Let’s Dive Right Into The Wall, Side Two
“Doug Walker isn’t just bad, he’s this beacon of horribleness where it makes you self-critical in just the right way where you can become better just by totally avoiding being him.”
— Quinton Reviews, To Boldly Suck: Bad Lore Movies
VI. Is There Anybody Out There?
Let’s talk about the Channel Awesome anniversary movies.
Typically, whenever two Channel Awesome producers were going to the same convention or were in the same town for some other reason, they’d film a crossover in a hotel room. These were always fun to watch because we got to see multiple perspectives on the review subject and we got to watch the two personalities bounce off each other.¹¹ Sometimes when a whole bunch of producers got together, like for MAGfest, you’d have as many as four people crowding a hotel room and it would get very crazy very quickly.¹²
¹¹ The example that comes immediately to mind is Kyle Kallgren and Jacob “JesuOtaku” Chapman’s joint review of Revolutionary Girl Utena, where Jake, the anime nerd, reels off all the symbolism inherent in the girl turning into a car and why it makes perfect logical sense for the girl to turn into the car, while Kyle, whose persona was very highbrow and intellectual, just stares at the screen dumbfounded and can’t say anything more coherent than “that girl turned into a car!”
¹² I’m thinking primarily of the absolutely bizarre crossover that Paw, Rollo T, Sean Fausz, and Y Ruler of Time pulled together for Dragonball Evolution, probably the textbook example of a crossover review spiraling out of control, but also worth mentioning here are the reviews of old Marvel adaptations that Nash, Film Brain, and Linkara would always film whenever they were all at MAGfest, which grew to the point that they developed their own little self-contained plotline.
The anniversary specials were meant to be one tier above that, bringing together all the big reviewers and whatever plotlines they might have¹³ into one giant epic movie-length blowout. This was an event. This was clear from the first one, which was meant to be a conclusion to this storyline Doug had during the first year of his reviews, where he had this big rivalry with the Angry Video Game Nerd. This culminated in the Year One Brawl, where everyone on Channel Awesome at the time¹⁴ were split into Team Critic and Team Nerd, and they had a really big fight in a rented hotel ballroom. This was followed up with Kickassia, where everyone on the site heads off to Nevada to take over the self-proclaimed micronation of Molossia; Suburban Knights, where they all dress up as fantasy characters and go on a quest for this powerful gauntlet thing; and To Boldly Flee, where Doug’s house is turned into a spaceship to do battle with the dreaded Plot Hole.
¹³ Some reviewers, like Linkara, built their reviews around entire epic mythologies, involving multiple characters and mirror universes and how saving the world hinged on reviewing these particular comic books and so forth. Others, like Todd in the Shadows, were content with having a few running gags here and there. Some of us in the fandom tried to tie everyone’s storylines (and “storylines”) together into one coherent continuity, which was…an adventure. I personally was there for the ranting, not the storylines, but that’s just me.
¹⁴ It’s fun watching it now and realizing (1) how right Lupa was when she said Doug doesn’t understand non-reference comedy (check out Critic and Nerd’s respective motivational speeches) and (2) basically everyone who was in the Brawl has since moved on to other things…and Doug is still stuck in neutral.
You’ll notice that the anniversary specials by and large run on make-believe-in-the-playground logic, where the film makes feeble-at-best attempts at verisimilitude or even coherence and the viewer has to be aware that this is ultimately an amateur/hobbyist production and let a lot of stuff slide in order for it to work. Most of the time they [attempt to] skate by via the Tyrannosaurs-in-F-14s gambit of being so flashy and epic that their coolness cannot be denied. It worked at the time. For Suburban Knights and To Boldly Flee I remember participating in group chats as they were released, gushing over how cool and exciting they were. I personally am responsible for fanart of the TBF gang drawn in the style of that character chain from the first ED of Durarara!!, because that was a thing people did at the time and it seemed to fit. And I’d be remiss without mentioning the tribute videos some of us pulled together after the Critic died. We didn’t have factions the way some fandoms do, but we all had our favorite reviewers, so seeing them all in one place during the anniversary specials brought the fandom together in a big way.
Today, though, the anniversary movies represent the failure mode of Tyrannosaurs in F-14s: when you miss so cool, you wind up at so stupid. Of the first four, the Brawl still holds together the best because it’s under absolutely no illusions about what it’s about: you want the whole site fighting with each other, so by God that’s what we’ll give you (and a pair of turbo mech Jesuses because why the fuck not we’re already in this deep). It’s a film that knows exactly how stupid it is, and on what levels it works and on what levels it doesn’t. The specials from Kickassia onward don’t. On paper they’re these high-stakes epic tales of adventure, but in practice they descend into little more than bloated, incoherent LARPs.¹⁵
¹⁵ Notice the way the scope changes from special to special. Kickassia is set in Nevada. Suburban Knights is set in Doug’s neighborhood. To Boldly Flee is set in Doug’s house. That’s not a good trajectory when you’re trying to ramp things up.
