Raocow is a notable, though somewhat minor, personality in the Let's Play community, known and loved by many for his Non-Sequitur commentary and pleasant-yet-amusing voice. He became a YouTube partner on March 17, 2011.Also artist and co-creator of Artificial Time XS.
Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: He has a surprisingly large English vocabulary, but often pronounces things strangely, due to English not being his first language.
He stated that he doesn't mind people correcting his pronunciation, but that sometimes his odd-sounding words are on purpose. In addition, words that have a French origin often confuse him due to his uncertainty of which native pronunciation to use.
Advancing Wall of Doom: An extremely annoying version can be seen in this VIP 4 video in the Temple of Homing level, where the entire second half the level is trying desperately to outrun a homing missile at top speed, including flight (link to video)
Always a Bigger Fish: Poochy is basically the unreliable steed to Mario's unreliable steed.
Amusing Injuries: Raocow accidentally fractured his foot during his VIP 3 playthrough. He makes fun of it.
And Now For Something Completely Different: Occasionally, his normal silliness gives way to much more educational material, such as his explanation of humans' abilities as endurance hunters. Of course, there are cases where he Did Not Do the Research (or possibly made inaccurate claims on purpose), as when he tried to explain why the sky and ocean are blue. No, Raocow, one is not reflecting off of the other.
Episode 60 of his An SMWC Production LP abruptly switches to an LP of Santa Mario due to technical difficulties.
Arc Words: While his stream of consciousness commentary style may seem completely random at first, certain words get referenced semi-regularly. Raocow himself mentioned he notices he uses the word "laundromat" a lot when he tries to think of a random word.
Berserk Button: Oh, mentioning Youtube video errors on his videos' comments page.
Raocow's fine with being given hints on how to complete things that he misses in his Youtube comments, but gets extremely upset when full solutions are given. His LP of Bunny Must Die was put on hold for over a month because commenters just wouldn't stop telling him to play.
To be fair, his reaction upon seeing the Vip 5 special world (set in space) for the first time sounded like he was making the reference.
Bilingual Bonus: Raocow occasionally speaks his native Québécois French, leaving what he's actually saying to whoever else understands the language. Most of the time though, he's just venting his frustrations with the level at hand, incorporating the French cuss words of "merde", "tabernac" and "simonak".
On a few occasions, he does translate:
Raocow: Hello. How's it going? Rock'n Nonne. That's the name of Sister Act in [Canadian] French, for some reason.
In one video, where he finishes a Castle, he proceeds to read the English text as if it were French.
Double Entendre: The episode title "La petite Kappa" translates (with some awkward French grammar included) to "The little Kappa", aka Nitori, the main character of the game he was playing. But, seeing how he replaces one word in all the episode titles in Nitroid by "Kappa", one can figure out that the title is actually a reference to the French expression "la petite mort" (little death), which roughly translates to "having an orgasm". Said expression very accurately describes his commentary in that particular episode.
Black Comedy: Discussed at the end of his playthrough of Mario Gives Up 2. His consensus is that, while the ending (Mario sending Peach into a lava pit, like in the intro of the first game) would have been funny to him if he were younger, it strikes him as disturbing as an adult.
Breathless Non-Sequitur: All the time. Let's just say that if you don't enjoy Non Sequiturs, you won't enjoy raocow. One example from this video:
"That guy is wearing a helmet, but it doesn't protect him from the dangers of mustard. Probably because mustard is something you eat. I've once received a drop of mustard on my head and I don't think I've suffered a lot of brain damage although, I mean, I could be wrong. I've been wrong about a lot of things in the past such as: Yogurt is not a cat, I had to learn that the hard way, and you can not play the piano if your piano is resting precariously on top of the CN Tower."
The title of his Youtube channel even says "WARNING: non-sequitur content ahead"
While playing Mushroom Kingdom Meltdown, Raocow spends several minutes on a non sequitur about skeleton growth being the cause of bodily aging, to the point where the skeleton will pop out of the flesh. Weeks later, during Nezumi Man, this happens. He mentioned skeletons pushing on skin several times in the LP; it's one of the few jokes that he repeats. If I'm not mistaken, he also makes the reference in his Yoshi's Island hack LP.
During The Great Empire, in episode 10, there's a stage called "Boomerang Bro Bonus". It features a single Hammer Bro, rather than a Boomerang Bro. In episode 11, he calls a Hammer Bro's weapon a boomerang.
Buffy Speak: He is fond of referring to everything as a thing with a thing, and enemies as guys ("Hey there, guy").
Justified, as Raocow is from Quebec, and French in Quebec has many, many words that mean "thing" with different connotations that don't translate well into English.
He decided on "Mr. Bean Man" as his name of choice for the Meep enemy in the Commander Keen Let's Play.
