"Someone's been in here!"
DankPods is an Australian YouTube channel, named after the owner's (real name Wade Nixon) eBay account. His videos are about iPods, “nugget” MP3 players and headphones, usually reviewing them in a comedic way.
He has gained fame for some of his more creative videos, such as the 1TB iPod Classic (and its later upgrades) and the ShrekPod Pro, later revealed to have been created from the scraps of a broken iPod received through the eBay Global Shipping Program.
He also runs:
- Dankmus, a Simpsons remix channel, and his original web project.
- Garbage Time, initially for random videos usually involving his pet snake Frank, but later converted to focus on nuggetty cars.
- The Drum Thing, about drums and drum-related content.
- Hello, I'm Gaming., a gaming channel (primarily) showcasing various poor-quality games.
"Oh, my tropes!":
- Accentuate the Negative: Most of the products he reviews are either garbage off-brands or mediocre overpriced stuff, meaning that he rarely has anything good to say about them.
- The Alleged Car: Wade has an affinity for such cars, both having grown up with them and also for the peace of mind that, since the car's already old and beaten up, he won't ever feel bad for damaging it. A count of some of the nuggety vehicles he and Jamess have spent time fixing:
- "Tony Kowalski", A 1991 FSM Niki / Polski-Fiat Maluch he bought in July of 2021 to fix up with his friend James. It broke down in the middle of a bus lane at one point. They did eventually manage to fix it up
into a mostly-serviceable car, which required tearing the engine apart to replace most of the individual components. The process also showed just how bad of a state it was in before, the most alarming thing being how fuel was leaking into the oil supply, dissolving parts of the engine from the inside and filling the cabin with dangerous amounts of fumes when driving. - He later bought "Sleepy(/Smelly) Jeff", a 1996 EF Ford Falcon GLi, a weird freak of nature with the trim of a cheap taxi and a high-end V8 engine, that he thought "only" had problems with leaking coolant that would take a day to fix. Cut to James getting under the chassis and discovering oil leaks compensated for by overfilling the oil tank, the mufflers replaced with janky soldered-on pipes that were leaking, the fancy differential was busted and also leaking and all the bearings for wheels and pulleys being worn. It took six entire weeks to fix everything, only for the interior to stink, be fairly slow, and have incredibly poor mileage.
- It was later discovered that the bad smell in the interior was due to multiple DEAD mice living in the interior of the car, which resulted in Jeff having its ENTIRE interior removed, including the seats, as Wade 'banned' Jeff from having an interior. What remained of the interior would later become completely disinfected with white vinegar to permanently remove the old smell. Unable to find proper replacement seats, he eventually settled on applying a used, filthy bench seat from an older ED Falcon found at a U-Pull-It, with a hole cut in the middle to allow the parking brake to be used. Though it now lacks a proper interior, thankfully Jeff no longer stinks. It even managed to gain better fuel mileage as a result!
- It was later discovered that the bad smell in the interior was due to multiple DEAD mice living in the interior of the car, which resulted in Jeff having its ENTIRE interior removed
- He inherited a 1985 Daihatsu Charade for free from an old housemate and named it "Two-Face". The driver's side is covered up with graffiti art (hence its name), the brakes are completely gone, the tires are 21 years old and the interior was full of trash that had been untouched for about 6 years. Despite all this, it is deemed to be in better condition than Jeff... until he and James gutted its engine out.
- The Donkey Van, a 2003 Mitsubishi Express van with half a million kilometers on the clock and commensurate major wear in the engine, differential, transmission, and general beaten appearance. Being so rough as to not care about mistreating it was the point when purchased, and it mostly worked despite the smoke and noises and the bananas in the differential until a can of engine conditioner spray burnt a hole in the head gasket. After being repaired it now runs worse than before and performs and drinks worse than Jeff. Wade eventually would re-adjust the timing in the engine and give the van another fuel run, where it managed to drink less fuel than Jeff pre-interior ban... barely.
- His latest addition is an as-yet-unnamed 2007 Mercedes CLS 500, a dream vehicle of his that he found at a used car dealership for $20,000. A not-terribly-happy James set about working on it while Wade was visiting Canada for three weeks, expecting that he would return to a fully-restored nice car that he could enjoy. Instead, Wade learned that James had discovered the car had been badly abused throughout its lifetime, including signs that it had been on a forklift, mold in the doors, corroded wiring, and a non-original boot. The climax of the video shows Wade taking the car through the car wash and getting soaked through the windshield. Ultimately he resigns himself to the fact that he's acquired yet another nugget, proclaiming this one "the nicest nugget I've ever driven."
