Channel Awesome two(?) years ago, granted I haven't followed them for years.
@@cthulhupthagn5771 Whoa, who died? Ohh, the murder.
(っの_,の)ᕗ| 𒐪𒐪
^That's a fence. Heh. But wow, you're, erm, very upset. Pull yourself together, m8. I think you'll be fine.
It’s weird having grown out of the nostalgia critic a decade ago and looking back and seeing Doug hasn’t grown at all
There's this thing I always say that very often the worst thing to find out about a comedian or other creator is that they're not really playing a character. Doug reallt just is like that. It's funny to watch a guy misread movies and shout into a camera when you're 12, but imagine the kind of person who decides to make that into a career at 25.
I've watched this video a ton of times and the finger guns bit at the end still kills me. I just noticed that Hat Dan: The Dan with a Hat is poorly greenscreened in despite the fact that the Dans are never in the same shot
Hat Dan is amateurishly green screened (the software didn't remove the screen entirely, causing an aliased outline), the hat is only meant to hide his hairline, the footage was filmed on a phone in vertical so he keeps clipping off screen, the backdrop is just a shot of a house so the green screen was redundant, the acting is atrocious, he keeps looking directly into the camera like a child looking for validation and praise, his summary is disingenuous, and the skit they do at the end is unrelated, overly-long, ostentatious, and as unfunny as cancer.
(Which is what makes it hilarious.)
There are so many levels on which the Hat Dan joke works so perfectly to be a scornful mockery of Doug Walker that it feels like trying to follow the plot of Inception trying to follow them all.
@@DaMaster012 just reading this and giggling, so good
@@DaMaster012 Also, the fact that Hat Dan is introduced as a "long-running character" but did not appear in the video yet, which is a nice nudge to the furry Trial itself. This is an absolutely savage way to condense most of the criticisms he has about Doug Walker's The Wall and about Doug Walker himself into a hilarious outro.
The fact that, during this skit, he thanks his patrons by stating "THIS IS YOUR FAULT" made me laugh even louder.
@@DocteurZeuhl >The fact that, during this skit, he thanks his patrons by stating "THIS IS YOUR FAULT" made me laugh even louder.
Fun _Dan Lore_ time! This is because when NC's The Wall came out Dan had a few people asking him to make a video review about it, and he did not want to put the effort required to make a review (like watching and engaging with NC's The Wall several times) and eventually said "Okay, fine, if my Patreon reaches 800 members I'll do it" and then got a flood of new patrons.
my favorite thing bad film reviewers do is complain about a movie's lack of subtlety and then proceed to completely miss the very obvious points being unsubtly shown to them
A lot of people who do reaction videos are like this too. In particular people who react to One by Metallica. They're always like "omg this is so sad and messed up" and then at the end they complain that they didn't get it. Even though the message of the song is about as subtle as a mortar blast to the face
I hope you've seen Dan's video about Annihilation, it is so beautiful, I love it.
It's about too many UA-camrs engaging too much with the literal.
@@robertluong3024 We need to trick Doug into reviewing Annihilation so that Dan has to talk about that too.
Nothing breaks my heart more than someone I once cared about, even as a fan, refusing to grow for their own sake.
What in the hell could Doug Walker ever have done to inspire being "cared about" ?
I was NOT expecting seeing you here lol
@@wellesradio I mean as a teen I "cared" about Doug in the sense of "when is the next Nostalgia Critic coming out."
@tama hero
I used to be huge fan until he talked about a movie I actually know a lot about and it made me realize how hollow a lot of his criticisms are. If I didn't know better I'd swear he intentionally misinterprets movies. Regardless some of his reviews still make me crack up so I am conflicted at his lack of understanding
@@whateverIFeelLike "If I didn't know better I'd swear he intentionally misinterprets movies." Wow, I think you just summed up his whole character
I thought Waters' criticism of school was childish and overdone - until I learned about the reality of 1950's British boys' boarding schools. The Wall needs a A LOT of context to be understood and as history marches on, we are slowly losing this context.
But unlike Walker you did the research.
I don't think Doug would be able to change his mind even if he did understand the sheer volume of abuse that british kids were suffering. He's too egotistical for that.
I remember the movie Kes (from the 70s) has a scene of boys being beaten with rulers by the teachers, including one kid who didn't do anything and had just been sent by another teacher to deliver a message. Then the main kid breaks down crying to a nicer teacher later on about how horrible the adults are, and yet nobody cares. It's so sobering.
