Arby 'n' The Chief is a comedic Live Action Puppeteering/Machinima series created by Jon Graham (formerly known as "DigitalPh33r"), who also produced Deus Ex Machina. The focus of the series is based around figurines based on Bungie and Microsoft's Halo series coming to life when their owner is out. As the title suggests, the main characters are based on Master Chief (a Leet Lingo-speaking Jerk Ass whose only concern is how much he "pwns" in any given game, something that he is completely incapable of actually doing) and the Arbiter (a Deadpan Snarker who often acts as the voice of reason to the Chief's mindless ranting). One of the unique features of the series is that many of the characters actually speak through a PC voice synthesizer, instead of acted voice-overs. The series is based on Graham's previous shorts, Master Chief Sucks At Halo, where the series' trademarks (including synthesized voice-overs and the Chief's personality) were developed. This is the show that has made Graham a internet wide phenomenon, rivaling Rooster Teeth in popularity.The original series initially ended after the third season with a six-part finale, "Endgame". The finale led to a spin-off, Arby 'n' the Chief in LA, produced entirely by Machinima.com with minimal input from Graham. After a break from the series, Graham announced a fourth season of Arby 'n' the Chief in 2010, which takes place before "Endgame" and the LA spinoff. This was followed by a fifth season in early 2011, and a sixth season in mid 2011. A seventh season has been announced and premiered in early 2012.
Tropes appearing in this series:
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Method
Arc Number: Every time you see a clock, it will either display 3:43, 13:37 or the digits will add up to 7 (which is a reference to Bungie).
Breaking the Fourth Wall: The figurines' owner is named "Jon", and the second episode has Chief commenting on a Bungie blog post about the first episode. Further, the plot of The Movie is started when Chief watches machinima by DigitalPh33r.
The episode before endgame has Arbiter and Chief stuck in a game with several people, two of whom recognize Master Chief's voice from the show.
Call Back: The season 5 pilot, to "Wedding" (episode 14/S3E2)
Also in the the same episode, Cheif tells the security guys, "We r guyz, WHO GON TEACH U LESSON!" a variation on one of his first lines from the very first episode.
Canon Discontinuity: Arby and The Chief didn't move to LA. It totally didn't happen. And the fans were relieved.
Travel Montage: Parodied in The Movie. When Chief escapes from LA, it zooms out to the classic "line on the map" scene - except the lines are a tangled mess because Chief has no idea where he's going.
In The Movie, the petition to stop Chief from making machinima in and his subsequent video response are direct references to similar events revolving around Uwe Boll. Chief even uses the same phrases as Boll in his video.
Take That: As shown by the Chief being a Take That at Halo's Fan Dumb and indicated by some episodes' director commentaries, the plots of some episodes are aimed at common complaints that the Halo fanbase made about the games, or make fun of Xbox Live users in general. This intensified when Graham discontinued It's A Wonderful Live, a separate machinima series designed to vent out those same frustrations.
Take That, Audience!: Jon addresses some of his more zealous fans with these from time to time. In the first episode of It's a Wonderful Live he outright tells his general response to complainers: "What's the big fucking deal?!"
Arbiter delivers one at the end of "Panic" (19/S3E7)
Arbiter: A few of you obsessive types are probably now scampering to your Xboxes to register the gamertag "assassininja4827", "assninja4827" or some other slight variation. No one will be impressed. Just wanted to call you douchebags out on that beforehand. Owned.
In fact, Todd, Travis, and Cortana's deaths seemed like this.
Abusive Parents: Kylie's motive for working with Chaos Theosis was so that she'd have enough money to leave home because of her abusive father.
Affably Evil: Trent Donnovich, despite his portrayal as a Corrupt Corporate Executive in the first episode and a harsh first meeting with Arbiter, later tries to make friends with him and invites him to the wedding "church".
The hacker Duncan in season 6 seems to qualify so far.
