Headscratchers / The Nostalgia Critic

• In his review of The Wiz, he complains that it is unrealistic to have a tornado in New York, and also that Glinda has such a small role, despite the fact that the movie does explain both at the same time: Glinda is the one who creates the tornado in the beginning. Not only did he conveniently overlook this scene, he actually used the clip of Glinda creating the damn tornado towards the end of the review. What the hell?
  • Because a tornado's ability to survive as an existing funnel cloud like that, leaving out Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud, is highly improbable in a dense, urban setting like New York.
    • That's sort of correct. More like the New England region isn't exactly known for usually having the kind of weather conducive to Supercells and/or Tornadoes. It's a common myth that Tornadoes don't attack areas like New York because they are dense urban areas when in reality they are just as vulnerable. Just ask Miami or Salt Lake City.
• 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.
• 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 develop immunity.
    • That's what they make vaccines for!
    • Maybe he killed their parents, though with good reason.
  • He can only heal their diabetes.
• "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!" 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 I was a child, my grandparents came over to help with the trick-or-treating.
• 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 "You're A Dirty Rotten 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 that's the joke, but there literally has to be someone in the world who is worse off. Also there's a name that kept coming to my tongue 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....)
    • 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.
    • Their lives wouldn't be worse because they'd be dead. They don't have a life. Not having a literal life is different from having a bad life.
• Why was Santa Christ bleeped in the Care Bears Movie II 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 (1999) review, he says that they leave Penny behind for the climax. She actually took 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.
  • He can't include everything from the movie in his reviews. He probably just couldn't think of any good jokes to make about it.
• In his Mortal Kombat: The Movie 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 recognize 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 because it takes place in a relatively mundane environment.
  • 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 jarring. 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.
  • Doug explained that it was because of the movie's lack of world building and how it keeps throwing random nonsense at the audience.
  • Also, for what it's worth, he does end up snapping at Mary Poppins for not explaining anything. Though it was partially due to a last straw kind of situation.
• What's that song that plays during The Avengers (1998) 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.
    • Actually, that's a common misconception. You can be part of a "race" and be Latino, but Latino itself is not a race. Even wonder why you see Non-Hispanic White and Non-Hispanic Black on the Census? There are Black and White Hispanics all over Latin America.
    • 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 response to that one statement you made.
  • Because Italians are acceptable targets of mockery.
  • Because he's not Obsessively Organized and doesn't need to use the same word every single time he says something.
• 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.
• 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 colors 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.
  • Liechtenstein is a principality, and its rulers always have the title of "prince". The "princesses" NC complains about never rule principalities but KINGDOMS, whose rulers should have the title of "king" or "queen". The point is, if the previous monarch of the kingdom is dead and you take on their responsibilities, your title is either King or Queen, not Prince or Princess just because it makes you sound younger/cuter.
    • Exactly, the title is in the name of type of realm: Empires are ruled by Emperors, Duchies are ruled by Dukes, Counties are ruled by Counts, Sultanates are ruled by Sultans, Emirates are ruled by Emirs, and as the previous post pointed out, Principalities are ruled by princes, while Kingdoms are ruled by kings, or the female equivalent queens. Plus the difference in titles is usually dependent on the size of the country. Liechtenstein is a rather small country, while kingdoms are usually very big.
• 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 Child's Play (1988) review, Phelous' characterization seems off. In his earlier videos, he was more deadpan. Now, he's over-the-top and constantly 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.
• 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. (1993) 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 thought it was stupid 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.
    • Word of God has confirmed Mario's last name is indeed Mario. The Critic is still wrong.
• 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 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 & Friends 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 & Friends 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 & Friends, 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.
• In the Digimon: The Movie review, the Critic makes a joke about an announcer announcing the Digimon digivolving. Wouldn't he be able to tell that it's the Digimon themselves announcing it? Even if he couldn't figure it out, I would have thought JesuOtaku would correct him.
  • Simple, really: Doug more than likely wrote the review. He made a point of telling us that he never watched Digimon, and he probably just didn't notice. Even if JO did point it out to him before the review was made, he might not have found a way to fit it into the script in a funny way, or he liked his "Critic kicks the Narrator in the balls" joke enough to ignore it.
  • The Digimon Commentary shows that this review was really rushed- JO wrote the script outside of some Critic stuff and was also at an Anime con and Doug was too busy with the Year 4 Special to put a lot of time into the review. So most likely in the rush to get it done JO either didn't notice it or thought it'd be too much trouble this late in the game to change it.