- For completion, the non-nuggets in Wade's possession include Bruce 2 (2013 VE Holden Commodore SV6 ute), The Frog (2017 Nissan Leaf), The Car (1998 Toyota Corolla, borderline nugget) and Mum's Nugg (2018 Suzuki Baleno). Bruce 2's name alludes to Bruce, a deceased 2003 BA Ford Falcon ute that was deemed not worth fixing due to being set up for LPG fuel, an artefact of 2000s Australia that is no longer viable for regular use.
- "Tony Kowalski", A 1991 FSM Niki / Polski-Fiat Maluch he bought in July of 2021 to fix up with his friend James. It broke down in the middle of a bus lane at one point. They did eventually manage to fix it up
- Arch-Enemy: eBay, following his refusal to use them following the terrible, terrible service of the Global Shipping Program, as seen in his three videos about it.
- Art Shift: Whenever Wade decides to test new drum equipment, the video switches to the style of his drumming streams, and back to his normal video style after he gives up.
- In "The "Interchangeable Game Child".", the video switches from his usual style to that of a Garbage Time video during Wade and James' attempts at fixing the Game Child.
- In "The "Interchangeable Game Child".
- Aroused by Their Voice: Wade pretends to be infatuated with his Bluetooth speaker because of its Australian-accented female voice that announces status and settings - he will always switch modes just to hear it say "auxiliary mode", regardless of whether the mode is needed for the review.
- Ascended Meme: After the Cash Converters song from his Australia Day special became a common inside joke with his fans, he decided to record a video about iPods brought from Cash Converters. This was spun off into the "Cashies Special" series of videos, in which Wade displays items he brought from Cash Converters.
- Ever since the iPod Nano video, people have gushed about him saying "Na-no!" in a cute voice. Since then, any time an iPod Nano is brought into a video, he plays that audio clip.
- Auto-Incorrect: When Wade tries an Apple Newton, he finds that The Simpsons may have been a little generous, as "Eat up Martha" at least resembles "Beat up Martin", unlike "Brokerage". It variously interprets "Dingus" as "Rings", "Bridges", "Directs", "King's", "did yes", and eventually "Berger", and it interprets "Hello my name" as "dominance", resulting in the bizarrely threatening Ice-Cream Koan "dominance is frank".
- Awesome, but Impractical: Most of his iPod mods are this. In particular, upgrading the storage of an iPod to 1TB or 2TB may sound impressive, but in practice, it's highly unstable and difficult to actually get to work, and actually storing that much data on the iPod is nigh-impossible anyway. (His attempt to get to 4TB flat-out failed, to boot.) Similarly, installing an SSD intended for a PC in an iPod may sound cool (and not that difficult to do, at least) but it's prone to data loss, is slower than using the hard drive, causes massive heat problems and absolutely destroys the battery life.
- Bait-and-Switch: “Cashies Special Vol. 3” starts like a normal video, only for Wade to say he’s going to his car. Cut to footage of him heading to the garage and starting up his car. He explains after the opening sequence that the car is supposed to be part of his secondary channel, “Garbage Time”.
- Blessed with Suck: This is how he describes the iPod Nano: They are a very good product for managing to be so small... but that's exactly why they are cursed according to him. Due to how tightly everything inside them is packed to make them so small, the rechargeable battery is pressed directly against the back of the display. When the battery inevitably starts expanding, it starts damaging the screen (leading to a "black spot"), and can then cause far worse problems if left unchecked, including damage to the body and the risk of catching fire and exploding; since the battery was only just small enough to fit at its original size, an expanded battery can't easily be removed and may tear on its way out. It's bad enough to the point where he keeps his "black spot" Nanos sealed in a jar.
- Catchphrase: Many:
- "Oh, it's so crunchy!" - describing any poorly fitted, cheap-feeling components.
- "Phone yer nan!"
- "Na-no!" - said in a peculiar baby-talk voice whenever bringing out an iPod Nano.