Arch-Nemesis: The closest thing to an antagonist the series has is obnoxious video game players, but if anyone could be called the Arch Nemesis it would be Scott from 'Endgame' story.
Trent Donnovich appears to be fulfilling the role in season 5.
He's pretty much Arbiter's absolute arch nemesis now. Aside from what he did in season 5, he put Arbiter into a depression for 4 months, and turned out to be the Big Bad of Season 6 as well. He's also the only human character aside from love interest Claire, and the Scott and Boris Smirnoff characters from Endgame that know that Arbiter is a toy.
Adam appears to be Arbiter's arch nemesis now, especially considering that he fragged Claire.
Author Avatar: Arbiter, and Jon has already admitted to it; this has not, however prevented many instances of Author Filibuster from occurring. (Though they have become more rare as of late.)
Amazingly, Chief has also become this in some recent episodes, seeming to embody Jon's wild, silly, artistic, and emotional side while Arbiter embodies his logical thought, controlled behaviour, and cynicism. But how much Chief channels Graham and how much he is of his classic stupid self vaires from episode to episode.
Badass Bystander: One player in Cradle to Grave maintains a calm personality despite being threatened by Adam, and later refuses to obey him.
Badass Longcoat: subverted for Agent Smirnoff, who is actually a quite clumsy person.
Badass Crew: Parodied with Chief's "n00bz". Everyone of them is an insanely bad Halo player and they all are beaten easily by Arbiter in the last part of the episode. Not to mention Chief says the exact point of them to is use exploits, which hurts their awesomeness significantly.
By the end of season 5, all of the toys qualify. Yes, even Chief.
Word Of God confirms that the antagonists of season 6 are this.
Big Bad: Trent Donnovich now counts as the big bad for both Season 5 and Season 6.
Characterization Marches On: most noticeable with Chief - he used to be simply a Small Name, Big EgoFan DumbDitz, but then he started realizing that he is not as good at Halo as he previously thought. And he has recently got a tiny grasp of sarcasm (not that he makes use of it very frequently). His relationship with Arbiter has been changing over time, too. See also Author Avatar above.
It's also a little weird watching Chief write off many games as stupid and that Halo is way better than them (like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Devil May Cry 4 and Callof Duty 4) and took some serious convincing to get him to even play them when you later see the chief willingly play many different games without a mention of Halo or even that the game sucks (like Grand Theft Auto IV and Resident Evil 5)
An example in Season 5 is the player Chief met in "Time Wasters" and other earlier episodes who called him out for being bad at Halo. In the penultimate episode he turns out to be a member of an organization of underground hackers and takes Arbiter and Chief to the organization after they got kicked from the server that Trent and Claire's wedding is taking place in.
Evil Counterpart: Arbiter's evil counterpart is the Leader of Chaos Theosis (both play as Elites in Halo multiplayer) and Chief's evil counterpart would probably be Adam who is also a member of Theosis.
Evil Feels Good: Arbiter, when he gives in and starts doling out kills with Eugene's clan's fragban software. Especially after he finally got back at fragging a random player during "Spiraling" who insulted him once before in season 7. When asked how it felt, he simply states "Good."
The Faceless: "Jon", the owner of all the action figures. Onscreen only twice, and even then, we never saw his face. Also Skylar Loveheart (also played by Graham).
Until Endgame when he played Scott, but even then his face was covered by a large afro and sunglasses (though he takes them off at the end)
Hijacked by Ganon: In Severance, the twelfth episode of Season 6, Kylie and Clyde were fragged, disbanding Chaos Theosis. However, by signing into Clyde's account using his password, Arbiter and Chief find out that Trent Donnovich, Season 5's Big Bad was behind the entire thing.
Trent Donnovich makes Chief look like a decent human being action figure.
Subverted in Trent's case during the second half of the fifth season. He's actually rather friendly, although it remains to be seen whether he's genuinely nice or if it's just a gambit to gain Arbiters trust.