• Why does the Nostalgia Critic often review movies not often regarded as good (because of nostalgia), but ones almost universally hated such as Batman & Robin? Very few people would be nostalgic for movies like that.
  • Nothing is universally hated. I know plenty of persons who still remember the Tom and Jerry movie with fondness, and the Batman franchise is obviously part of his childhood. That's why he did it.
  • Plus he doesn't necessarily review movies people remember fondly, so much as movies that were made between the early 80s and early 2000s. Whether or not it was ever popular to begin with is irrelevant.
  • One, terrible stuff is easier to review. Two, to deconstruct nostalgia. When people talk about "Man, the 80s and 90s were so cool, so much better than now", he then says "Well, what about all this awful trash? Stuff just as bad as today's!"
  • Nostalgia isn't inherently "good". There IS such a thing as BAD nostalgia, where you remember something from your childhood because of how much you hated it. Besides, a lot of people probably did like Batman & Robin as kids that didn't know any better.
• In the Nostalgia Critic's Scooby-Doo review, he says he never gets to do anything with anyone... What about all that stuff he did with other reviewers on the TWTG website over the years from Kickassia to Suburban Knights to just the occasional crossover?
  • Speaking from experience, when you're as self-loathing as that, you tend to twist the truth to make things worse for yourself. And he's technically their boss in the TGWTG world, so that probably makes him feel detached from everyone else.
  • What about when he was reading Fifty Shades Of Gray with Uncle Yo, brentalfloss, and Team Four Star in Baby Geniuses 2? While it was part of the Critic's attempt to save money on his hotel room, they were clearly enjoying it.
    • That's depression for you. Gives you about an hour of happy and then tells you it didn't mean anything.
• During the Scooby-Doo review, Future Critic suggests that Scrappy is going to be the villain, but then when Scrappy turns out to be the villain, he says it doesn't make any sense. Huh-wha?
  • It's more a case of just knowing that scene was just there to "foreshadow" the movie's twist. From a character point, young Critic was right when he said making Scrappy the bad guy was like Hate Fic.
  • Just because he correctly predicted the end of the movie doesn't mean that he thinks the end of the movie made any damn sense.
• Why, of all the nonsensical things in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, is the Sonic Sez message "even you can learn something from a sloth" the one who pressed the Critic's Berserk Button?
  • It was the last straw.
  • Yeah, I mean, what is so wrong with "even you can learn something from a sloth/slowmo"? It's just another way to say "don't judge a book from its cover", after all...
  • Out of context the line just seems literal, as in even someone can learn something from an actual sloth.
• So, why does the Critic do what he does? I mean, there are easier ways to make money, he clearly hates it, and the fact that he's convinced he's never made anyone happy implies that in-universe he doesn't have many (any?) viewers (so he's probably not making any cash anyway.)
  • This was looked at in the CR crossover. Screaming at movies (his words, not mine) is all he thinks he's good at, and if anyone else goes into his territory (Chick with guy movies, LordKaT with Bébé's Kids, Nerd in general) then the possibility of being ousted becomes too much to take for his ego.
    • In-universe, though, he's everyone's boss. So he's explicitly hired people to scream at movies. If he was that worried why would he do that?
    • Everyone was designed to scream at stuff in their own little niche, though. Chick was supposed to do girly stuff and branched out. He assumed Linkara was taking the piss because he dressed up like him and talked about the Superman movies instead of comic books. He came in to "Until We Win" when LordKaT explicitly said that "not even Critic could beat Bébé's Kids". He got pissy at both the Nerd and CR when people made a fuss about similar they were to him. Plus it was only around TMNT-episode time that he started to go a little insane with insecurity.
  • In his review of My Pet Monster, he says it's pretty much his job and the next episode with commercials goes into detail with him wondering why he does what he does.
• How come Lupa, Linkara and Spoony are still around in the future in which seahorses took over the world and don't look any older even though the future Critic has clearly aged (and is acting like Christopher Lloyd)?
  • They're speaking through time from 2010. They're not actually speaking from the future. How? How do they keep hacking into the Critic's...camera I guess...in the first place?
  • It's magic, I don't have to explain it.
    • Plot Hole.
