The Nostalgia Critic/Headscratchers

• On the promo artwork thingy for Garbage Pail Kids, it says Garbage Pail Kids - The Complete Series. Wait, what? If its a series, why are they reviewing the movie? And why does there exist a series? Did they change it to the movie and then forget to change the graphic?
  • I'm guessing that part of the image was hastily copied from a DVD cover of the animated series. Here's the interesting thing though, it was pulled from airing in the United States. Completely. Sadly other countries weren't so lucky.
  • Not that I'm defending the movie, by why didn't the Critic infer that the Garbage Pail Kids came from the garbage pan floating in space earlier in the movie?
    • Because frankly, would you, or anyone else care? Besides, that makes even less sense. Just think about it.
• In the Critic's Tom and Jerry: The Movie review, he makes a giant deal out of the two talking (and this was before they started singing). So, why is it he undermines the impact by showing a clip of Tom "Don't you believe it" line at the end of the review? He's pretty much making himself a liar by showing that the two have spoken in animated shorts prior to the movie!
  • Ah, but that only counts as a one-liner. The movie just said, "Fuck it. Let's have them talk. Who CARES that they're usually known to be silent, with a few one-liners in very few cartoons?"
  • Most of their dialogue in the old shorts were brief non-canonical gags or in an episode that's Something Completely Different.
  • Plus, he says that Tom & Jerry had "little to no voice actors" originally, so he's probably well aware of what he said.
  • Incidentally, Tom and Jerry both talk for almost the entire episode in "The Lonesome Mouse", which was made in 1943.
• This has bugged me for a while... Why does the Nostalgia Critic say that The Wizard was Nintendo's biggest flop since the Virtual Boy? That wasn't out until 1995 (The Wizard came out in 1989).
  • Slip of the tongue. Doug does that from time to time.
  • When people use the "this is the X-est X since Y" trope they don't generally mean "since" in a literal, chronological sense, but more in the vein of "apart from".
• This is really just a trifle, but This Troper was bothered by the fact that the series he's got going is called "Old vs. New," but the new person is on the left while the old person is on the right, making it look like "New vs. Old."
  • vs. is a commutative operand, so it's all fine.

• Santa Christ's first appearance. He cures NC's diabetes, and regularly reads to sick orphans. Couldn't he cure them as well?
  • But then he wouldn't have sick orphans to read to.
  • His reading is so great that it can cure any illness?
  • Would it also make their parents come back?
    • Maybe the orphans just have chicken pox and he can't cure them or they won't develope immunity

• "Holiday Clusterfuck" is an awesome, hilarious song. However, it's a song about Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Christmas, yes? So we get the line, "Seeing your in-laws three times is too much!" Er. Do many people visit their in-laws for Halloween?
  • Thanksgiving and Christmas tip the scale two to three. It's mostly about how there's big popular holidays every month, meaning planning and decorating and meeting people gets crazy.
  • Many couples with children will take them to their parents' neighborhoods for more candy.
  • When this troper was a child, her grandparents came over to help with the trick-or-treating.

• I know it's Rule of Funny but seriously, why is Old!Critic always completely blonde when he has brown hair now?
  • Isn't that supposed to be grey or greying hair? He's impersonating Doc Brown from Back to The Future in the The Room review when it was on the site.
• If he listed Sailor Moon's transformation in the Top 11 hottest animated women to be one of his favorites, why does he end up looking REALLY bored during said transformation instead of staring in bliss like he did in the Barb Wire opening?
  • He was acting out how he thought the Sailor Moon enemies would react to the two minute or more transformation sequence before the fight.

• What's the difference between his "Pointless Moments" and "Big Lipped Alligator Moment" running gags?
  • Big Lipped Alligator moments are completely bizarre and have no place in the movie whatsoever (a sudden musical number or a Disney Acid Sequence). Pointless moments make sense in context but just don't add anything to the movie or forward the plot (usually cases of crowbarred-in attempts at Character Development or times when the director decided to Leave the Camera Running).

