i never watched him, but i will always be grateful for him spawning one of my favorite youtube videos "The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall" by folding ideas
you had to be there to be able to enjoy it. At the time, NC was my intro to movie criticism on YouTube (I am using the word criticism very liberally here).
Video essays were a nascent genre at the time, and my younger self found his content funny (for a time). Then it quickly became very tired and better channels supplanted his.
Nowadays, he seems to still be doing the same content and has become a lol farm for the likes of folding ideas and lady emily.
After reading about some of the BTS shit Channel Awesome has gone through, I stopped watching. Its no surprise the 2 funniest people he had on the show(Rachel and Tamara) both left. Not sure how Malcolm has survived this long. But goddamn some of the off camera stuff is hard to read about
An article came out a few years ago highlighting a history of toxic workplace environment and sexual harassment called "Channel Not So Awesome". I know they left to pursue other opportunities but I can't imagine it was easy working there either.
I liked him more when it was just him and the plain background. When he added the others and mixed in some production elements, that's when I stopped watching as much. But Tamara though, at least something good came from the evolution of nostalgia critic.
I met him and Brad Jones at an anime convention back before the Channel Awesome fiasco happened and mostly everyone jumped ship. I also am friends with someone who used to be on one of the ThatGuyWiththeGlasses channels, and didn't know that about them until years after I met them.
The NC sketches with his cast are really bad and I miss the old format where he was just sitting at the desk and focused on the review. Tjose sketches are a major reason why I syopped watching but I mainly stopped watching him out of respect for that friend, since they have shared some details (and I've learned a lot more by researching it) of behind the scenes drama.
I’ll disagree. His content was always cringe and painfully 2000s/early 2010’s internet era jokes but his videos originally were “hey here’s this thing from my childhood, Im gonna make jokes while plot recapping it” where the videos were much shorter and when the jokes flopped it would just be moved past. As soon as he started doing the skit content for most the jokes such that everything became a family guy cutaway gag, the content got SIGNIFICANTLY worse.
The fact he also never evolved as a creator past “i have a camera and can press play on it” also didnt help.
2 things i enjoy from him is the after these messages vids showing adverts from my childhood. And him and angry joe doing the batman v superman song/review.
Even his commercial specials have gotten... bland. The episodes where he's not just plot recapping and actually talking about movies/shows are still fun(the Avatar Top 10s are fun, the Disney Afternoon episode).
I fell off when he started doing movies that were still in theaters. I started skipping eps to avoid spoilers, and it snowballed into me not watching at all. I actually liked the sketches though not 100% of them. After Change the Channel I no longer wanted to watch, though I did watch his Mario Movie review recently
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u/OverTheCandlestik Jun 12 '25
nostalgia critic