• In the Captain N: The Game Master review he mocks the fact that occasionally there aren't backgrounds in the animation. He uses an ironic joke that it's stupid to not have a background, when he doesn't have a background himself. How does this joke make sense? It's apples and oranges. Cartoons are supposed to have backgrounds. Online review shows aren't. Besides, Doug does have a background; the wall behind his desk. Blank wall=/=unfinished animation.
  • He was just making a joke. If he had really meant it doesn't work regardless of context ever, then he would have changed his background long ago. Besides, by that logic, someone could write a novel consisting of just blank sheets of paper, and it would still count as a novel.
• What was Lindsay's evil plan that involved stopping Doug from reviving Nostalgia Critic?
  • Probably involved sending Nella to physically threaten Doug. Unfortunately, not only did Nella fail to deliver effective threats, she also confused Doug with Rob.
  • What would she have to gain from it? She has half her sanity back now with Critic to lighten the load.
    • Because she wanted a monopoly on Nostalgic movies
    • But she's already got the electric company, the waterworks and the hotel on Baltic Avenue.
    • That hotel's a dump and her Monopoly's pathetic.
• If Nostalgia Critic was Donnie the whole time, then how did he manifest in other people's videos during his tenure as the Plot Hole?
  • Yes, that is quite a plot hole, isn't it.
    • It could be he experienced things non-linearly. He hung out with his old friends, developed a guilt complex, and became Donnie retroactively.
    • He already had a Guilt Complex in To Boldly Flee. Remember Ma-Ti and the Film Brain goodbye? Absorbing the Plot Hole and nearly walking out were the only times he looked happy in that movie.
    • Yeah, but then the job of stabilizing the Awesomeverse got old and/or disillusioning. He would be aware of all sorts of things mortal Critic would not have been, perhaps how much he hurt people...perhaps the people he reviewed (internet reviewers seem to have more power in the Awesomeverse). Just recall how much Douchie is already hating a job that seems to be one he would love.
    • I don't think Douchie is a good example; he hates everything. Even things he likes.
    • Critic was happier and wiser when he was with Harvey, he was fine and helping people. Mortal Critic blamed himself for internet laws that he didn't even have anything to do with.
  • I have to go with the "plot hole" idea. The Critic fused with the physical embodiment of continuity errors and illogical stories; being in an illogical number of places at once would be right up his alley. He was Donnie, a Muppet, the Ghost of Christmas Past, and a skull Phelous found simultaneously.
  • Actually Karl explains it. Mental struggle made real. Jekyll and Hyde if you will.
    • Except in all four of Critic's Plot Hole appearances, he was calm, lucid and in control (the good kind, not Review Must Go On-sort). Even Word of God confirmed he was finally okay and moving on.
• Why did Doug call out Linkara for speaking like his characters were real people when Doug himself had previously witnessed the Nostalgia Critic manifest himself in the real world just a few months prior? One would have expected him to ask Linkara if his characters were turning real as well.
  • Nostalgia Critic's ascension was in part due to the existence of the Plot Hole opening things up to reality. With that closed, the likelihood of Lewis' characters coming into existence is unlikely.
    • That implies that Doug knew how the 4th wall was broken in the first place and that he also assumed there was no way it was likely to happen again. Linkara writes his own characters and could in theory replicate a circumstance that brings them to life much in the same way that Doug did. This would be all the more plausible seeing that Linkara's show was elevated with the departure of Spoony and the NC hiatus.
  • The Nostalgia Critic was able to come alive because of all the time, effort, and heart Doug poured into him, writing him week after week after week for four and a half years, and Doug knows that. It'd be unlikely, if not impossible, for mostly two-dimensional cameo characters like Harvey and Pollo to make that leap. You don't see Chester A. Bum running around Doug's house, after all.
  • The better question is why is he calling out Linkara when he himself is hallucinating the Critic speaking to him and wandering all over his house and computer screen.
    • I might be wrong, but I don't think at the time Doug called Linkara that the hallucinations had reached past the "mind playing tricks" stage. As soon as they did Doug probably took his comment to Linkara to heart and immediately drove himself to the drug store.
• I know it was played mostly for laughs, and a tad bit of Nightmare Fuel, but why would Linkara think Pollo and Harvey would be real? Wouldn't 90s kid be more or less plausible? Harvey's a lounge singer way behind on the times, and Pollo is a robot something that while possible isn't likely to have the sarcastic wit he did on the show, so why?
  • Because the punchline is that he's crazy.