• Luke and Phelous blew up with Canada in "Your An Old Dirty Bastard". Wouldn't their lives be then worse?! Also, doesn't President Vargas seem a little too trigger happy for America to be safe. I know thats the joke, but there literally has to be someone in the world who is worse off. Also theres a name that kept coming to my toungue during this: Rob!
  • Isn't it obvious! Rob is Santa Christ and Santa Christ is telling the story! My brain actually went to Chester, as he was always calling the Critic nice and Critic seemed to be the only one in TGWTG to give him change, as well as offer a place to stay. I think you just have to take Rule of Funny on this one and ignore some logic issues.
    • I'm guessing that without the Critic to give him money, Chester was forced to pull his life together and became a millionaire businessman.
  • For that matter, why would Spoony be a non-gamer who reviews only family films? I know, I know, Rule of Funny--but at least the other Critic-Free lives made some sort of sense, given their respective character traits. Wouldn't it have been more logical for Spoony to become a combination of the Nostalgic Critic and the Happy Video Game Nerd? (At least this version of Spoony still seemed to be rather mentally unhinged....)
    • That bugged me, but for a different reason--supposedly, we were being shown a world without the Nostalgia Critic, not without Doug. Spoony can't be the Critic because then the world's got the Nostalgia Critic in it. In fact, if Spoony is the Critic, why is there no TGWTG.com? The same "YouTube being bitchy about copyrighted material" issue still would've come up, which would likely have resulted in the contributors we saw joining anyway.
    • The world is without the Nostalgia Critic as we know and recognize him, not necessarily without a person or entity that at any point for whatever reason chose to name him-or-herself 'the Nostalgia Critic'; after all, if we applied that logic to the original movie, there could never have been anyone ever called "George Bailey". We're also viewing them as in-universe characters; maybe in-universe Spoony secretly desires to be the Nostalgia Critic and happily review family films, and the fact that he can't is what fuels his angry reviews of video games instead? As for why Spoony's not doing video games, he has done movie reviews from time to time, so it's not unheard of.

• In the Tank Girl review, he said he'd never read the comic, yet later on he holds up a copy of it. Did he just have it on hand but never read it? Borrow it from Linkara just for that gag?
  • You can still own a 90 minute DVD and not get round to watching it.
  • I assumed he borrowed it from someone who had read it and never bothered to read it himself. It's not like the movie would've given him any inclination to read it.

• Why was Santa Christ bleeped in the Care Bears 2 review when nothing else is bleeped?
  • Because he's Santa Christ -- he's too pure to actually swear. He just makes a swear-censor bleep noise. How can he do it so well? Because he's ****ing Santa Christ.

• In the Inspector Gadget review, he says that they leave Penny behind for the climax. When I saw the flick on Cartoon Network a few weeks ago I saw her take out a guard by making him think over his life as a goon after sneaking in the factory and joining her uncle in the finale. Why would he skim that detail?
  • ... because he didn't feel like mentioning it?
  • I figured that was a reference to the fact that her part was reduced so much in that movie. As he mentioned before Penny was basically the real main character in the cartoon and instead the movie was about Gadget, his love interest, an annoying talking car, and a guy who was supposed to be Claw. Since he covered most of the major plot issues and points of the movie you can see how easy it is to overlook Penny's (almost nonexistent) role.
• I really liked You're a Dirty Rotten Bastard; what bugs me is the commentary. Doug says he wasn't aware that It's a Wonderful Life had been homaged or parodied before. Considering how often it's been done, I find it rather improbable that he'd never even seen one spoof.
  • He said he'd never seen people's life made worse before. This happens all the time in modern day kids shows, which Doug doesn't watch. I think.
    • Correction: He said he'd never seen a spoof where the person's non-existance made everyone else's life better. It might just be a case of not having watched the right shows; not every show does It's A Wonderful Life spoof, and those that do probably did it in a different way.
• Other than just wanting three-dimensional characters, has he ever said why he hates bullies so much? I agree that they're usually one-note, but knowing what kinda person Critic is and hearing how much his school-life blew, you'd think he'd accept that "nerdy creator wants to take vengeance against his former bullies" mentality.
  • Mainly because most of the time bully characters in movies and stuff are just so poorly written. They usually appear as this roaming pack of vandals who never do anything and for some reason their only hobby seems to be tormenting this one person for giggles, and most of the time they are never punished for it.
  • The "never punished" part is probably the big sticking point for Doug. Anyone who's done even a little research on bullying knows that it can get really bad, but movie bullies get away with way too much. For instance, in a movie you might see a bully walk up to a smaller kid and just start pounding him into the ground, and NEVER be punished for it. No detention, no trip to the office, nothing. In real life if a bully did that at the very least he would be dragged straight to the office immediately. It's like Hollywood thinks all teachers in America are completely blind.
  • And because the way you worded it seemed like you wanted an in-character reason, maybe he's good at compartmentalizing? It's really the only reason I can come up with, and I wouldn't put it past him.
  • Actually, he said in his "IT" commentary that he knows the bullies are going to get punished, which is part of what bores him. It also bothers him that they never smile or look they're having fun when they bully somebody. Why bully somebody if you're not going to at least laugh? That's why he prefers the bullies Jack Black plays.
  • This Troper was bullied in school, but can't stand when writers seem to be "getting back" at the people who bullied them as a kid. It just comes across as petty and childish. Just because the Critic might have been a nerd doesn't mean he automatically sympathizes with them.

