Spongey444
(formely titled "Crossing the Streams", and now title "A Taste of Spongey") is a blog run by Thomas Blalock aka Spongey444. He does reviews of movies, as well as books (mostly R. L. Stine books). He also does general reviews of movies, as well as top lists, and tributes. He reads TV Tropes, which means lots of trope references and even a month dedicated to the So Bad, It's Horrible page.
Starting Mid 2016, he won't do the main Film Reviews weekly as explained here, and now does them about once or twice or month.
Tropes Include:
- Aborted Arc:
- He started a Dreamworks a-thon, but stopped due to laziness.
- Same happened with a Haunting Hour-A thon (which became a series of Season Retrospective) and a retrospective of the Disney Channel Sitcoms.
- Actually Pretty Funny: Happens at least once a review, as he likes to point out the good parts of any movie.
- April Fools' Day:
- 2012: Dr Doofenshmirtz reviews My Little Pony: The Movie (1986)
- 2013: A random man takes over a review of The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, in a more analytical style.
- 2014: Doof returns, along with Major Monogram to review A Talking Cat!?!.
- 2015: Another random guy takes over to review Walking with Dinosaurs from a paleo-nerd's perspective.
- 2016: His Title Card guy reviews a fictional play from an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
- 2017: He reviews Citizen Kane...legitimately
- 2018: He looks at some SpongeBob games...as The Angry Video Game Nerd
- 2019: He does straight forward reviews of some April Fool's Day episodes
- 2020: He reviews a book from the Spinechillers Mysteries series, a Christian Goosebumps ripoff.
- Avoid the Dreaded G Rating: He mocked Antz for this.
- Author Appeal: He often talks about/makes references to/reviews Phineas and Ferb, R. L. Stine's Works, and Disney/Nick Kidscoms.
- Brick Joke: In His Guilty Pleasure list, he talks about My Little Pony The Movie. At the end, he says he hopes Celestia doesn't mind him enjoying it. Cue picture of him on the moon.
- When Dragonball Evolution mentions air bending, he pleads it not to remind him of The Last Airbender. At the end, he finds out he has to review that film.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: The Paranormal Activity demon, at least according to him.
- Broke the Rating Scale: "It's the First Day of School Forever" was so odd that he couldn't grade it properly.
- A Serbian Film was also too much for him.
- Celeb Crush: Pretty much everyone who has gotten the "She's nice" gag mentioned below but Debby Ryan is the biggest example.
- Catchphrase: "Hello, Spongey Here."
- Chewing the Scenery: He thinks Cobra Commander was having a ten course banquet with it. He also said a Goosebumps Villain somehow manages to do this in book form.
- Christmas Episode:
- 2010: The blog started out with a list of the top 12 Christmas specials
- 2011: He did a series of general reviews called "Spongey's Christmas Carol", where reviews included The Santa Clause and Eight Crazy Nights.
- 2012: He did a couple of reviews such as A Fairly Odd Christmas, but the big one was Batman Returns.
- 2013: The first year of consistent Christmas reviews, which were Fred Claus, Eight Crazy Nights, (updating his earlier review) Good Luck Charlie It's Christmas, The Search For Santa Paws, Santa with Muscles, The Santa Clause 3, and A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.
- 2014: The Reviews were Santa Paws 2, Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever, Saving Santa and The Ultimate Christmas Present.
- 2015: Reviews included The Swan Princess Christmas and Saving Christmas
- 2016: He did The Dog Who Saved Christmas Vacation and Elf
- 2017: Surviving Christmas and The Santa Clause
- 2018: A Frozen Christmas, and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
- Cluster F-Bomb: He's not The Angry Video Game Nerd but he can explode a few.
- Crossover: His full review of The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water is one with The Cartoon Hero.
- Department of Redundancy Department: From his review of Fred: The Movie:Fred's Dad: They've been kidnapped...by kidnappers.
- Drinking Game:
- In the review of The Haunting Hour: Don't Think About It, he takes a shot whenever there's a pop song.
- The Grown Ups 2 review features the Adam Sandler drinking game.
- Episode Title Card: Some of his reviews have a drawn title card.