• In the "Is Twilight the WORST Thing Ever?" Video why did he show a poster of harry potter when talking about bad influences? he never seemed to show a dislike for the franchise before sure he made some jokes at its expense but nothing hostile.
  • It's not about what he dislikes, it's what moral guardians have bitched on.
• In his Digimon: The Movie review, why does he have a folder in his inbox SPECIFICALLY FOR DIGIMON REQUESTS?!
  • He most likely added that folder after he got thousands of requests for it flooding the inbox. Also, Rule of Funny naturally.
• Why did Halle Berry attack the Critic, if his review of her role basically amounted to "as good as humanly possible with the script she was given"?
  • To go with the "catwomen are irrational" theme of the episode?
  • Why didn't he try another method to distract her, like catnip, which worked in the movie?
    • ...Because he doesn't have a cat?
    • He was panicking and didn't think straight.
  • Halle Berry herself hated the movie and even accepted her Razzie. It makes no sense at all she would attack him.
• I was a little puzzled (and annoyed) when I heard the Critic talk about pointless changes to The Cat in the Hat. His closing statements seemed to suggest that The Cat in the Hat didn't need to be changed; it didn't need to be updated, nor warped into some modern-day garbage because Dr. Seuss' creation was fine the way it was. Actually, I completely agree with all of that. What bothered me about it was, I felt it was pretty sharply hypocritical considering what he said in his Looney Tunes Show review. Apparently, if you don't want the Looney Tunes to change, if you don't want their original image to be defiled by modern-day twists, you're comparable with a baby rolling around on the ground, whining 'I don't want change! I want everything to stay the same!' I think by Doug's own reasoning, that's a pretty unfair accusation. It isn't that change should never happen, it's that some things (in some opinions) don't need to be changed because they were good enough. That's the way Doug feels about Cat in the Hat, and that's the way I feel about the Looney Tunes. I'm sure someone could point out how The Cat in the Hat changes were more dramatic, more offensive, or different altogether. At the same time, I simply feel that his spiel at the end of the Cat in the Hat review could be perfectly applied to Looney Tunes, so that it seems he pulled the 'Stop being afraid of change' card too quickly and to serve his own need.
  • While it's not an excuse, bear in mind that if Doug hadn't tried change only for Vocal Minority to brick wall him, that “screaming on the floor” bit wouldn't exist.
  • The big difference is that The Cat in the Hat movie was an absolute desecration of the source material. In his review of the Looney Tunes Show, however, he does point out that the show stays true to its spirit, even if some circumstances have changed.
  • I'm more annoyed by the fact that, when he compared it to Duck Dodgers, Duck Dodgers gets one clip taken out of context, and the Looney Tunes Show gets a full montage. I love The Looney Tunes Show, but that was an unfair, bias comparison.
• Okay, here's one of my biggest gripes about the Nostalgia Critic's show these days. It's the fact he keeps using the Devil as a recurring character in his series. Now it would be fine if he just stuck to one portrayal of the character. But nope, he keeps changing the character every so often he has an opportunity to do so. First, he said Teddy Ruxpin was the devil in the non-canon Halloween special, then it was Bennett the Sage in "Care Bears 2", then it was That Guy with the Glasses in Linkara's "One More Day", and now it's Malcolm in "Mask 2" primarily to do take thats at Kim Kardashian and new bad movies these days. Just make up your mind already, Doug, just who exactly IS the Devil?!
  • Watch some Ask That Guy. The Devil changes his/her form and gets overthrown all the time.
  • Word of God says that the Devil changes his shape to whatever he feels like. Plus Bennett was only pretending to be the Devil in the Care Bears 2 review, so he doesn't count.
• Are Nostalgia Critic and Doug Walker two separate people? Sometimes the critic refers to himself as Doug. He even tells the audience how much he hates the name, but both of them act totally different.
  • Yes. Watch To Boldly Flee (and "The Review Must Go On" though that's much darker), they even have a conversation about Critic evolving.
• In his Eight Crazy Nights review, at the part where Davey sings "But he never quit on me" during the Bum Biddy song, the Critic complains that Whitey did quit on him and acts like that's never mentioned. But the lines immediately following that part were "Till I told him he was useless, and his sister was freaky". Did he not pay attention to the whole song?
  • He probably did, but Doug (and many other reviewers) intentionally lie and misrepresent the reviewed work so that they can bash the work more, for the...comedy.