It goes without saying that we weren’t aware of anything wonky going on behind the scenes. The general vibe we got from the Channel Awesome people at the time was that they were one giant family and everyone got on and there was nothing seriously wrong. (This even though there were occasional cracks in the facade, like when Blistered Thumbs shut down, or the constant barbed jokes some producers made at Mike Michaud’s expense.¹⁶ Those were surely isolated incidents and not indicative of anything more systematic.) Meanwhile, the Google Doc cataloguing CA’s numerous shortcomings describes something else entirely: a filming environment that was profoundly, unapologetically, nigh-parodically unprofessional. On multiple occasions, Michaud and the Walkers had to have the basics of film shoots explained to them like they were five. They didn’t know you’re supposed to provide catering on set. Especially water. In the Nevada desert. They didn’t know you had to secure permits, learn shooting hours, provide transportation, or hire stunt people. Any concerns that the female producers brought up only drew mockery. Direction was aggressively vague and minimal. The set of Suburban Knights specifically saw multiple crew injuries, one of which apparently needed Rob Walker to swoop in and force the victim to sign an ex post facto CA-is-not-liable-for-injury form, because the injured party was technically a guest. Despite all this, though, there really was a general sense of camaraderie amongst the producers themselves, and their occasional statements that Channel Awesome was like a family didn’t come from nowhere.
Then To Boldly Flee happened.
¹⁶ Michaud is going to be a major factor in Channel Awesome’s implosion, because he’s a thin-skinned, tyrannical shit-for-brains. In hindsight, I’m genuinely surprised at all the stuff people openly said about him that managed to skate by. (“Reprimand. Reprimand. Reprimand.”)
The filming of To Boldly Flee was an unmitigated clusterfuck. The filming schedule was rushed — three to four hours of movie in just one week — resulting in shooting days that were long, brutal, and tiresome. The script was extremely first draft and contained numerous questionable scenes, most infamously a rape scene (!) between two of the site’s most prominent feminists (!!). Even toning it down to what’s in the final film was like pulling teeth. One of the most professional filmmakers on set swore off ever working with the Walkers again after yet another long, drawn-out fight about basic filmmaking techniques. The Walkers are obsequious to Phelous, their designated SFX man, to his face but talk smack about him behind his back, eventually dispatching someone to spy on him to make sure he was really working (the spy tells Phelous what’s up immediately). There are more on-set injuries, and more clashes between Michaud/the Walkers and the producers. Whatever warm fuzzy feelings lingered after Suburban Knights were gone once To Boldly Flee rolled around.¹⁷
¹⁷ We in the fandom could tell, too, if we paid attention. I distinctly recall the producers had a pronounced lack of positive things to say about shooting To Boldly Flee compared to any of the previous films.
And, oh yes: no one was compensated for putting up with this shit. Their transport and lodging were free, but no one was paid in anything but exposure, and all the ad revenue from the films and any extra crossovers filmed at the same time went not to the participating producers but to the Walkers. Absolutely everything about the anniversary specials, from the experience of filming to the finished product, was a complete and total disaster.
Here’s the kicker: despite being intimately involved in the production of these movies, Doug has absolutely no clue any of this is happening. While everyone else is suffering, he’s merrily skipping through the wreckage, completely oblivious to all of it and thinking everything’s hunky-dory. The other producers had to corner him and effectively stage an intervention before he had any idea how things were really going.
It’s all downhill from here.
VII. Comfortably Numb
Walker’s fast-forward through The Wall’s midsection ends at Comfortably Numb (here creatively reskinned as “Comfortably Dumb”) and it’s clear that he only stopped there because that’s the album’s centerpiece and it would have been a dereliction of his responsibility as a critic (“critic”) to not do something with it. He spends the Comfortably Numb section yet again just accusing the film of pandering to alienated teenagers, as though Pink Floyd and, say, your average nu-metal band are obviously doing the same thing. Lyrically, this is pure filler, and only serves to advance what little plot this review has.