-
Follow the Leader: He lists both Blogger Beware and The Nostalgia Critic as inspiration. He also discusses the trope in a review of a Bone Chillers episode. - Formula-Breaking Episode: After reviewing mostly comedies, and light hearted films, he looked at...A Serbian Film.
- Guilty Pleasures:
- He did a list of them.
- The big one for him is Disney Channel Kidcoms, as explored here.
- He did a list of them
- Halloween Episode: He did a month of Halloween movies ... in the month of July.
- He did normal Halloween reviews for the following Octobers.
- Hostile Show Takeover: His Meet The Spartans review was taken over by Seltzer and Friedberg.
- For April Fools' Day of 2012, Doofenshmirtz took over. Most of the April Fools Day reviews are this.
- I Am Not Leonard Nimoy: Like the NC, he will call actors by their names, and not the character's names. He did this so much during Adam Sandler month, that he lampshades this when he does use the character's name.
- Jump Scare: He mocks Goosebumps' use of these. As well the use in the Paranormal Activity series.
- Lame Pun Reaction: He complains about the time puns in Spy Kids: All the Time in the World.
- Mile Stone Celebration:
- 100: He reviewed CryBaby Lane ...as a musical.
- 200: He reviewed Spy Hard.
- For his 100th actual review, he visited his childhood with The Spongebob Squarepants Movie.
- For the 300th post, he reviewed Billy Madison.
- For his 200th review, he reviewed [1] due to it being the 10th DCOM. (He was going to do the 50th but he couldn't find it at the time)
- The latter occurred during month celebrating the 100th Disney Channel movie, and later complained that said film wasn't a worthy celebration. Disney Channel later advertised a different one as their 100th DCOM.
- He later did DCOM Month 3 to tie into the 20th Anniversary of DCOM's, one of the reviews being what the Adventures in Babysitting remake that Disney counted as the 100th DCOM. He didn't think it fit either,
- Review 300 (which was 303 due to a clerical error) was on 1982's The Treasure Planet.
- Multi-Part Episode: His reviews of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, The Lone Ranger, and Transformers: Age of Extinction were 2 parters, while To Boldly Flee'' was a 3 parter.
- Musical Episode: The aforementioned CryBaby Lane review. Yes, a musical on a blog.
- Obviously Evil: Points this out so often, he refereed to the villain in the Garfield movie by this very name.
- Recut: He remade his old 16 Wishes review, because he felt the old one was lacking.
- Review Blog
- Rule 63: A gender-bended version known only as "Girlgey" appears in the banner and occasionally in the title cards of more female-centered movies, such as Bratz.
- Running Gag: Every time he runs into an attractive actress, there will be a picture of her accompanied with a "She's Nice"
-
RATED G - Whenever there's a ridiculous death (the penguin in Foodfight!, or death of a character he jokingly praised (Ron Fox in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay) there will be a gravestone drawn by Spongey himself.
- His love of Sharpay
- His love of Alpha Bitches in general.
- His love of Debby Ryan
- Some of screw ups have become this, most notably how he once described crunchy as a taste
- His hatred for abrupt endings.
- A Title Drop will be accompanied by a picture of Buford saying "And Roll Credits".
-
- Schedule Slip: He's suffered this a few times, to the point where he made the main reviews weekly starting late 2014 to avoid this. Then he made them roughly monthly to further avoid this.
- Shout-Out: In the Spy Kids 4 review, The demon says the Devil cared when someone made crappy Dr Seuss movies.
- "I’m at the Bottom of the Ba-...Wait..
- This Is Gonna Suck: When the Serbian Film review opens with him saying he's not ready, you know it's not gonna end well. Lampshaded in one review where he says if the review beings with "...", it's gonna be bad.
- Villain Song: He's happy whenever one pops up, even in Bratz: The Movie.
- Yet Another Christmas Carol: He did a Christmas Carol spoof in 2013, in which ghosts that look like Freddie from Freddie As FR 07, Adam Sandler, and the Paranormal Activity Demon make him a review a bad Christmas film from the past and present. In the future segment, he turns the tables on the ghosts and reviews a good recent Christmas movie.