• How was Zod still alive, after dying in To Boldly Flee? They just acted like it never happened.
  • Every other dramatic game-changer moment in that movie turned out to not matter, Doug even said The Review Must Go On was to "subvert" the scenes he was so proud of, so might as well go for broke?
  • Well, that makes sense. I just find it weird that nobody even seemed to remember. A Deja-Vu moment would have been nice at least.
• There are a lot of jokes recently centering around Critic's hatred of Product Placement especially in his Eight Crazy Nights Review. There were quite a few jokes in his classic episodes too. The question I have on my mind though is why he's so mad when a movie includes a real life product/restaurant/etc.? Is really that big of a deal when a movie shows characters eating at something like Burger King or playing a Game Boy?
  • I don't think it's a problem with minor product placement that he has, but the ham-handed, just bash-you-over-the-head stuff you see in a lot of films. I, personally, loved Man of Steel, but the Product Placement in that film got really needless at times. And, well, Eight Crazy Nights is another can of worms entirely...
  • You ARE aware that product placement usually involves money changing hands, right? Like there's a reason characters drink Beer Beer. So a lot of people find shoe-horning in a product just for the purpose of getting paid for it unappealing, and it's not always done well.
• When he does the song at the start of his Man of Steel review, the Critic, as Batman, calls out Superman for killing someone. Isn't that kind of hypocritical? He's specifically doing the Chris Nolan Batman here and in the Nolan films, Batman killed Two Face and Talia Al Ghul!
  • With Two-Face, one could argue it was an accident. With Talia... it's trickier but one could argue that she caused her own death by refusing to turn the truck and Batman was firing on her merely because he knew it wouldn't blow up the truck, only obscure her vision.
• Sailor Moon has a higher rating on the IMDb than both The Flintstones and Ponyo. Why didn't he get booed or beat up when he spoke badly of it? And why doesn't he get booed or beat up when he mocks My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic when that has an even higher rating and it's ranked on this website as the most Heartwarming thing ever made?
  • IMDb is not exactly a reputable source for rating films, considering most of it is done by zealous fanboys/girls. Remember all those folks who gave Twilight four star ratings before the movie even came out?
  • Also both are in his Girl-Show Ghetto. Sailor Moon review caused a lot of deserved drama and yet cons still have him crowing about how the show is jailbait.
• In "The Shining Miniseries", its revealed that the only way to save the Critic from the miniseries driving him mad was to find something in the miniseries that was actually good. Shouldn't the Critic have had his sanity restored when he admitted that Jack's Sanity Slippage was remarkably well done?
  • It wasn't really saving him because even he knows he's consistently getting further away from sanity, and the energy it took to admit that Stephen King did something better than Kubrick was what drove him to catatonic.
• In the Ghost Dad review, Critic didn't bring up Bill Cosby's love interest. Come to think of it, he didn't show any clips of her. Why did he leave her out? She was a supporting character too.
  • Maybe he just couldn't think of anything to say about her or any scenes that she was in.
• In the Alice in Wonderland (2010) review, he refers to himself as a celebrity. I'm not sure if it's the Critic character just being arrogant or if that's how Doug sees himself. Doug is pretty popular around the net, but he's not world famous like Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise.
  • It's pretty obviously Critic being a character. Doug's frequently said he's not worth fanning over.
  • Plus, in The Shining Miniseries review, he subverts this by having Malcolm refer to NC as "a D-list Internet celebrity".
  • A part of the review I've been wondering about is the part where he states that the whole title is inaccurate. Sure, it's true that Wonderland not really being called Wonderland does make that part of the title wrong in a technical sense, but Alice being older doesn't make her no longer Alice (her name didn't change), and the fact that Alice has been to Wonderland/Underland before doesn't mean she's not "in" it now. The title doesn't tell the whole story, and it is certainly misleading since it's mostly not an adaptation of the original books or the animated movie, but it's not actually wrong.
  • She's not in Wonderland because it's "Underland", though.
• Why didn't Little Monsters or Drop Dead Fred put the Critic into a coma? Doug Walker said they were worse than Baby Geniuses.
  • Because he needed to talk about how the former was horrible to children, and just generally, being put in a coma three times would get really old. Plus, movies fail in different ways, allowing for a variety of reactions.
  • Rule of Funny.