Corey Taylor has functioned more or less like an ersatz Pink in this parodic retelling, and as such has spent pretty much the entirety of the review thus far sitting inert and inebriated in a dark room, watching the review right along with us, with the occasional flashback to his own childhood as the plot demands. At this moment, though, in barge frequent Nostalgia Critic underlings and co-conspirators Tamara Chambers, Malcolm Ray, and Brad Jones, there to drag him out of his room and into the studio garage, where he’s instructed to “sober up or have an existential conflict.” The garage door opens into a bright light and the sound of cheering fans, and Taylor walks through and into the intermission. Except the being who scrapes himself off the floor isn’t Taylor at all…
It is summer 2012 and Doug Walker has killed off the Nostalgia Critic, by having him enter the Plot Hole and set the world to rights again during the climax of To Boldly Flee. I suspect I’m in the minority when I say this, but I was not opposed to the idea of the Nostalgia Critic ending. First of all, Doug had indicated on several occasions that it would happen eventually, so when he finally pulled the trigger it wasn’t as much of a shock to me. Second, I’m a firm believer that it’s better for people to go out on top than to allow themselves to grow stale, and that it’s natural to grow and change and want to branch out from what initially made them big, so from that perspective it’s reasonable to think Doug should have the freedom to do other things if he wants to. Third, in the moment, it seemed like a pretty good sendoff. I remember the group chat I was in at the time was genuinely moved at the Critic’s sacrifice. (We now realize that everything about To Boldly Flee was ponderous and fucking stupid, but, y’know, hindsight n’at.)
Here’s the problem: the decision to kill off the Nostalgia Critic was communicated extraordinarily poorly to everyone else on the site while the film was actually being made. To Boldly Flee was written in the wake of the SOPA/PIPA debacle,¹⁸ and therefore carries with it this ominous air of everything that was built up over the past four years imminently ending. It isn’t just that the Critic dies. To Boldly Flee reads as if, thanks to potential future interventions like SOPA/PIPA on behalf of large copyright holders, the medium in which the Critic was working was going to die right along with him. Worse, this was sprung on the producers at the last minute, right as a very high-stress film shoot was starting, with basically zero time to process how that would affect them and what they would do going forward, meaning that everyone’s thoughts immediately went to the worst case scenario. What was meant as a way to clear the decks and start fresh came off at best like they were about to see a significantly reduced income stream now that Critic wasn’t there to funnel viewers their way, and at worst like Channel Awesome was dissolving and everyone associated with the site would be thrown to the wolves. You can see why many of the producers were peeved when they found out what was actually going on.
¹⁸ Cliff’s Notes for people in the future: the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act were a pair of bills introduced in 2011 that would have given copyright holders (i.e. large corporations) broad, sweeping powers to remove any content anywhere from the internet if they believed it violated their intellectual property. In practice, this would have effectively served as a global corporate censorship regime, with the attendant chilling effects on free expression of ideas. (Also, this was probably the last time you could crow about free speech and not come off like an alt-right goon who wants to say the n-word in public and not get beat up for it.) The bills only died because of a massive and unprecedented online mobilization effort, culminating in large swathes of the internet going completely dark in protest.
One small part of that mobilization effort was a big chunk of the Channel Awesome team going to Washington and lobbying their elected representatives to oppose the bills, during which Michaud threw Ven Gethenian, Kyle’s title card artist, out of Congress. Seriously. Management later told Holly that Ven was thrown out because he was “dressed inappropriately.” He wasn’t.
While everyone else is panicking over what to do next, Doug is gushing over the new studio that they bought, and in which they’d film all sorts of cool stuff that they couldn’t do when they were working on the Nostalgia Critic and filming in the Walkers’ house. He is completely unaware of all the headaches he caused through mishandling the transition away from the Nostalgia Critic so severely.
As it turns out, although it sounded like aforesaid cool stuff would come in a big rush all at once, it would actually dribble in piecemeal over the course of several years. It’s October 2012, and Channel Awesome premieres its new flagship show, Demo Reel, featuring Doug in a fedora running the eponymous schlock remake film studio. I couldn’t tell you what it was about beyond that because I never watched the damn thing. Reception was overwhelmingly negative, with most of the criticism unfavorably comparing it to the Nostalgia Critic (natch). It’s cancelled less than two months later, in favor of bringing the Nostalgia Critic back. We don’t hear anything about any other shows for eight months.
This, in turn, is the point at which my personal investment in anything Doug Walker released pretty much ends. Because I supported Doug’s decision to retire the Critic and felt the scene in TBF where he dies was a good sendoff, I already had misgivings about the Critic’s abrupt return, believing that it somehow cheapened everything that led up to it (yes, even more than it already was). In addition, I got the very strong sense that Doug’s heart wasn’t in this revival at all; that he was only bringing the Critic back for the money, realizing that his fanbase doesn’t want any bullshit passion projects but the screaming movie man once a week and that’s it.