• In the Cop and a Half review, well... I don't know much about Chicago's police department, but would they really beat a small child bloody to get information out of him? Was he just going for dark humor there?
  • His main point was that no police department would let a child be a police officer because it was too dangerous. And yep, Black Comedy.
  • Speaking of Cop and a half, how come the Critic didn't make any remark about the Unfortunate Implications about Devon, a black kid, being the only one to get in trouble for being in a conflict with two white bullies?
  • Because that is a common trope about bullies and victims (sometimes happens IRL unfortunately) and had literally nothing to do with race at all.
• How come when a character in a movie says a word or name in a weird way, Critic spends the rest of the review saying that same word/name in the same weird way? "Food" in Waterworld, "Dark Heart" in Care Bears, and "Devon" in Cop and a Half. Other than M. Bison, doesn't the Critic usually try to avoid repeating jokes nowadays? I mean, he doesn't say the word outside the review, but it's still the same joke though.
  • Because it's a joke.
  • Running gags within a video are different beasts from cross-video running gags.

• In his Mortal Kombat review, at one point he goes "Oh Shinnok! I mean, oh Jesus!" Yet in the rest of his reviews of the Mortal Kombat movies, he clearly shows ignorance of the series - he doesn't recognise Cyrax or Baraka, he doesn't catch the glaring contradictions in the plot, and he gets confused about the difference between the original Sub-Zero and his brother. If he knows about an obscure character in the series, why doesn't he know about other, more well-known characters and plot points?
  • Most likely for a joke similar to his confusion on the Super Mario Bros Movie. He and Rob have stated they do know Mortal Kombat, but the movies make no attempt to let anyone who doesn't know the franchise become familiar with its characters, which didn't sit well for them.

• In the Quest for Camelot review he rags on the movie for never explaining how the various supernatural items/events/beings came about, shouting, "Explain, movie! EXPLAIN!" Yet at the end of the review he expresses a liking for Mary Poppins, a movie whose supernatural elements are even more nonsensical.
  • That could be in part due to the fact that Quest for Camelot takes place in the Camelot mythology, which already has established rules and such. Since Mary Poppins took place in its own universe instead of an already created one, it's less harmful. It's like the Camelot mythology is a series of books and Quest for Camelot is a bad fanfic. Whereas Mary Poppins is just one thing.
  • We have a trope for this: Accentuate the Negative.

• What's that song that plays during The Avengers review as they're walking in those giant floating hamster wheels like Wayne Coyne or something? It's got to be from some seventies series, but which?
  • It's the theme from American Gladiators.
• How come he calls the Mexican stereotyped mice from the animated Titanic movie racist but just calls the Italian stereotyped Mario and Luigi stereotypical?
  • Because Latino is a race. Italian is an ethnicity and therefore would be prejudice but not exactly racism.
    • Technically speaking, racism is defined as unfair treatment (e.g. prejudice) based on race and/or ethnicity. So it is racism. Granted, as an Italian, I don't particularly feel Mario and Luigi are too racist, but this is just a respone to that one statement you made.
  • Because Italians are Acceptable Targets.