Butt Monkey: Yoshi, the green mistake of nature. Except for Yellow Yoshi, whose fart-powers apparently amuse the Cow of Rao.
Canada, Eh?: Along with Psychedelic Eyeball, one of the two big French-Canadian LPers to have come out of Something Awful.
Canon Discontinuity: Raocow does not make any mistakes. Any mistakes he makes are either "demos" to show off what happens when you DO fail, or experiments done For Science!. When he does make a mistake, he will call a mulligan.
"That totally just happened."
Catch Phrase: "Hey there, everyone, this is Raocow..." "That was a demo." "That's pretty great." (sometimes pronounced "S'pretty great") "Oh boogers." "Chipmunk time!" "Panic panic panic." "Not gonna lie." "Like it was no thing." "Science." "Jesus-hell!" "Good times." "This is Raocow, see you guys."
"That totally happened." He says this when state-rewinding to avoid a cruel and/or unfair trap.
"Join me next time, possibly/probably tomorrow..." at the end of his videos.
"Scary like X (Bananas usually)"
"Isn't that great? Not really."
"That's crazy town!"
In more recent episodes, after particularly nonsensical non-sequiturs he says "What am I even saying here?"
"That guy, he has opinions."
He often describes things as "destroying the world" when said action only involves destroying a small object of little significance.
Before starting levels, he often says, "We're gonna [part of the level name] it up."
Characterization Marches On: It's really weird hearing Raocow swear a lot in his earlier videos. Though you probably won't hear a Cluster F-Bomb, he still swears a lot more in his earlier LPs. Also, his typical Talkative Loon personality evolved slowly, to the point that he barely even seems eccentric in his early videos.
Cloudcuckoolander/Talkative Loon: raocow's Let's Plays are filled with some of the most bizarre and surreal commentary one would ever hear. It helps that he's a French-Canadian for whom English is a second language, although he's still rather fluent in English.
He periodically speeds-up random bits of footage to squeeze a video in Youtube's 11-minute (or 15-minute as of July 29, 2010) mark. Sometimes the chipmunked footage is no less intelligible than the real-time.
Cluster F-Bomb: During his Let's Play of Super Mario Infinity: Mystery of the Magic Wand, he talks about a point in the game where it becomes a series of "'Fuck you' after 'fuck you' after 'fuck you.'"
Raocow: This is just barely hair-singing me, because you know, lava, normally, like, at this proximity, Demo would be something like evaporated by now, but I mean we're talking about reverse-gravity lava, which has COMPLETELY different physical implications.
His explanation of Samus Aran's backstory during his play of the Super Metroid Legacy hack...
"We don't even care about the story, it starts with the same thing. It's about a guy who, y'know, goes to the bathroom and he ends up in an alternate dimension where he's a lady in a space suit."
Flat "What.": During the discussions surrounding ASMT, this was Raocow's reaction to Rule34 of his character being made.
For Science!: His justification for exploring an area, finding it leads to death, then rewinding.
Foreign Cuss Word: In one particularly frustrating level, Raocow says "merde" and "tabarnac". Also qualifies as a Precision F-Strike since he rarely swears in his commentary.
Often times, he'll say "simonak" as well.
He often exclaims "Voyons!", meaning roughly "Oh come on!"
Funny Character, Boring Actor: Raocow has admitted that while he's doing his videos he's incredibly, well, weird, he has difficulty maintaining that state of mind all the time.
Gag Sub: Youtube's Auto Captions are CONFUSED by Raocow's speech.
To be fair, Youtube's Auto Captions would even be confused by perfect Oxford English.
Genki Guy: Pretty much the only time he runs out of energy to commentate is when a level is really hard.
Game Mod: Raocow plays many Super Mario World mods, which have been a mainstay of his LP ensemble since he began. The members of Raocow's community have also designed a mod for him to play titled A Super Mario Thing, complete with tons of Shout Outs to Raocow's many Catch Phrases.
He's also made his own Kaizo-level romhack appropriately titled What The Hell?
Genre Savvy: Raocow is very genre savvy when it comes to platform games. He can sniff out a secret exit with almost no hint of its existence, and he even figures out puzzle levels, the bane of most platformers, without too much difficulty, mostly because he's Seen It All by now.
Gentle Giant: In his "tagged" video, he says he's 6'5". Both in and out of character, he seems like a friendly, easygoing guy.
Guide Dang It: ThisGame Maker game provides very little instruction of any kind. Conequently, Raocow has a little trouble figuring it out.
Good Bad Bugs: invoked In Super Mario Infinity, he likes the glitched "Course clear" screen that reads "Course cleior."
Yes, he's the one responsible for thismess. He hides it at first, presumably to receive unbiased feedback from his watchers, but owns up to it at the end of the second video.