- "Look what they have done to my boy!" - whenever anything gets badly damaged, either by himself or his arch-nemesis, the eBay Global Shipping Programme.
- "Can you believe no one bought this?" - when introducing a worthless new-old-stock product.
- Referring to cheap MP3 players and headphones as "dirty nuggets".
- Similar to the above, he often says "dingus" to refer to items he's messing with, people, himself, or Frank.
- "Someone's been in here!", when referring to how a certain item (mainly an iPod) has been broken into before (sometimes by himself in an earlier video).
- “It’s like the biggest companies make the worst junk or something” - when reviewing an MP3 player made by a brand that doesn’t usually make them, which are usually generic Chinese MP3 players.
- "So like this one time, right..." - the usual beginning of any microphone test.
- "Oh, my puhk-cell!" - any time he knocks over the collection of cheap "PK Cell" branded batteries that came with various devices.
- Latterly supplemented with "oh, my duck!"note and "oh, my sausages!"note .
- "That's how you know you're thinning out the soup a bit too much." Said whenever he has to use an adapter to plug a cheap set of headphones into his amp.
- Pretty much every video ends with "And mate? I'll see yaz all next time."
- Cloudcuckoolander: The weird persona Wade puts on when he's testing out microphones. They're a talentless, penniless idiot who keeps stealing their mum's Corolla, are constantly coming up with and going through insanely stupid business ideas, and mistake anything under waist height to be a dog."So like my last job was working at McDonald's, but I got sacked 'ey, cuz like I stole all the cooking oil and poured it all over the car park mate, turned it into a drift rink 'ey, people pulling in for Macca's didn't even know they were participatin', man, never seen a Camry slide like that, straight into the lamp pole mate, it was super mad."
- Crazy Enough to Work: In the "Flash vs Hard Drive" video, Wade decided to test to see which iPod hard drives were stronger: the flash drive or the hard drive. How did he do it? Make a faux keyring on both iPods, tied rope on them, went on a private road and tied them to his motorcycle and dragged them by the rope. Surprisingly enough, the hard drive survived!
- In "They made drumsticks for the iPod", Wade shows off an air drumstick toy made for the iPod, only to find that it doesn't work like it's supposed to (likely due to the electronics inside not aging well, though the controls still worked). Believing them to be cheaply made (indeed, he later snaps them easily like a twig), he tries breaking them by using them with his actual drumkit. Amazingly, they held up the entire way through, even with how hard he played with them.
- In "They made drumsticks for the iPod
- Crossover: "The MP5 Player." is a crossover between DankPods and Garbage Time, in which Wade and James try to put a car stereo claiming to have "MP5" support into the Donkey Van.
- Wade appears as a guest in the Linus Tech Tips videos "Trolling DankPods with AliExpress Headphones" (Where Linus builds Wade a pair of headphones with off the shelf parts from Ali Express) and "I Gave Money To Criminals" (Where Linus and co look at various scam "audiophile" products).
- Wade appears as a guest in the Linus Tech Tips videos "Trolling DankPods with AliExpress Headphones"
- Damned by Faint Praise: Whenever he compares multiple products, he usually names one to be the best of the bunch. Which is usually undercut by the fact that he's talking about bad products.
- Do Not Try This at Home: Wade will often try opening devices up in a dangerous way, warning viewers not to do what he's about to do. On several occasions, he has actually injured himself on camera.
- Drives Like Crazy: Not Wade himself, but in his (now-deleted) video about Northfield on the Garbage Time channel, he mentions "driving like a dickhead" as a common "community activity" within that suburb.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: His early videos had him being oddly enough very calm and chill, with a monotone-like tone that didn't have the Large Ham attitude that Wade has now in his videos. That said, however, the early videos did feature a few of Wade's quirks, such as the random names he'll give items, as well as his hyperactivity.
- The first video that featured the so-called "freakish ears on a stand" used "A Night Alone" for headphone comparisons instead of "Walk Through The Park". Both songs are by TrackTribe. Similarly, the debut of "Scarlet Fire" was during a montage of a Rocket League match as opposed to the debut of the Mojo, as one would assume.