• In the first animated Titanic review he says that he'll need something more potent than the Jagermeister he's currently using. But he's not replacing the Jagermeister with a more potent liquor (working his way up to pure vodka, for example), he's just getting bigger and bigger bottles of Jagermeister. I get the fact that it's a great sight gag, but it's still not escalating "potentness".
  • If the bottle's bigger, it can hold more Jagermeister. If he has more Jagermeister, he can get more drunk.
  • Had he said he needs more booze, I would have no problem. But he said "potent", which is a measure of the strength of the liquor, not the quantity. Look up the definition yourself. The Other Wiki defines potency as a measure of strength, concentration, or the like. A larger bottle does not have stronger liquor, it's more of the same liquor.
  • Guys, lighten up...RuleOf
• From his Aristocrats sketch, why would Richard Attenborough have to pull his pants down to get fucked if he had already been assraping the Doberman?
• Men don't need to take their pants off, or even down to use their penises.
• Why is the Critic so dependent on logistics in cartoons? Cartoons don't have to make much sense. There's a difference between not being realistic and insulting the audience, before anyone says that. And if he goes with this line of reasoning because it's funny, then it shows he's short on material since he's used it quite a few times. For example, the review of the Doug movie. I know he hates the show, but it's still unfair to think the movie was going to follow the laws of reality to the letter. Cartoons aren't realistic, that's why they're cartoons.
  • Critic's always demanded logic in everything. Remember Suburban Knights and how he didn't believe in magical stuff happening until he had his Despair Event Horizon rant? It's just a character trait.
  • But then he's missing the point. Cartoons don't have to make sense, and to expect all of them to makes Critic's disappointment his own fault. And in case anyone says anything, I do know Doug has different expectations than the Critic. But I mean the Critic.
    • About half of the Critic's suffering is his own fault, he expects too much and then gets let down. Doug said that himself either in an interview or at a convention.
    • And then treating the subject as if it were legitimately bad just because he disappointed himself? ... Yeah I guess that does actually fit with the description he's given the character. After all, reviews aren't really the gospel. I guess I just couldn't shake the feeling that a part of Doug actually thought that certain cartoons suffered for not following reality.
    • It might also be something along the lines of what's often called called "Ebert's Law" (basically, it's not what it's about, it's how it's about it); after all, it's possible for even cartoon logic to be pushed too far past breaking point or to be inconsistent with it's own internal logic or rules (if it sets up a more-or-less 'realistic' universe and then has something over-the-top and zany happen, then it's shattering the show's internal logic). It's also probably to do with him being the Nostalgia Critic -- one of the things he skewers, at least in part, is nostalgia, looking back at things with rose-tinted glasses rather than as they really were. We might have watched these things as kids and thought everything held together perfectly, which thus colours our later memories of them, and thus how we react to material which is made after we're kids ("These modern cartoons make no sense at all, not like the ones I used to watch when I was a kid..."); what he's doing is peeling this away and showing that no, actually, in many cases they make no frickin' sense whatsoever.
      • Just because something is a cartoon doesn't give the writers an excuse to be lazy. Half the time, the stuff he's pointing out isn't just cartoony type stuff, it's something central to the plot that is just completely ignored or not mentioned. Saying something is a cartoon, and so doesn't have to make sense, is a cop out, like saying something is "enchanted". Alright, fine. But A) You still have to be consistent. For a Tom and Jerry Movie, violating basic laws of physics and reality is fine, you expect it. But for Doug? I don't think so. It just doesn't fit with the tone of the show at all. And B) Bending the rules has to appear before the big climax, or it's just a Deus Ex Machina with a lazy explanation.

• After seeing his Sonic the Hedgehog and Felix the Cat: The Movie reviews, I have to ask: what's his beef with having a Prince/Princess as a ruler/head of state? Liechtenstein has one, and they're doing fine.
  • He explained it in the Captain N review. He gets annoyed with women not having the power they should have, and the "princess" moniker is just manipulative to young girls who associate it with prettiness, not responsibility.

• What was with the gag in the Drop Dead Fred review where the Critic couldn't pronounce the names of the actors? Mayall isn't that odd of a name. And Phoebe?
  • Critic's a ditz.
  • It's also probably a play on the fact that Mayall's first name is spelt as 'Rik' rather than the more conventional 'Rick'. Rather than simply make fun of Mayall's first name, he instead played if as if they all had weird names, and the best way to do that through speech is to imply they're difficult to pronounce as well.

• After watching the Childs Play review, I'm wondering about Phelous' characterization (which I probably should be asking on his page). In his earlier videos, he was more deadpan. Now, he's over-the-top and contstantly talking in a sarcastic tone.
  • Well, if you watch a more recent video of Phelous', he pretty much acts like that all the time. His style changed since he started.

• Why does he keep cutting to Blip commercials in the middle of his shows now? Is that going to be a permanent feature, just a way to raise some quick emergency funds, or what? I'm honestly curious.
  • Apparently, they're having some trouble with funds, and this is a way for them to make extra cash to make up for the drop in revenue. No clue on if it's going to be permanent.
    • At least the critic is tying in some funny and clever jokes to ease us in and out of those commercials.

• In "Patch Adams" review, when he speaks about "the way media wrote women in the nineties", he says "...in the nineties there was a desperate need to change it. Oh, not by making them ****, fuck, we wouldn't want that!" Making them what? I can't discern that last part. Could somebody give me a hand?
  • It was "less pretty". Basically another jab at Male Gaze.

• So why did he review Ponyo for his 200th episode? The movie's not all nostalgic, it just came out four years ago. Did he just want to address the oddities in it, did he just want to surprise people by reviewing something completely different from what he usually does, or was there some loophole in the "only nostalgic films criteria" that I missed?
  • Something special for the anniversary, taking advantage of the fact that he was at an anime con, he's said a few times that he wanted to analyze a good-but-adorably-crazy film and he probably needed a breather after the terribleness of Patch Adams.