I Think You Broke Him: Often times when a level is extremely difficult or annoying, Raocow would either go crazy or silent. This leads to comments accusing the creator(s) for "breaking Raocow".
Probably the best example of this is this level. The highest rated comment on this video is "Raocow broke."
Ice Cream Koan: Raocow would sometimes say seemingly political or controversial sounding phrases in his [{Lets Play}}s that might just actually be meaningful and insightful. But if you think of it for a while, you will realize that it's just a plain Non-Sequitur.
In VVVVVV, every episode name was six of a certain character in a row.
In Hyper V, every one uses roman numerals, either appended to the end or somewhere in the middle. (At least, up to a point. After that, he starts using negative numbers.)
In An SMWC Production, every episode went by "that/those (thing(s) that is/are the subject of the video)". Except for "Tempestuous XXIX", which references Hyper V's naming scheme.
In Scarlet Devil Mario 2, every episode consists of a color followed by an animal , followed a random noun that in some way will relate to the content of the video.
Instant Web Hit: It's usually commented that any video uploaded by Raocow, or having Raocow as one of its tags gets 3,000 to 4,000 views by the end of the day. This includes demos, silly cuts, audiosurf songs, or whatever.
Jump Cut: Often used to get him back to where he was before dying, or to remove several failed attempts to get to a place. Often paired with him jump-cutting mid-sentence.
During his LP of Clarence's Big Chance, Raocow outright refused to bring harm to any of the cats in the game, despite them actually hurting you if they made contact. When he accidentally defeated one of them once, and proclaimed "That never happened."
Exemplified in this brief, simple, but very moving tribute to his cat who passed away. If you listen closely, you can hear him stifling tears in the background.
Law of Conservation of Detail : Due to the way he cuts his videos, you know that if a reattempt of a level is shown at normal speed, he will succeed during that attempt, or at least something interesting is going to happen.
Lethal Joke Character: Any enemy that was meant to be point fodder in the original Super Mario World gave Raocow lots of trouble during his ascetic run.*
The point of an ascetic run is to avoid scoring points or collecting coins at all.
One enemy in particular - the suicidal koopa of Vanilla Dome 3 - gave Raocow lots of strife as he tried to avoid it. This koopa' lack of self-preservation instinct seems to be unintentional though - it behaves more reasonable in the GBA version.
Meaningless Lives: Double Subverted. In VIP5, he dies a ridiculous amount and still has plenty of lives. Then, in the level THE GREED, he loses almost all of them... and immediately goes grinding.
Raocow: [while playing An Untitled Story] You can't destroy the Milkman!......don't tell that to Kiwis, cause it might get infected. INFECTED WITH THE TRUTH!
Musical Episode: He routinely sings his commentary to the tune of the level music.
My Future Self and Me: Sort of: in some of his Hyper V videos, he's been adding post-commentary in the sections where his live self (or Livecow as he calls him) gets quiet from frustration. This sometimes leads to him talking over himself, and he's even told his past self to shut up at points, making his videos even more surreal than they already are.
He calls his future self "Post Production Raocow" or simply PPR. Especially amusing is when he tries to cheer up his past self with "Oh, cheer up, raocow, it's almost done." We also get more or less live translations of him talking French.
Orphaned Punchline: A lot of his quotes can seem like this, but they're usually non-sequiturs. This actually happens occasionally when he stops fastforwarding midsentence.
raocow: ...and I am not a time-ologist, unfortunately.
Platform Hell: Raocow has played through some of them. The Kouhai series are a good example.
This one level has the gimmick of killing you if you score any points. Everything in Super Mario World gives you points, including coins. Raocow's reaction is in the link.
His own romhack, What the Hell, also falls under this a good deal, especially since most of the enemies are invincible.
Precision F-Strike: Oh, it happened. Occurs during a rather frustrating tower of boss fights in Bunny Must Die. One of the rare occurrences of the F-word a) being uttered, and b) being clear enough to not miss.
WARNING: If you REALLY want something depressing, just go to 17:52 (And it goes downhill from there). Not a pretty sight. And the ending's quite miserable too. At least in the next episode he's quite cheerful compared to frustrated. He even says that it's one of the only few levels that he has ever ragequitted.
It is mentioned that he did it with Acid Labs Inc. from Mario Gives Up 2. He just straight up deleted the footage and just played the level all over again.
The final level of Marisa & Alice was so unforgiving that it caused Raocow to give up on the game entirely, going so far as to dump the game folder into his Recycle Bin and and empty it on camera.
In the extremely unfair hack "S. Mario" ("S" as in "sadistic"), Raocow has had to "Rage Quit" a couple of times. Although one of the levels wasn't implied, he showed a video of one of his "scrapped takes" and it actually isn't too bad.