- The first video that featured the so-called "freakish ears on a stand" used "A Night Alone
- Every Episode Ending:
- From mid-2020 to late-2023, his videos would usually end with him advertising the extra video/"after show" available to his Patreon followers, complete with a showcase of what the video is about. He also began promoting his side channels ("Garbage Time", "The Drum Thing", "Hello, I'm Gaming"), as well as his Floatplane streams, as they were introduced.
- There is usually a post-credits video of Wade talking to Frank, his pet carpet python.
- The Faceless: Wade/Dank prefers to stay behind his camera, and the most that viewers will usually see of him is his hands, with a few exceptions. However, in his drum streams or in videos that show him at his drum set, his face is easily visible, and he has appeared in other media such as Linus Tech Tips videos without hiding his face.
- Gender-Blender Name: Wade's pet snake, Frank, who shows up at the end of most videos, is actually female. He reveals in an after show (later released for free) that this was because Frank was the runt of her litter; female carpet pythons are larger than males, and since Frank was too young and small to safely sex when Wade bought her, she was just assumed to be male since she was so small. Once Frank grew to be quite large and was discovered to be female, Wade chose to keep the name anyway.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: Several in "Even Hello Kitty made an MP3 player...", in which he refers to Hello Kitty in French as "Bonjour Chaton", in Russian as "привет котёнок" ("Privet Kotyonok"), and in German as "Gleichgültiger Fisch" ("Indifferent Fish").
- Hell Is That Noise: Invoked in his treatment to cheap pack-in headphones and any other crummy audio tech Wade doesn't care for, which is to hook them up to an amp that can push 48 times the power of a typical laptop's headphone jack, and playing the incredibly bassy "Scarlet Fire" through them at max volume. Typically this results in an obscenely loud, farty-sounding buzzing noise that's liable to break whatever's trying to play it.
- Also happened when he took the Skullcandy Crushers, a pair of headphones that have haptic motors to make the bass unlistenably loud, and recorded what they sounded like on a pair of sensitive headphone-tuning microphones. The loud, distorted bass that Wade recorded is powerful enough to actually damage your speakers if you aren't careful, as some viewers attested to.
- Unsurprisingly, the microphone on a giant bootleg AirPod speaker is...quite poor at its job. Hear to believe.
- Land Down Under: Wade plays up his Australian nationality for humour, including a couple of voices with comically exaggerated accents (one a bellowing Awesome Aussie for when he's trying to make something sound great or reading marketing speak, and one a wheedling drawl for when he's nit-picking), as well as liberal use of Aussie slang and references to Australian products.
- MacGyvering: James, a friend Wade calls in whenever he needs to get a car fixed, has been called the "jury-rig king", best shown when he got a shattered indicator bulb to work as a test light for checking the wiring in Wade's Fiat Niki. In this same video, he made a replacement gasket for the gear lever out of a water bottle neck.
- Made in Country X: Discussed in numerous videos. In general, Wade really doesn't like when companies who used to have their products handmade in their home country move production to China just to save a buck, being particularly upset that AKG has gone that route after being bought by Samsung. He doesn't have any problem with companies like KZ or KBEars though, which are real Chinese companies that primarily market to a Chinese audience, with the western market being secondary.
- Malicious Misnaming: Wade will sometimes make up silly names for products and brands he is less than impressed with. Particularly notable is his Running Gag of referring to Samsung as “Smasnug”, and throughout his review of the Raycon Bluetooth earphones, where he variously refers to them as “Rondons”, “Rancans” and “Royjoys”.
- More Popular Spin Off: To his former channel Dankmus. It should be noted that Dankmus wasn't just a small forgotten relic, it was rather well known, even getting being acknowledged by VICE and interviewed as well. However following the success of Dankpods, it has eclipsed whatever Dankmus was, which is ironic considering Wade put the channel on sporadic updates due to Youtube's system (even at one point suspending monetization of his channel for a year).
- Mythology Gag: When attempting to load music onto his JAMP3, the enclosed software decodes children's music found on the Eee PC when he simply wants Scarlet Fire. Wade explains that this is because he uploaded them during the filming of a Patreon-exclusive "after show".
- New Technology Is Evil: Downplayed with his opinion on true wireless earbuds. While he absolutely understands how important convenience is, he finds you can get better sound for a lot less money if you're willing to compromise and buy headphones with a cable, and can then get accessories to win back some of that convenience while still paying less. But moreover, true wireless earbuds are eventually guaranteed to stop working as the batteries in them lose the ability to hold a charge, while decent wired headphones can last for decades if taken care of, as evidenced by his collection of vintage headphones from as far back as the 1980s.