Honestly it may be a good thing that we are losing this context with enough time such tragic events only get remenbered by historians as they start to lose relevance in the world
Like the fall of constantinople for exemple
Its a sing that the scars arent as deeply anymore and instead are healing
@@valletas If we forget it we cannot learn from it.
The Wall once gave me what is probably the worst panic attack of my life because the emotional themes and the visuals were so overwhelming. Now, that in and of itself is no clear stamp of quality or anything, but it was able to evoke feelings so strong my body literally couldn't handle it. To see Doug fail to even grasp the most basic of themes is kind of weird when it freaked me out so hard that I had to take the day off work because I couldn't sleep at all that night.
Me, after I watched _The Thing_ for the first time.
What was the part of The Wall that caused you to be stricken with debilitating existential terror?
Same. Me and my parents, both big fans of it, took me to see a screening of it two years ago. It made me feel physically sick, because the societal commentary, but also from the personal perspective. Being stuck in the head of a severely mentally ill person is nauseating but also left me with a cathartic feeling once it had settled with me.
It seemed Doug had just made up his mind before seeing it that he was gonna hate it and didn't bother actually interact with it
@@DaMaster012 It wasn't any one thing in particular. I suffer from rather severe anxiety, and a movie with trippy surrealistic visuals and a theme that hit a bit too close to home at times was just the thing to push me over the edge.
'The commentary is extremely shallow while also being deeply petty and mean.'
This feels like an epitaph for the last 25 years.
divine creative writing professor reviewing God's work
This is probably just me overthinking: Capitalist Realism has been ubiquitous for decades, but it really settled into people's minds after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our belief that the world can fundamentally change, that problems can actually be solved, simply disappeared. All that we're left with with is identity-based symbolic "culture war." Politics is no longer about destroying/reinforcing the class hierarchy, it's about the war on christmas.
With the rise of the internet, economic stagnation (for the working class), increasing alienation/isolation, our extreme cynicism, and the unwillingness to imagine or dream of a genuinely better world, the scope of public involvement in society is reduced to discourse about Mr. Potato Head's gendered marketing. In such a context, how could society be anything other than petty, mean, and shallow?
(And just to clarify, I'm not anti idpol, but it needs to be tied to class conflict, because identity and class divisions are mutually reinforcing)
@@wadehwallace Identity politics springing up and dismantling OWS is one hell of a coincidence, eh? Nah, it's still about class hierarchy. They just figured out that it's better to exhaust you with distractions than to engage you directly. Talking about smarty pants policy allows for failure and fails to resonate emotionally. Failing to curtail baby killing guns/abortions is still a heroic effort against overwhelming forces of darkness. Keep on voting against *those guys* while I filch the product of your labors.
Oh and uh, they don't just brand guns as a right wing thing to sell them, they do that to make sure you hand them over to the oligarchs when the critical mass is reached and politics flip "left"ward across the board. You will *celebrate* your disenfranchisement when reach it. This aside seems random but it's not. Hypernormalization is not complete until you forget you ever *could* have done something about it. You can't/don't want to crumble the state but if you think Bezos/McConnell/etc are out of your grasp, you sell yourself short and *that* sentiment was deliberately planted/reinforced.
@@PutkisenSeta I'm not sure what your larger point is, but I have a few issues with your comment. 1) What are you referring to when you say "OWS"? 2) Identity-based conflict and class-based conflict are MUTUALLY reinforcing, both must be addressed simultaneously or we won't succeed on either front. 3) I don't think the gun issue is really relevant because whether or not the populace is armed makes no difference today, this isn't 1917. If a few thousand untrained college students with rifles tried overthrowing the US government they'd just get erased by a drone strike. This idea that we're going to try to defeat the US military with guns we bought at Walmart is naive. The most effective tools at our disposal are ECONOMIC because the centers of power are economic, not political. A general strike is INFINITELY more effective than an attempt by leftists to storm a capitol building (especially since the government wouldn't turn a blind eye to LEFTISTS the way they did the right wingers on Jan. 6th). 4) Are you an anti-capitalist?
@@wadehwallace Occupy Wallstreet. Did I use the wrong acronym? It collapsed in the end due to internal strife over nascent identity politics. More than a little suspicious, no? The PoC talk just *happens* to get traction at the very moment the proles are starting to threaten their masters and conveniently sends the whole movement into disarray.