Once in a while I’d watch one of the new Critic videos, but with the charitable exception of the Roger Ebert tribute none of them really landed for me the way the old ones did. Although I appreciated that Doug wanted to continue featuring the Demo Reel actors and the studio after the show they were originally brought on for flopped so badly, the new reviews still felt like a weird flanderization of the old ones, where the more overtly cartoonish stuff (like the sketches) was shoehorned in at the expense of the stuff that was actually funny. And, of course, the incredibly harsh reaction to his Sailor Moon review, by all accounts a disaster roughly on the same level as this one, conclusively laid bare Doug’s inadequacies as a critic.
This doesn’t mean that my involvement in the fandom ended. Even before To Boldly Flee I found myself focusing less on the Nostalgia Critic himself and more on some of the other people who were on the site with him. I became particularly interested in the progressively more meaty and academic works of Lindsay Ellis and Kyle Kallgren, two of the site people who actually went to film school, and who therefore actually knew what they were talking about, and who were also the two people most obviously straining against the restrictions the angry-review medium placed upon them, which gave us a lot of very interesting and outside-the-box videos.¹⁹ Todd in the Shadows reviewed pop songs, which was great when I first discovered him because I still hated pop music at the time and needed catharsis. As time went on, though, and he got more analytical and I learned to appreciate pop music the way he did, I learned that he’s a pretty good music historian, able to discuss the histories of one-hit wonder bands in an informative and entertaining way. If I wanted something lighter, I usually turned to Brad Jones shooting the shit with his buddies in the back of a car, or Nash and Tara going off on bizarre news stories (the trifecta for a while was naked rampage, Florida, and bath salts). That last show, What the Fuck is Wrong With You?, and its parent, Radio Dead Air, became such a consistent part of my weekly routine that in the fall of 2012 I started one of those fuckyeah Tumblrs and regularly liveblogged them as they premiered.²⁰ Radio Dead Air specifically was also responsible for introducing me to musicians and bands like Frank Turner, The Gaslight Anthem, Placebo, CHVRCHES, and The 1975, many of whom are among my favorites to this day.²¹
¹⁹ Lindsay’s review of the Roland Emmerich movies, during the middle of the Dark Nella saga in (I think) late 2010, could be considered a precursor to the video essay format which she would later pioneer. Kyle, meanwhile, went through a fascinating period where he reviewed films in their own style: Slacker was deliberately phoned in, Häxan was done as a silent film, Nightwatching/Rembrandt’s J’Accuse was filmed almost documentary-style whilst visiting the Netherlands, that sort of thing. (That last one would partially inspire a Dutch vacation of my own four and a half years later.)
²⁰ At various times during the blog’s life I’d be aided in this endeavor by two people. The first was Violet, the same one who would go on to dump Brad Jones in what was in hindsight the most glorious way possible. The second was a good personal friend of mine, with whom I’d years later cut off all contact after he was outed as a sex pest. It was, unfortunately, he who took over the blog completely in 2016, after mental health issues and my work schedule meant I couldn’t maintain it the way I wanted. Mercifully inactive since 2017, the blog is now probably most well-known, for a given value thereof, as the vehicle through which I walked into a viral joke about selling your kid on Etsy.
²¹ The first time I saw Frank Turner live, in 2017, one of the opening acts was a gent with an acoustic guitar name of Will Varley, who I had never heard of. Or at least I thought I hadn’t, until he hit the chorus of the first song, and I realized he was playing Weddings and Wars, which was featured on Radio Dead Air a few times, and I found myself reliving five years of dedicated listening simultaneously.
Most of the people I knew personally at the time were associated with the Channel Awesome fandom as well, and although they’d eventually move on to other primary fandoms, there was still this mutual shared experience that tied us all together. We’d play games, stream movies, read horrible fanfic, create this weird AU where Kyle was an erudite cartoon snail, and just generally appreciate each other’s company. I met my best friend through the fandom, with whom I now regularly have weekends in the big city where we’re cute lesbians who hold hands and go to tourist traps. There was drama, oh good lord was there drama, this was on Tumblr and it wouldn’t be Tumblr without it, but at the end of the day that didn’t define the fandom experience (or at least it didn’t to me). My personal life was rather volatile during this time, but this group of people helped give me some sense of grounding and stability, and for that I’ll always be grateful.²² Meanwhile, Channel Awesome itself was slowly rotting from the inside.