- Also Zigzagged with his opinion on vinyl records compared to digital, pointing out that a lot of stigma against digital music comes from the early days when music files needed to be smaller, and audio compression wasn't as advanced as today. On the other hand, vinyl records can still sound great, but it depends on the quality of the recording. He points out that the reason why some people prefer vinyl's "warmer" sound is probably that they prefer the way music has to be mixed on vinyl.* His biggest reason for enjoying vinyl was that the hassle of setting the record and inability to skip tracks encouraged him to listen to full albums, rather than pause them and go do something else.
- Non-Indicative Name: His "Nugget Lucky Dip" series, in which he takes a bag filled with old, crappy MP3 players bought in bulk, and rummages through it to find some good ones. As he himself pointed out, it is very rarely lucky.
- Oh, Crap!: He tends to have these moments whenever something isn't right with the product he looks at, but one big example was when attempting to fix his 1TB iPod, he realizes there's more damage after he broke the chassis and it began to make crack noises when he attempted to put it together. He will sometimes break into a sing-song "Oh nooo-ooo-ooo!" when something is going especially badly.
- Once per Episode: Every video opens with a shot of DankPods' desk and the green-cased iPad he uses as a work surface, followed by throwing the video's main topic (or a setup) onto it.
- Percussive Therapy: Any particularly terrible devices and accessories will usually end up smashed by the end of the video, either by being whacked with a small anvil, or the "1 grit sandpaper", which is just a fist-sized chunk of a broken concrete slab. Particularly low-quality earbuds will often be subject to an audio version of this where they're plugged into a high-quality headphone amp which is set to full blast in an attempt to burn them out.
- Product Placement: Played With. Wade always says "Not sponsored" when talking about iFlash in any iPod repair video he's done, and several videos of him shilling really nice headphones and accessories have him clarifying that he's just a happy customer.
- A few early videos had common sponsors like VPN services and Audible.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Particularly bad devices (or services) tend to get one of these, especially where they are the product of a large company that should be capable of making something better:
- The three videos on eBay's Global Shipping Program can be seen as this, although the third one is where it fully became a rant about how terrible the service is, especially when in said video Wade explained that an item he ordered actually was stolen. He then declared in the video that he was giving up on eBay and permanently moving on to buying things from other sellers or Amazon, who have been more reliable to him.
- The video on the Zunenote and the series on booting Windows 10 on an iPod will have Wade completely rip apart Microsoft for becoming very lazy and sketchy with certain decisions, most notably on the former borderline ranting about Microsoft's laziness in making what could have been a decent MP3 player and the latter with a small tirade about Microsoft becoming very complacent following the release of Windows 10 since they don't really have competition anymore.
- As mentioned, the Zune gets an epic one for how he sees a wasted product:Wade/Dank: So to sum this guy up: The biggest, richest tech company with by far the best experience in the field and influence in the computer scene abandons everyone they suck in their junk media OS, to wind up using someone else's design, which wasn't selling well by the way, due to wanting to rush it out by Christmas, whose only hot selling features were totally gimped, to put a store together that was poorly stocked with content, at a time that NO ONE was asking for something like this, only to add their DRMS and ARROGANT point system to buy music, stupid Microsoft Funbucks, WITH less supported music formats, only to throw it all away like it had never happened, abandoning everyone who actually thought Microsoft was gonna do something cool. (exasperated) SQUIRTING!?note
- His video on the Samsung "beans"note ends with him criticizing it primarily for its high price considering the mediocre sound quality (which he contrasted to the TaoTronics SoundLiberty 79) and the lousy build quality for the case, the bad performance of the active noise cancelling to the point of it practically not existing, and worst of all, Samsung parading the practically-defunct AKG brandnote for tacky marketing purposes.
- His video on Twitch's bad automated customer support, due to his account's payments supposedly being "suspended", leading to him quietly joining Floatplane, a streaming platform owned by Linus Tech Tips.
- Running Gag:
- DankPods' fascination with Shrek, the quintessentially early-2000s film series whose heyday overlapped closely with that of the iPod, crops up in many videos:
- Any video-capable device will always be tested by loading a copy of Shrek onto it. Audio-only devices will sometimes get the soundtrack to the first Shrek movie.