Recycled IN SPACE!: His reaction to the Space Tanks (BONUS 4) level in Mario Gives Up.
Rule of Funny: According to the commentary in this video, he usually went into chipmunk time only if he didn't think the commentary was interesting enough to warrant splitting into two videos. With YouTube no longer having a time limit, he still chipmunks just because it's one of his trademarks, and has even lampshaded it at least once.
Sanity Slippage: Inverted. When especially difficult levels start to grind away at him, Raocow's Breathless Non Sequiturs begin to dry up and he sounds increasingly... normal. Can be rather unnerving when compared to his usual demeanor.
An example: After (impressively) managing to clear more than half of Vip 4 without using savestates, Absurd Athletics completely breaks him, and his usual wacky commentary is replaced with depressed, angry ranting. He even remarks that he's been rendered incapable of saying that "purple monkey cheese shit you guys like." Needless to say, this is the level that made him give up his "no savestate" rule for the rest of Vip 4's playthrough. This is referenced when he reaches the sequel level in Vip 5... which he DOES eventually manage to clear savestateless.
Save Scumming: Averted in later videos, but played straight in most of Raocow's earlier videos. For hard hacks like the VIP series, Kouhai, and others, he would use save states all the time, but he later stopped doing that except for the occasional science moment, unless the levels were really unfair.
Sensory Abuse: Thisironically bad hack in the 2010 vanilla contest had horribly corrupted music, which he commented on repeatedly.
Serious Business: Raocow has repeatedly said that he thinks most Let's Players ignore the "let's" part of the aspect. Among other things, this means he insists on keeping the comments open even when people are spamming him with help.
"This level is a desert. You can tell because it's a desert!"
"Welcome to the Forest of Depth. It's a very deep forest."
Shout Out: All the time. A notable example is in his Scarlet Devil Mario 2 LP, where when describing how red the Red Switch Palace was, he randomly said Ren and Stimpy.
"It's logical that you don't know how to operate an elevator, after all your house doesn't have one. It has stairs, where your can dropped something that day, didn't he, Mr. Samuel Tanguay? Is your can green? I hope it's green, since it's your favorite color, isn't it, Mr. Samuel Tanguay?"
GenericCAW seems to be fond of Raocow remixes in general. The link leads to his Youtube profile. Sixteen of his twenty seven remixes (hosted on Youtube at least) are Raocow remixes.
The above mentioned mixer seems to have caught Raocow's attention on a few occasions, as evidenced by his Call Back to this mix.
Surprisingly Good English: English is Raocow's second language and he's noted to speak English pretty much only for his Let's Plays, yet he verbosity is surprisingly diverse. Given, he flubs words occasionally but on the whole it's quite good.
In a YT comment, he stated that his father being in the military caused him to move around a lot; he apparently mostly went to French-speaking schools, but spoke English in the neighborhoods he lived in. He says this is probably why his accent isn't really all that "French Canadian"-ish.
Throw The Stupid Horse A Bone: Raocow has insulted Yoshi many, many times (see The Scrappy above), including calling him a "green miscreant" and "an insult to all creation". In this video, after Yoshi looks like he's going to fall off a ledge, then doesn't, allowing Raocow to get back on him, he says:
"Thanks for not plunging in that hole there Yoshi. I appreciate it. I-I usually I don't appreciate you enough, perhaps, some people would argue."
Troll: After constantly being pestered for not beating the key boss in Mario Gives Up, he finally uploads this.
Undercrank: Chipmunk mode. He's even done twovideos entirely in chipmunk mode.
Inverted in one video where a YouTube glitch causes the audio to go into half-speed before slowly cranking back up to normal, albeit about 2 seconds out of sync. Then back into chipmunk time. It's like YouTube found the one way to make Raocow more surreal.
The Unpronounceable: One of the many Super Mario World hacks he played was titled :P :P :P. When he had to refer to the game's title, he usually either said "P P P" or blew three raspberries.
He uses "Pumpernickels!" as a swear word occasionally.
Verbal Tic: Try listening to see how many times Raocow says "It's pretty great".
Vocal Evolution: His voice was a lot softer, calmer and more thickly-accented at first. As he refined his Talkative Loon nature, he also developed a "wackier" tone of voice to match, while becoming more fluent in English. Even his out-of-character videos sound nothing like he did on his first LP.
You No Take Candle: Intentionally mangles English; he's more or less fluent in both English and French. With that said, on occasion some of his structures sound odd, but he'll often comment on how bizarre they sound immediately.
is a notable, though somewhat minor, personality in the Let's Play community, known and loved by many for his Non-Sequitur commentary and pleasant-yet-amusing voice. He became a YouTube partner on March 17, 2011.Also artist and co-creator of Artificial Time XS.
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