• Doesn't the existence of a Future Critic in the Scooby-Doo review kind of indicate that the Critic's fate in To Boldly Flee was never going to be a permanent death?
  • Different times, ceasing to exist or just Plot Hole, Doug's said over and over again that TBF was meant to be Critic's happy ending but money issues.
• Why wasn't Dr. Smith on his list of "Top 11 Dumbasses In Distress"? Apart from the fact that he's a character on the show itself, in Lost in Space, he's a coward whose greed gets the entire ship in serious trouble and has to be rescued from the messes he's made for himself. At least Jar-Jar Binks and Princess Peach aren't greedy and cowardly.
  • Because it's a top 11 list and there isn't room to include every worthy candidate. Also, incompetent villains seemed to be excluded.
• Why does Doug/Critic exclude the original Ice Age and Rio movies from the "Diet Dreamworks" recipe (he states its made from their sequels)? It can't be because he thinks they're good, since that would go against his line that he's stop picking on Blue Sky Studios if they ever made anything good, wouldn't it?
  • While those two films are by no means masterpieces, they arguably have some amount of creativity. The sequels, as well as almost every other Blue Sky movie at the time of the episode's release, were considered formulaic. Also might just be because Blue Sky is easy to make fun of, being a studio that constantly makes poorly reviewed movies that end up being financial hits.
• I have a feeling the answer will be Rule of Funny, but how could Critic make future references to The Star Wars Holiday Special if Santa Christ wiped it from his memory?
  • Perhaps he keeps re-reviewing it because he doesn't know he's already covered it, and so Santa Christ has to keep wiping it from his memory.
• Am I the only one who strongly disagrees with the Critic's stubborn notion that 100% of comedy is 'misery'? Think of Airplane! where the nun is reading 'Boy's Life' while the boy is reading 'Nun's Life.' No one's miserable, it's just unexpected. Or when the hoof-clopping in Monty Python turns out to be the banging of coconuts. No one's miserable, it's just unexpected. Or in Top Secret! we see what appears to be a normal-sized telephone in the foreground of the frame, though it turns out to be a really huge phone. No one's miserable, it's just unexpected. Misery has a large place in comedy, but it seems to me that Doug's preoccupation with it has developed into a fallacy.
  • Not at all. At a 2012 Kollisioncon panel Doug said that even Lewis disagreed with him and clarified that this belief was mostly a defense mechanism trying to make things less crappy. I don't know if that still applies, but you're not the only disagreeing at least.
    • It also ties into an old adage - "Comedy = Tragedy + Time". The further removed from an event people are, no matter how tragic, there will be jokes made to help cope.
• In the Critic's Eight Crazy Nights review, isn't his characterization of people who enjoy poop jokes a bit odd, considering the fact that he's good friends with The Angry Video Game Nerd?
  • James is Doug's friend, people who enjoy Sandler movies aren't.
  • Even the Critic does poop jokes once in a while, just not excessively or exclusively.
• If the cat wanted to hide the Hocus Pocus Blu-Ray, why did he put it in the case of Evil Dead 2 instead of something unpopular?
• Why does the Nostalgia Critic hate the bat credit card so much? I don't get the joke.
  • Because, to him, it was the death knell for 'serious' Batman. If it helps, Doug thinks the joke is massively overrated.
  • It's finally addressed here.
• This troper is curious about the executive characters (played by Rob and Malcolm). The one played by Malcolm, why does he still show up even after it's been revealed that he is "Willy Wonka" in disguise? He shows up again as the executive without any explanation. It's like the Willy Wonka thing never happened. The continuity is weird.
  • not that weird, Black Willy Wonka seems like the type to have two personas, and Doug in Lorax commentary word of gayed them.
• Does anyone know the name of the epic instrumental music that plays during the Studio Ghibli edition of Disneycemeber? It's also in a couple of other NC videos, but I can't seem to find it anywhere. Is it his own original song?
• In the I'll Be Home for Christmas review, Nostalgia Critic's personality seems...a bit off. He's kinda nice in the episode. He's not his egotistical and rude self. He shows concern for his friends, and calls D-bag out on his rude behavior. NC doesn't seem like himself, or is it just me?
  • He's never been just mean and egotistical, To Boldly Flee was all about him wanting to be better, and he kept saying this episode how hard he's finding trying to be good.
  • It's pretty much a recurring trend that the second of his Christmas reviews have him be a lot less abrasive than usual, coupled in this episode with the Reality Subtext of Doug wanting to reassure his viewers who may be afraid of massive changes in the future (especially political).