- In one video he Frankensteins together an iPod out of various semi-broken spare parts, held together with blu-tack, sticky tape and cable ties, and loaded with a copy of Shrek. He names it the "ShrekPod Pro".
- Frequently substituting the word "wrecked" with "Shreked".
- Following the small fandom after his iPod Nano video, any time he pulls out a Nano in a video, expect an audio clip of him saying "Na-no!" to play.
- If something goes wrong during the editing of a video, it cuts to him in the "studio" explaining what went wrong, usually a factual error or a clip he couldn't put in the video.
- Pronouncing "AA" or "AAA" batteries as a short, high-pitched scream.
- Referring to user manuals for electronics (typically small print manuals) as "phonebooks for mice".
- Similarly he'll often pronounce "manual" as "Manuel".
- Any time he brings out his Sennheiser HD600 headphones for a comparison, he pronounces the model number "huh duh six hundge-Os".
- When unboxing a new old stock device, he'll sometimes sing "A brand new nugg, can you believe no one bought this?" to the tune of "A Whole New World".
- DankPods' fascination with Shrek, the quintessentially early-2000s film series whose heyday overlapped closely with that of the iPod, crops up in many videos:
- Sequel Escalation: After successfully upgrading an iPod Classic to 1TB of storage, he has a sequel video where he upgrades it to 2TB, and a final one where he tries (and fails) to get it to 4TB.
- Shout-Out: Wade leans heavily into being Australian, so references to The Simpsons episode "Bart Vs Australia" abound, including referring to all prices in "dollarydoos", and in one video while using a knife, mutters "You call that a knife? This is a knife!" before pulling out a spoon.
- In his video on the Digi-Block MP3 player (that's the shape of a cube) during the test of the microphone, he says he needs to go to Bendigo to get "me cube", referencing Rick and Morty: Bushworld Adventures.
- In his review of the iDuck, he refers to the "not for children under 3 years old" symbol on the packaging as "Nought to three sad onions", which is what Stuart Ashen invariably calls the symbol in his videos. He references Ashens again when he does a review of the Interchangeable Game Child (and subsequently summons Ashens' viewerbase when he calls attention to Ashens and the Quest for the Game Child). Helps that he's a longtime subscriber to Ashens.
- In his video on the Digi-Block MP3 player (that's the shape of a cube)
- "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Discussed in his Headphone Starter Guide with regards to online audiophile communities, as well with other hobbies. He greatly dislikes the "snobbery" in forums for a hobby that is very much down to personal taste, and where the highest-end options can be prohibitively expensive and impractical for most people that just want better headphones than what came with their phone. But on the other side of the coin, he does understand such people being fed up with people joining forums just to ask the same questions that have been asked time and time again, and recommends anyone considering getting into an audiophile community to do their own research and to search their site to find answers to anything they want to know first.
- Tim Taylor Technology: The Maraca Cracker 9000. A gift to the channel to give Wade something to reliably destroy the cheap headphones that seem to come with every media player, it comes with a proper covered arming switch and a warning never to plug in anything he doesn't want to lose. It takes the output of an amp that typically pushes audio to every speaker in a good-sized supermarket or airport terminal, and compresses it down to a single headphone out. He's completely aware that it has zero practical applications beyond his own amusement."This is not a retail product. This is not something you'd want to sell to people as a retail product."
- Video Review Show: With a definite focus on Accentuate the Negative, although this can be to products that genuinely suck (such as the SpongeBob MP3 player or the Zune) and even if the item sucks, he tries to make it fun and entertaining.
- What Have I Done: In his review of the Lego MP3 player, after struggling to upload some music and photos to the device, which fails to play or show any of it, he sets about it with various sharp tools until it's stripped down to its plastic chassis... at which point a picture of Shrek flickers onto the screen. He gently sets down the stricken player in shock.Wade: And after I destroy it, it decides to show me Shrek! What have I done? What have I done!? I'm a monster!
- Subverted in the end where after that revelation, it cuts to a quick black screen where Wade puts that he honestly doesn't care and that the Lego MP3 Player really did suck to use.
- —And mate? Ah'll see yaz all next toime.