Knight in Sour Armor: Arbiter. It pops up every now and then, but is most noticable in season 5. His "The Reason You Suck" Speechto Trent Donnovich pretty much sums up what this trope is all about.
Not to mention Chief's temporary crush on Cortana. Their personalities are the weird part.
Oddly Small Organization The clan of hackers that will be the main antagonists of season six seem to only have four members, according to the trailer and Jon's blog at least.
Oh Crap: Chief's usual reaction to Arbiter's rage.
Only Sane Man: Inverted, as the Chief is the only really odd character.
Or actually zig-zagged for Arbiter: characters of common sense comparable to him come and go, as do Chief-alikes.
Psychopathic Manchild: Chief. How else do you explain him destroying a Call of Duty 4 disc just to spite Arbiter?
Adam in Season Six. Holy fucking shit. Technically, he doesn't qualify for the 'man' part of this trope, but absolutely everything else fits him to a tee.
And Then John Was a Zombie: The "shocking" twist ending of Chief's first machinima "TEH AELINS FRUM TEH OTUAR SPAESS" in The Movie, which as mentioned above is a shoutout to the notoriously bad Doom fanfic Repercussions of Evil.
Awesome Moment of Crowning: Subverted, Chief finally regains his Recon but learns you could get it from doing the Vidmaster challenges.
Chief: god damit this gaem is gay [beat] wen is teh sec0nd 1 cumign out
Bittersweet Ending: Season 5. Jon's Xbox is permanently banned, cutting Chief and Arbiter off from online gaming and social interaction, but Trent is defeated, Arbiter and Claire are still friends and even though Greg's in hiding, at least he is still around.
Brick Joke: In Episode 6, Brawl, Chief gives Arbiter a hug just to put a sign that says "im stuped" on his back. Arbiter doesn't know about this until the end of the episode.
And then it happened again in the movie.
And, to make it a trueBrick Joke, another hug occurs in the fourth episode of Hypermail. And both characters end up getting signs on their backs.
Bus Crash: Happens with Travis, Scott and Cortana.
Caught with Your Pants Down: During a Halo 3 match between Chief and professional gamer Craig, Craig notices he has a hard-on and goes at it while Chief is temporarily distracted from the match. Craig, however, gets caught in the act by his parents, and the ensuing confusion on his side allows the normally incompetent Chief to win the match.
In the 10th episode of Season 4 "Night of the evading dead", Chief wakes up Arbiter by telling him there's a big spider next him, implying that he has arachnophobia. In the finale, a giant spider appears in Jon's house, and this becomes an important plot point.
In the 4th episode of Season 7 "Terminal", Master Chief removes a plug for some reason and when The Arbiter goes to turn on the Xbox, it won't power on so he casually puts the plug back in. This just seems like a minor plot point, but in the next episode "Heat", Master Chief decides to scare Cortana and put her in the oven. When she isn't scared, he turns the oven switch on thinking the oven was unplugged and nothing would happen. Instead, she burned to pieces.
Cluster F-Bomb: Chief swears like crazy when he realizes that he just killed Cortana.
Enemy Mine: It appears that Arby and Chief are cooperating with Cameron and Cody to survive the hackers attack on the application match
Final Boss Preview: Arguably the matches against the two security guards count as this.
Gainax Ending: of season 5, the mind screwing part being another synthesized voice (Microsoft Mary, previously used for Cortana) waking up Arbiter.
Which turns out to be an incredibly cruel prank by Chief.
Heroic BSOD: Arbiter during Season 6. 4 months and counting.
He's showing signs of coming out of it though
He's Back: Not a character, but Chief's foot, which he cut off and was given back to him as christmas present by Arbiter, who apparently repaired it. Chief tries to invoke this trope, but ends up just as fail as he always is. It's also symbolic of the series returning to it's post "Endgame" glory.
Killed Off for Real: Not "killed" per say but one of the security guards from the wedding gets fragged during the application match. The other one makes it out though.