• Hyper's Facebook lists her birth year as 1984, but states it in her Q&A as 1991 (as old as Tamara). Are we to assume she's lying on her Facebook for whatever reason?
• At the end of The Princess Diaries 2, how did Hyper get Critic out of bed, dressed and take him hostage? Was Benny there? She might be scary but she's still half Critic's size.
  • He's been beaten up by girls way smaller than him before, such as Chick and Tamara herself. She might have been able to knock him out, then if she couldn't carry him, call Benny (we know he can get to her area in a very short amount of time). We know from the Spider-Man Old vs New that she owns his clothes, so maybe she didn't even take the time to dress him at his house.
• In his "Top 11 Worst Sequels", he says he only does ones where the original was good. The #1 spot was Troll 2, but since when was the original Troll a good movie?
  • To be fair, it’s a Dolled-Up Installment / In Name Only sequel.
• Which of the children are Aunt Despair and Uncle Lie's children and which are their nieces/nephews? It's assumed Bum Jr. is their birth daughter because she refers to Uncle Lies as her dad in the Jurassic Park III review and because of the aside in the Labyrinth review that they should have taken the morning after pill, but she still refers to Aunt Despair by name rather than calling her "mom" and Aunt Despair claims her actual parents died in the Balto review. Cliff calls her "auntie" in the Home Alone 2 review but it still seems a bit confusing. It's technically possible they could be both but that's an uncomfortable interpretation.

• How does the Critic remember Spider Smith every time he appears when Smith killed the Critic in his first appearance?
  • Erm, he's immortal in the "yes, you can die, but you'll always come back and probably remember how you died" sense?^note Which sounds pretty horrific in itself. I have no clue for why they're kinda friends, however.
    • That would also explain why he knows about It from his review of The Tommyknockers, since he died at the end of that one too.
    • Outright confirmed in the Phelous crossover where he shoots Phelous because he's upset about dying three times in twenty minutes.
    • His review of Surf Ninjas shows him being resurrected by Optimus Prime. I guess that's how he keeps coming back.
• I know he has a bit of Selective Obliviousness where the Chick is concerned, but did he ever find out about her constant attempts to off him in Kickassia?
  • He probably always knew deep down, he's just good at compartmentalizing. And it's not like he can get much moral high ground from that week either.
• Wouldn't Sci-Fi Guy bring up to Critic that he saw Ma-Ti in his Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within video?
  • Turned out to be a recording, no need to get the guy's hopes up.
  • Plus, the first time Critic wanted to kill him for going into his territory, and the second time he was being molestily paranoid about Linkara. Would you really want to agitate him even more by bringing up a death that was partly his fault?
• Wait, if at the end of To Boldly Flee, the Critic became the plot hole how does Future Critic exist?
  • Some point in the future, he descends? Some time before the Seahorses take over.
  • More likely, he has either ceased to exist or it's a different timeline.
  • Even more likely: It's a plot-hole, it very existence create the incongruence by its nature.
  • Seeing as how he's mentioned the Critic will appear again, just not often and not weekly, maybe he gets out at some point in the future?
    • Donnie is the Critic. The real question now is what's going to happen to Demo Reel's world.
  • It still raises further questions! Who knows how far in time from now Future Critic is.

• In Alone in the Dark (2005), one of Christian Slater's contacts informs him that the missing people had nothing in common, except that they all grew up in the same orphanage. Spoony goes on a rightful rant about this really large similarity being practically dismissed. But isn't it odd that he didn't even briefly compare it to a similar reveal from a certain game he spent at least ten videos lampooning?
  • Maybe he just thought mentioning a game in that movie review wouldn't add much? I think it wouldn't... I also highly doubt FFVIII was the first one either.
  • It's also possible that they planned to, but it got cut either for another joke or it was just out of place. According to the Behind the Scenes video, there were more than a few jokes they came up with that didn't quite make the cut.
    • I'd say signs point to yes, since in the Linkara Blog, he makes a 90's Kid joke about FFVII
  • I'll have to double-check, but I'm fairly certain he does mention it in his commentary on the video.
  • He pointed out the similarity between FFVIII and Santa with Muscles, because it was a plot-twist there. In Alone in the Dark (2005), you know from the beginning that it's about children from an orphanage who were sold to a scientists.