Like I said, they want you thinking of grandiose, doomed insurrections rather than your individual, actionable power. It's the only way to convince you to disarm the lower classes without incident, solidifying for good the state's monopoly on violence. They cannot control individual actors and hence, must paralyze you psychologically. It's the only way to hold onto power *firmly*. Striking, protests etc are easy to undermine and suppress via control of the media. Prole reporters say what you tell them to say, no different from the mooks in uniform. You can identify as whatever you'd like as long as it's called a riot when the cops attack you. They told you to fight on that field because they know they will beat you. You know what's much harder to deal with? A man with nothing to lose but his chains, a man with a gun and a purpose. A man who knows he's free.
On rewatch I’m struck by how … genuinely cruel it is to rewrite when the tigers broke free, a song about your dad dying in ww2, to call the guy talking about his dad dying “whiny”. Like????????
Doug is like that guy in school who no one liked , but for some reason everyone tolerated having him around.
@@APPEALtoFEAR I think it's more, Doug is that guy who nobody liked, and never realised that it was entirely because of who he is as a person, and that people only tolerate him because of what he can do for them. Like a rich bully, or that guy who was a dick and just rude, but owned the only xbox so you couldn't just ditch him.
@@kalreynolds5829 Lmfao you're funny , that's pretty creative , but maybe a little too specific to be correct... I'm just joking, that actually cracked me up.
That's pretty much exactly what I said. Only with more detail 🤣
Idk how you can listen to that song in all its fucking heartbreaking bitterness, hear “and that’s how the high command took my daddy from me,” and conclude “eh it’s just some rich guy whining”
@@hannahb2306 It's not like Doug Iis great with his criticism under normal circumstances, but he was definitely reaching on this one.
The Wall is something that's very close to me personally. Despite being made about the aftermath of WWII, it resonated with me during the war in Syria that started in 2011. The image of the abusive school institution, the sheer horrors of war.... It was all things I had to face from a very young age, things that are bricks in my own wall. "Goodbye Blue Sky" might be my favorite piece of art ever made.
I was once a fan of Doug Walker. His style of comedy really worked for me when I was younger and I grew out of it, but to see him so deliberately and desperately bad mouth this movie and make a mockery of it is just so pathetic. It's been years since the internet dunked on this piece of crap "review" and rightfully so, but I just felt inclined to comment
I can’t get over how terrible the line “our education system’s broke” flows over the stresses in the melody. “Oh OUR e-JOO-CAAAY, SHON, sys-TEM’s BROKE”
"Fury Road has all the substance of a Road-Runner skit" is certainly a... revealing take on the film.
Maybe if Immortan Joe got crushed, blowned, fell many time off a cliff, got hit by paintings of road he made himself, got hurt by defective Acme products and kept being startled by Furiosa and Max going "Beep Beep' behind him, then yes, Fury Road is like a Road-Runner skit.
Doug, what were you smoking when you did this script?
I'm semi-convinced Doug thinks that Looney Tunes cartoons are the absolute height of not just comedy, but all of cinema.
@@amiefortman7220 He’s done top tens before and Terry Gilliam is his top inspiration/favourite filmmaker. I feel like you can very much see Gilliam’s style in Doug’s work, but it’s missing all of the nuance and wit.
@@TheLingo56 His content is Gilliam without understanding what makes Gilliam beloved.
He's also cited "Amadeus" and "Ed Wood" as some of his favorite movies, but he doesn't seem to understand what makes them actual good movies. The way I see it, he's obsessed with the *idea* of great cinema without grasping the *craft* of great cinema... another way the Tommy Wiseau comparison is really apt.
I know it's got nothing to do with Doug but "English Nationalism is just blood in the gutter - soldiers sent to war don't die for their country, they just die" is a quote I think about all the time
it cuts deep into the retroactive heroacism we place on the soilders during the world wars, like nothing has been quite as harrowing as seeing veterans of those wars lamenting how they never wanted any of this.
I think about it constantly, especially being British. We are all taught so much in school and in British society to focus on heroism and bravery, but we don't focus nearly enough on the terrible waste of life. That line hit me out of nowhere.
Yeah that line has stuck with me and made me research and learn a lot. I didn’t know if I agreed with it when I watched this last year but yeah he’s right.0
@@hl6994 yeah here in America too we all live with a hero complex. You constantly see people with a gun on their hip and it’s obvious they’re just trying to intimidate people or they want someone to reach for their gun so they can “save the day”. Or they hope a shooting happens so they can be the one to save the day.
I come back to watch this video every so often and every single time I say that line along with him because it's such an honest and powerful message that really resonates with me
I'm still astounded after all these years that Doug Walker hasn't invested in a treadmill or something of the sort to make anyone walking in front of a green screen look somewhat realistic.