He made a brief reappearance in the attack on TOSER's HQ where he fought along side his friend on split screen before both of them were fragged. Also Claire was also fragged during the attack too, in a way that arguably is a Moral Event Horizon for Adam.
In Endgame, Scott literally gets killed. Also, at the end of Season 3, Cortana, Todd and Travis all got killed.
In Season 7, Cortana gets cooked alive inside of an oven by Master Chief.
In Season 7, "Crush", after getting told off by Arbiter for only wanting him as a friend and nothing more, Claire gets frag-banned by Arbiter's new clan.
Lemon Wacky Hello: Chief getting high from smoking cereal. Lampshaded by Arbiter stating that cereal doesn't have hallucinogenic properties.
Chief: HOLEH MUTHR OF GOD. L@@K OTU. ITS TEH COVERNINT.
And with Arbiter.
Chief: OMG LOOK AT ALL THE HORRIBLE THINGS OVER THERE
Let's Get Dangerous: In preparation for the wedding, Chief and Arbiter meet a group of console modders who help them to bypass Trent's ban on them, give them various cheats including unlimited ammo and the ability to make all the fusion coils at the wedding explode, and guns and melee attacks that result in a console ban and all of the victim's personal information being stolen.
OOC Is Serious Business: The normally friendly and rather cheerful Greg, who peppers his 'speech' with text lingo and smilies like Chief, becomes dead serious when he confronts Chief about Cortana's death, begins writing with perfect grammar, capitalization and punctuation, and even manages the Precision D-Strike mentioned below despite him normally going out of his way to sanitize even casual speech.
Precision F-Strike: Well, "D-Strike", but same principle. Delivered by Greg after he witnessed Chief not only MURDER Cortana, but is then forced to lie about it to Arbiter.
Early on in season 7 Cortana smacks Chief with a pretty brutal one.
Cortana: Tell me, Chief, why do you think it is that you were rejected by that girl you encountered online? Why do you think you're rejected by anybody and everybody you encounter online, for that matter? Hm? Do you think it just might possibly have something to do with this volatile attitude of yours? … Don't kid yourself Chief, the root of your issues lies far beyond my presence. You've been antagonizing everybody around you long before I entered the picture.
Chief: well u sure as hell hasnt b33n n e fucking help skank, thats foar goddamn sure
Cortana: That's just it, Chief. All I've been trying to do is help you. I realize the notion probably comes as a complete surprise to you, but it's true. You just can't accept it because you refuse outright to listen to reason. … Perhaps, rather than refusing to reason, you simply can't. That your under-developed brain won't allow you to.
Chief: mai brains r the shit
Cortana: I couldn't agree more. Utter shit. Even you know the truth. You know full well that any of us three could destroy you in any conceivable argument on any subject, and it kills you that you can't ever conjure up a rebuttal that's even remotely substantial. The only route you've found to take is to get angry and spit pathetic insults left and right that, ironically, only ever accomplish making you yourself look like a complete fool. You are a fool, Chief. Worse yet - you're an unlikeable and therefore unsympathetic fool. You're a blight. An utter embarrassment to yourself and everybody around you, twenty-four-seven. Accept it - and for God's sake, try to improve upon yourself.
In the same episode, she later gives another one to Arbiter.
Arbiter: Sigh. Really hoping this leads to a point where Chief's behaviour is significantly less retarded. If only for his own sake.
Cortana: Must you use terms like that, Arbiter?
Arbiter: Huh?
Cortana: Come on, you've proven that you have a wide vocabulary. Surely you can dig around for alternatives that express your feelings more tastefully.
Arbiter: Seriously? Chill out. I don't see anybody around here likely to take offense. I don't see any cameras on me either, do you? It's just us in here.
Cortana: Yes. And I find it offensive.
Arbiter: Why? You must know that my intention isn't to be derogatory
Cortana: Of course your intention is to be derogatory. You're associating something that you don't like and look down upon with mental retardation. You're almost as bad as Chief sometimes.
Arbiter: That's a mighty big leap, Cortana. I think you really ought to lighten up.