  • In the same review, they rant about how shooting the crazed, possessed dude, whom they later find out has a compromised nervous system, doesn't react to being shot. Firstly, being shot is in most cases not instantly lethal, lest to someone who can't control his own body anymore. Secondly, shooting him in the knee was a good move, considering that damage to the knew could prevent him from chasing him, despite that guy not feeling anything, and lastly, being impaled through the heart is lethal, no matter how possessed you are.
• Why would Linkara respond to the Nostalgia Signal? He's certainly comic-savvy enough to know that the Batsignal is used to summon... you know... Batman. Wouldn't he be looking for the Critic (or Chick) to answer the call?
  • The Critic installed the Nostalgia Signal, and for some reason he can't really remember why. No one necessarily said that he had to respond to the signal he'd established. Also, it's a joke.
  • The signal also comes from his house, so him answering his own signal from his house may mean that there's likely a chance the Nerd broke in to fight him.
• Why did the Nostalgia Critic, Spoony and Linkara review Alone in the Dark (2005)? It is too recent to be nostalgic, they never make comparisons with the original games (except just a line from Spoony) and has nothing to do with comics (though there may be a comic book adaptation but is not mentioned).
  • As they review wildly disparate things, they couldn't just do a video game, a movie, or a comic book- that wouldn't be fair to two of them. So they chose a video game movie, to be unfair to only one. They do not make comparisons to the original games for times' sake- the video was fairly long as-is, and too long and the web-viewers lose interest.
    • Just to add; Linkara also does some video game stuff (just not as high-profile as his comic reviews), so rather than being unfair to one of them they may have just just gone with the one factor that two of them shared.
    • The commentary mentions that one early idea was for them to review Bloodrayne, which has been a video game, a movie, and a comic book series. That would allow each of the three to contribute their own material. But the video game and comic books aren't nearly as terrible as the movie, and Alone in the Dark (2005) was much better known.
    • The comic book and game being better are not cited as reasons for why they didn't review them - Spoony said he couldn't find the copy of Bloodrayne (it was a scanned copy on the DVD).
    • Simply because he got a lot of requests for it and it's such a terrible movie it deserves to be mocked at any point anyway.
• Why were the Critic and Nerd complaining about the Ninja Turtles staying in character the whole time in the coming out of their shells tour? They are fictional characters themselves.
  • Because it's called a "making of" video, not a video set in the fictional world of the Turtles. If the video was just called "The Coming Out of Our Shells Tour," maybe you can argue that everybody should stay in character. However, this is a "making of" video, so nothing fictional should be treated as reality. And the review clearly proclaimed itself to be a Nostalgia Critic/Angry Video Game Nerd review. Were you expecting Doug Walker and James Rolfe to take part in a Nostalgia Critic/Angry Video Game Nerd review?
• In the Mary Poppins Returns review at the end, why didn't Mary Poppins 2.0 simply point out that the Nostalgia Critic had done things like diss the Matrix, crap all over "The Flintstones", and even kill Pokemon to show he was no better than her? Come to think of it, how IS the Critic no better than her?
  • Not liking things isn't the same as remaking it and thinking you're doing it better.
• In the Mad Max: Fury Road review, why were the Tom Hardy fangirls turned off when they found out he was a method actor?
  • See the “Should We Stop Method Acting?” video.
• In his Sailor Moon review, Doug said how obvious it is who Tuxedo Mask truly is. Well, how was Doug able to so easily figure out Tuxedo Mask's true identity yet was unable to decipher Sailor V's true identity? Sailor V did far less to hide her identity than Tuxedo did to hide his.
• In the sketches for the Batman vs. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles review, Hyper's plan to get rid of a fanfiction is to email the fanfiction to her husband's phone and have him throw it in a time portal. But how does that necessarily destroy the fanfiction? It's still on her, Benny's, and Critic's phones. They could delete it from their phones, but then sending it into the time portal is completely unnecessary anyway. Yes, it was likely just Rule of Funny all building up to a time travel joke, but there are likely better ways they could have gotten the fanfic to go back in time.
• At the beginning of the Alvin and the Chipmunks review, Critic thinks that he’s going to be reviewing The Chipmunk Adventure, and he mentions that he already reviewed it in a crossover with The Nostalgia Chick. He acts like he likes The Chipmunk Adventure, but in the Nostalgia Chick crossover, he didn’t like it very much.