²² I realize that wasn’t everyone’s experience — the main admin of TGWTGsecrets, the main watering hole of my corner of the fandom, disavowed Channel Awesome entirely after Kyle and Dany Roth dumped on him big-time in a now-deleted shitpost video and then initially doubled down when called on it (to their credit, they would later apologize) — but it is mine. Being relatively distant from most sources of instability probably helped there.
It’s August 2013. Channel Awesome runs an Indiegogo campaign to get the rest of the shows made. They promise 40+ episodes of three different shows: a game show, a comic book show, and a video game show. On the strength of these promises, the campaign succeeds beyond their wildest dreams, raising $90,000. Not long after they get all this money, Channel Awesome fires Holly Brown, their human resources director, webmaster, social media manager, and all-around only person at the company who could keep things running smoothly, the day after she had surgery.²³ Holly was one of Channel Awesome’s most dedicated employees, working weekends, holidays, and surgery days, and was also one of the few people in management who was actually competent. They withhold severance pay until she signs a contract blacklisting herself from the industry for three years. This destroys all her future job prospects and severs whatever working relationships she still has, forcing her to move back to Iowa and basically start again from scratch.
²³ Something to keep in mind as we continue: Holly is chronically ill.
The video game show is never produced. The game show, Pop Quiz Hotshot, somehow manages to be even more of a production disaster than To Boldly Flee, infamously requiring multiple reshoots because they didn’t know how to actually play the games and the studio hadn’t been soundproofed. (It still isn’t; they mostly film in the offices.) The pilot episode of Pop Quiz Hotshot was only released — a year and a half after it was filmed — because Michaud kept pitching a fit about it and Indiegogo was threatening to investigate them. It, like Demo Reel, is critically savaged, and only twelve of the promised 40 episodes are released. The comic book show didn’t materialize until March 2016, two and a half years after the initial Indiegogo campaign. They refused to pay at least one of the hosts, Beth Elderkin, what she was owed, so she took a pretty sweet job at io9 soon after and never looked back. The show ceased production in March 2017. So to recap, literally everything Channel Awesome directly produced that wasn’t the Nostalgia Critic invariably crashed and burned.
That’s just what’s happening in the studio. For everyone else, the reality is substantially worse. In addition to the long-running problems involving compensation and general unprofessionalism, communication between producers and management breaks down almost completely. Site policies are arbitrarily enforced. Producers are left in the dark about important company decisions, or are given two different answers about company policy from two different people. Michaud, and to a lesser extent Rob Walker,²⁴ runs roughshod over the producers, either heaping on abuse, threats, and insults or going totally silent for days or even weeks. Most of the producers operate on a toxic cocktail of confusion, uncertainty, and fear.
²⁴ The Google Doc generally depicts Rob as more ignorant, cavalier, and neglectful than outright hateful, but the way he handled Obscurus Lupa’s questions about Patreon, which we’ll get to, and the homophobic abuse he and Bhargav piled on Topher Ames cannot be ignored.
An intervention is staged, with several producers providing a written list of demands. Management are seemingly amenable to the requested changes, and after this communication does improve slightly for a month or two, but things quickly settle back to the hell that it was before, leaving behind a mountain of broken promises. Things will only get worse as the months and years drag on.
Again, we in the fandom were barely aware of any of this, although a few things did burble to the surface. Around the same time Holly got fired, so did Mike Dodd, except he didn’t even learn about it until two weeks after the fact. There was also the fifth-year anniversary film, The Uncanny Valley, which I did not see, but which I am told somehow managed to be largely unfunny, uneven, and spectacularly tone-deaf even without the Walkers’ direct involvement. Ultimately, though, there were very few outward indications that something was very, very wrong; certainly not enough for anyone on the outside to think that a pattern was emerging.
That is, until January 2015, when the dam finally breaks.
There is a song on The Wall album, but left out of the film, called The Show Must Go On, spliced in between Comfortably Numb and In the Flesh, representing Pink’s final moments of lucidity before the worms take over completely. He says he never meant to let “them” take away his soul, whoever “they” are. He doesn’t want to go onstage and perform, making it clear that he only does so out of obligation to his audience, his band, and his record company. He questions if he’s too old to do this rock star thing anymore, and wonders if he can still remember how to play at all. Nevertheless, he resolves, the show must go on, setting up the album’s climax.
It’s January 2013. Demo Reel, Doug’s passion project, is a complete flop. In order to win back the audience, he releases a series finale that methodically but cruelly destroys the show’s world. At the end, much like Corey Taylor walking through the unsoundproofed studio’s garage door and into the light, the show’s protagonist walks through the Plot Hole and comes out the other side as the Nostalgia Critic once again. Because that’s what you wanted all along…wasn’t it?