Cortana: I think you need to shake off some of that low-brow attitude that has obviously rubbed off on you from Chief throughout the past few years.
Arbiter: Fundamentally, I don't associate the word "retard" with the mentally handicapped. I use it and others like it because they're popular slang that pack a slight punch and inject a tiny bit of amusement into my empty existence.
Cortana: Really? You're that unimaginative that you consider speaking crudely as the only method of enriching your life?
Arbiter: What the fuck is your problem? Great work making an otherwise fine day awkward, Cortana. Having a nice time is so overrated.
Roaring Rampage of Revenge: S6 E9 ends with Arby gearing up for one after Claire is banned and her personal accounts hacked.
Soundtrack Dissonance: The scene where Cortana gets melted in the apartment oven has the fucking Blue Danube Waltz playing in the background.
Surprisingly Happy Ending: The Season 6 Finale involves Greg and Cortana returning to live with Arbiter and Chief, just as it seems Arbiter will be lonely and miserable living with Master Chief.
Tempting Fate: A rare example where things actually get better for the person that tempts fate.
Arbiter: Settle down, Chief. I mean most of the visual effects ARE cool and all, but some are made entirely for Machinima and it's impossible to see with them turned on. Playing with them all on would be fucking stupid. What kind of ignoramus would do that? Who, Chief? Who, I ask you? Who?
Arbiter: It doesn’t surprise me that a dose of emotion would have a toxic effect on an emotion-deprived cretin like you. Who’s really the plastic one here? Your bleak outlook on life is poisonous. Maybe the world is a big sinking ship. But we can’t accept that as an inevitability and use it as an excuse to act like shitheads. We have to be the change we seek. We have to build something better for ourselves.
Should be mentioned that this is Arbiter's answer to a "The Reason You Suck" Speech delivered to him by Trent an episode earlier.
Your Mind Makes It Real: Not exactly but Arby and Chief have been outfitted with weapons that when they kill someone with them, it will result in a console ban and all of the victim's personal information to be stolen.
Now that season six has rolled around, the clan of hackers are using these to more or less launch a terrorist campaign.
Long Runner: For a web series, and compared to Jon's other work, hell yeah. Since at least 2007 there have been 51 regular episodes split into 5 seasons, a movie, six-part "Endgame", and the LA spinoff that was never made.
The Movie: Arby 'n' The Chief: The Movie. "Endgame" could also be considered one.
In the original Master Chief Sucks At Halo trilogy, there was an Arbiter character whose personality was comparable to Chief's. In Arby 'n' the Chief pilot, an Arbiter figurine arrives in a box, seemingly meeting Chief for the first time. However, in "Face-Off" (episode 16/S3E4) Arbiter refers to a "sick montage" Chief made with him in the original trilogy, implying that he is the same character. Retcon? Breaking the Fourth Wall?
Season four was supposed to take place sometime after "King" (season 3 finale); Arbiter and Chief seem to be still living in Jon's home in Canada. Fair enough. However, the fifth season seems to have borrowed Claire from "Endgame", this time voiced by Elizabeth Carr-Ernst. How they managed to stay at the same place (if this is supposed to take place after "Endgame") is never mentioned.
Shoo Out The New Guy: The massive backlash and subsequent removal of Todd and Travis.
Soundtrack Dissonance: The music at the end of "Severance", when Chief and Arbiter attack Trent, and the final battle between them is about to start, the music is surprisingly calm.
Talking to Himself: Todd and Travis, as well as the voices of all characters that are not figurines (except Agent Smirnoff in The Movie, portrayed by Daniel Laszlo) are all voiced by Graham himself.
This trope was lessened in season 5 when Jon actually got a whole voice cast to play some of the characters other than himself due to the sheer number of different characters in that season. Though there are still one or two characters where this still applies, such as with Timothy and Nathan in the episode "Cheaters".
is a comedic Live Action Puppeteering/Machinima series created by Jon Graham
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