• In his Super Mario Bros. review, what is the problem with the names Mario Mario and Luigi Mario? It makes perfect sense. Why else would they be called the Mario Brothers? And why did Luigi mentioning Mario raised him call for a Brokeback Mountain montage?
  • He just found how stupid it was for a character to have both his first and last names be the same. It'd be like meeting someone called Thomas Thomas, it's just a bit odd.

• A much bigger problem I have with his review of Super Mario Bros., why did he think Mario was both Luigi's brother and father? The point obviously was that Mario raised Luigi like a father despite being a brother, why couldn't the Critic get that?
  • Because It sounded like Luigi was saying Mario had adopted him. Meaning that they're father and son but for some reason insist on calling each other brothers.

• In the Thomas and the Magic Railroad review he expresses confusion over why they made an entire new world just for talking trains, saying they're the only magical thing there. Then a later scene he showed had one of the characters eat vegetables that seemed to do something to him, and use two flowers like a phone. Has he seriously managed to convince himself that the guy was going crazy in a kid's movie, or does he live somewhere with magic plants?
  • He was saying there weren't enough things different in the Thomas world to warrant making it a different world entirely. If you're gonna make it be a magical fantasy land, go all out. Having some things be magical in rather mundane ways makes it seem sort of needless.

• Wait a minute, he did call it a pan in the Gordy review. What the hell was Douchey talking about?
  • Because after the Gordy review, about a hundred people on facebook said he got it wrong. It's a bit like the Prime death for me, not a fuck-up but he puts it up there anyway because Critic's pretty low on backbone.

• In his Top 11 Nostalgia Critic Fuck Us Part 3 video, he acknowledges that he wasn't familiar with the Thomas the Tank Engine series before he did the movie and that he only did it upon request. Fair enough. He also said that he finds it more humorous to do a review "blind" (IE: Not knowing what you're getting yourself into) and that he does these reviews for fun/comedy. Again, fine. Buuuuut, then he compares it to his Star Trek movie reviews stating that though he didn't watch the series that much, he still was able to understand what was going on in the movies. Uh, Critic? How does that comparison work? You clearly know at least the basics of the Star Trek franchise (IE: Plot, characters, etc.) to understand what's going on in the movies. How does that compare to you not watching an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine or looking up the show on Wikipedia to get a basic understanding of the concept? It baffles me to no end.
  • The Critic's knowledge of the Star Trek franchise probably comes from other people's reviews of the show (including those on SF Debris) and the occasional parody. As to why he hasn't read the Wikipedia page on Thomas the Tank Engine, the Critic is just lazy.
    • And his point was more that even if you don't watch Star Trek, you can pretty much follow the movies just fine. Thomas the Tank Engine...not so much.

• This is more about Doug than the Critic (although those two are obviously related), but why does he apologize so much? The fuck-ups lists had subjective opinions being treated like mess ups, I've lost count of how many times he's groveled for the LP, you have Spoony's story on how Doug felt like crap because he had the idea of acting like the Snob first and he even felt guilty because the crew in Kickassia got sunburn. There's a difference between being a Nice Guy and having a Guilt Complex.
  • His screw ups, first of all, aren't just apologies for screw ups, but also a chance to actually explain why he made the calls he did. And to let people know that, yes I do know I screwed up, stop emailing me already! As for the crew thing...wouldn't you feel bad if you dragged your crew into the desert, and they left looking like lobsters? I mean, I would at least feel a bit bad about it.
  • On the Kickassia DVD, you'll see that Rob and Bhargav told everyone multiple times to wear sunscreen. With that in mind, Doug really shouldn't feel like it was his fault because they chose not to.
  • And he's announced now that's he's going to retire the F*-Ups series, and just acknowledge the mistakes on his Facebook page.

• Why does he complain about comedy at the expense of killing animals (not in real life, just within the movie) in Jungle 2 Jungle when he also complained in Dunston Checks In that the scene where the dog fell off the building would have been funnier if the dog died?
  • He might have complained about a kids flick having this sort of comedy, but he also killed pets to see if the owners would laugh or not. For whatever reason, Critic's (NOT Doug) a Jerkass when it comes to animals.

• Why so many commercial breaks? They were funny for the Trek month but now they're annoying. Is he running low on money?
  • Yes. Blip's not doing well for any of the TGWTG crew, as you can see from complaints on twitter. And besides, they only take a minute in a free TV-episode-length review.