Actually, no, I'm not astounded.
Honestly, my gut feeling is that the project started with "We have contacts with Rob Scallon and Corey Taylor, we should do an album", and then The Wall was relatively arbitrarily chosen as a target from there. I reckon it could have just as easily been a review of Yellow Submarine.
That would make a lot of sense as Doug does that all the time. like with his Moulin Rouge review from 2011, or his Les Miserables review from 2013. he just gets his random mates together (Who have mostly left channel awesome, and called the company out on their terrible behaviour) to sing shitty parody songs of arbitrarily chosen musicals, while dressing in silly pantomime costumes, and lazily recreating scenes from the film.
@@jaredjams4267 Still, I shudder to think what their "All You Need is Love" parody would had been (something tells me I would had died out of cringe).
I don't think so. Doug had been teasing a review of The Wall as far back as _2012,_ like in his reviews of Felix the Cat: The Movie and The Wiz. I think it's more likely he spent years building a roster of talent that he could -blackmail- corral into working on this: building up ties with Rob Scallion, with _Corey Taylor,_ he saw it as all leading up to this. It really was a passion project; he thought this was going to be his magnum opus, the one he would be most remembered for... and it was... like how everyone remembers Tommy Wiseau for The Room.
@@DaMaster012I'm pretty sure doug actually did a The Wall review back in 2009/2010 but since I've never heard anyone but me talk about it i assume it's lost media. I distinctly remember being in class watching doug talk about the wall with accompanying footage instead of working
Doug's response to the story is like, "Oh, you were scarred by World War 2? Your dad died? You're scared? Suck it up."
"Your mother was both emotionally distant and overprotective and that lead to an innate distrust of femininity? You're scared that a woman will not only be dissatisfied, she will consume you? Grow some balls!"
@@howareyoumoreofaclownthanme "oh did your little tory government, villify gay people and poor people, brazenly try to quell opposition and set up barriers to stop people voting and echo the exact same sentiments as the nazis just with a quaint british accent?? Grow a pair, ya snowflake!"
I cant believe he thought shaming a man for grieving his father would make a good joke
"Like _The Room,_ it's a deeply cynical product made by a fundamentally untalented man, bored by the idea of personal growth, building so many layers of self-protective irony that it becomes unintentionally revealing."
In just that one sentence, you put into words all of my frustrations with Doug as a creator better than I ever could. That was brutal.
This video breaks down every single thing that is wrong with Doug himself and his view of The Wall, and summarises it all in this sentence
“Hello FBI, I’d like to report a murder”
I actually disagree with it I've seen the room and whatever else you can say about it I'd argue Tommy Wiseau definitely meant to communicate sincere emotions and feelings
@@oscarnewman1374 If anything, The Room is MORE coherant. Its a bad movie but its more coherent that Walker's Wall.
Too many layers of irony will inevitably fuse under their own weight into honesty.
as a kid growing up in india, the wall's section on school's was what had first connected me to the film/album. india was a huge and diverse country grappling with a post independence mire of caste and gender based discrimination and lofty ideals of secular socialist democracy had to quickly come up with a system of education that incorporated colonial era ideas on education with the new aim of lifting the huge population out of poverty and segregation. So today we have a system that is nominally very good at churning out very smart people of a certain mould while also crushing individualism and creativity and leaving many dissatisfied with the system. then off you go to uni where you have to pivot again and are expected to think for yourself. Seeing the critic get that song so wrong was the final sign i needed to completely sever my ties. i had stopped watching long ago but hadn't taken the step of unsubscribing
+++
It’s honestly fascinating what had to have been going through his head to come to the conclusions he did
i made the mistake of pausing the video and reading the screenshot of the satellite city wiki and now im currently in the hospital being treated for multiple lacerations from the sheer edge
I read your comment and made the mistake to check how bad it really was and like... even the edgiest version of my thirteen-year-old self would be embarrased to write that, let alone publish it.
Doug: You're comparing schools to concentration camps?? How dramatic!!!
Also Doug: Let me just transform this song about fascist propaganda into a song about twitter, I mean it's basically the same thing right?
Holy shit good point
@Tucker Johnson That's literally what a parody is. Reaches aren't needed when Doug is so hypocritical.
In his defense, there is a lot of literal fascist propaganda on Twitter.
@Tucker Johnson I agree that a parody doesn’t have to retain the same message or even critique that message in the first place. However, I disagree that what Doug did was a parody at all. It WAS a critique, Doug even says so himself. It is officially a review of the movie. It’s just so vapid and aimless that he had to put it into Pink Floyd’s amazing music to make it even a semblance of entertainment. I think that it only looks like a reach through the lens of a critiquing a parody when in reality we’re criticizing a critique, if that word salad makes any sense. Either way, half of Doug’s video is criticizing The Wall and the other half is him winging about Twitter in some weird anger-projection onto the audience and Pink Floyd’s art. Personally, I think his video is a beautiful testament to a type of “artist” who is only creative enough to destroy actually talented people’s work, and even that he fails to do without actually criticizing himself, wether he knows that or not.
@@isaacleguin2171 While true, that’s not what Doug was singing about. He’s singing about people who criticize him on Twitter because they disagree with his reviews.
"Like The Room, it's a deeply cynical product made by a fundamentally untalented man, bored by the idea of personal growth, building so many layers of self-protective irony that it because unintentionally revealing."
That has to be one of the most brutally calculated criticisms of someone ever, and I would like that power, please.
Unlike The Room (imo), NC's "The Wall" is so bad it's bad. The former is clearly trying to be a straight drama yet is so ridiculously made (the scenarios, the dialogue, the acting, etc.) to where you just laugh at it. NC's Wall is so surreal with its existence as it appears to lack a clear direction besides a guy being smug (just his voice sounds punchable. Wiseau at least sounded silly). If I were to choose between The Room and NC's Wall, I'd go with The Room anyday as it is fun to watch.
@@cadethumann8605 YOURE TEAR8NG ME APART LISA!! Is definitely one of my favorite lines as well as him going, Oh Hi Mark
@@cadethumann8605 There's also IMHO a huge qualitative difference between straight dialogue delivered poorly, and poorly delivered lyrical singing. Maybe it's just me and my musical sensibilities, but whilst badly delivered dialogue can be fun to watch (particularly if it's delivered sincerely, which tbf Doug and the CA team seem to tend to lack) a poorly sung lyric is just... idk, I feel like it delivers psychic damage just on sheer cringe, not fun or enjoyable cringe either, just...... fucking _ouch_
I remember watching an Anthony Fantano video where he was responding to a tweet that a fan had made calling NC's The Wall the worst album of the 2010s, not only because of its content but because it doesn't show as an expression of love for the art form. He agreed and said something along the lines of this:
'If I had to pick the worst album of the decade(between Angelic 2 The Core and NC's The Wall), it would have to be for very different reasons.
With Angelic 2 The Core, it's a bloated, horribly made album [...] but you can still tell that despite its delusional and awful content it comes from a genuine place of love for music.
With NC's The Wall, it just feels like Doug Walker hates music.'
If we change A2TC to The Room and music to movies:
'...With The Room, it's a bloated, horribly made movie [...] but you can still tell that despite its delusional and awful content it comes from a genuine place of love for movies.
With NC's The Wall, it just feels like Doug Walker hates movies.'
And that sums it up. Even if DW loves the album and movie, it just doesn't show in his expressions, more coming off as a childish and smug write-off of other people's horrific experiences in post-war Britain, like "I went to high school in a different country decades after the period the movie was inspired and born from, so therefore your horrific and traumatic memories of child abuse in school are invalidated".
Sorry for the long comment but Pink Floyd is very near to my heart as they got me into seriously listening to music as an art form rather than background noise(especially with The Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon), and to see such a bad "review" of it just makes it feel like a personal attack even though it obviously wasn't meant as one.
@@Hannah_Em Good point. Bad singing of a point just makes it feel incredibly smug. Smugness is not inherently a bad thing, but you need to have made a REALLY good point to use it because otherwise, it can put people off of your video, and to an extent, your channel as a whole.
I think this is a great insight into the mindset of older guys who "love" classic rock music like pink floyd, but refuse to engage with it on any political or ideological level. It's hard for more conservative folks to acknowledge their rock idols might have been left on the political spectrum. It doesn't gel with their worldview of "good old music who didn't used to be political, not like those snowflakes today."
For me that's how the critic can claim to love something but be so obviously dismissive of its deeper message. He's trying to process the cognitive dissonance.
The same goes for older people’s reaction to X-Men in hindsight. It too was a deeply political story; it was literally about a civil rights movement and yet older generations insist it was never “woke” and younger people forced it to be so.
Doug Walker walking into the shot with "Person You Hate" written on his face is genuinely hilarious but probably not for the reasons he thinks it is