History WebVideo / ThePoparena

In early 2024, "Nick Knacks" had a spin-off called "Nick at Nite Knacks" which explores shows from the Creator/NickAtNite after Greg reached his Patreon Goal.

* NotBad: Despite not liking the Goosebumps books, Greg was always quick to label which ones were actually good. The ones he seemed to enjoy were Welcome to Dead House, Stay Out of the Basement, Let's Get Invisible, Welcome to Camp Nightmare, The Haunted Mask, Piano Lessons Can Be Murder, Deep Trouble, Phantom of the Auditorium, A Night in Terror Tower, It Came from Beneath the Sink, The Horror at Camp Jellyjam, How I Got My Shrunken Head, Ghost Camp, Calling All Creeps, The Curse of Camp Cold Lake, The Haunted School, Werewolf Skin and I Live in Your Basement.

* SeinfeldIsUnfunny: Greg [[InvokedTrope invokes this]] in his into to ''Series/YouCantDoThatOnTelevision'', stating that something's importance doesn't always correlate to its actual quality.
--> ''Important doesn't mean good.''

** Greg also recalls TheNineties as a very productive decade for the Looney Tunes. Before he discusses WB adding some newer shorts to ''Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon'' and buying back the ones they sold to AAP so long ago, he recounts the campaign for Bugs Bunny's 50th anniversary, ''WesternAnimation/TinyToonAdventures'', ''WesternAnimation/TazMania'', ''WesternAnimation/TheSylvesterAndTweetyMysteries'', ''[[WesternAnimation/TheBugsBunnyRoadRunnerShow The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show]]''... and ''Film/SpaceJam''.

* SpecialEffectsFailure: [[invoked]] Greg notes that the ''{{Series/Animorphs}}'' TV series use special effects that fail to meet his standards.

Greg Stevens hosts [[https://www.youtube.com/user/poparena?feature=watch The Pop Arena]], a VideoReviewShow where he provides in-depth reviews or recaps of television shows, comics, VideoGames, and movies. He is most known for his retrospectives of the ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' books and TV series, and discussing every show that has ever aired on Creator/{{Nickelodeon}} in ''Nick Knacks''. He has also expanded to include retrospectives on several other series and one-shot reviews of all sorts of media.

** His Sample Platter video on the ''Tiny Toon Adventures'' episode "Elephant Issues" debunks the long-standing rumor that the episode was banned after its original airing due to the "One Beer" segment by posting newspaper listing, TV promos and ToonZone forum postings to show the episode actually aired at least a few times on Fox Kids, Nickelodeon and Kids' WB.

* His Sample Platter video on the ''Tiny Toon Adventures'' episode "Elephant Issues" debunks the long-standing rumor that the episode was banned after its original airing due to the "One Beer" segment by posting newspaper listing, TV promos and ToonZone forum postings to show the episode actually aired at least a few times on Fox Kids, Nickelodeon and Kids' WB.

* ItsTheSameNowItSucks: One of his biggest issues with the ''Animorphs'' graphic novels (at least the one that was out at the time) is that it's so slavishly faithful to the original book that it sometimes gets akward in the new medium, like retaining expository dialogue about what things look like even though we can now see them.

* Content Warnings: A couple of ''Nick Knacks'' videos have these.

* ShoutOut: To mark the start of the ghostwritten era of Animorphs, his review of #25 The Extreme begins with a long monologue about the thrill of going to a bookstore. It is actually an almost word-for-word recitation of a passage from Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" only with the references and locales updated to reflect Greg's childhood.

* LimitedAnimation: Discusses this technique and its various uses in the Nick Knacks epsidoes of ''WesternAnimation/DangerMouse'', ''ComicStrip/{{Bananaman}}'', ''WesternAnimation/StarTrekTheAnimatedSeries'' and ''Literature/CuriousGeorge'', citing ''Star Trek'' as having the worst animation he had seen up to that point, as is the case with {{Creator/Filmation}}'s infamous reputation of employing this method extensively.

** #005.5 ''Hocus Focus'': Another [=YouTube=] archivist, [=JonQUBE=] managed to convince Jim Jinkins to turn over a copy of an episode to be hosted on their channel for archival and curiousity purposes two years after Greg's initial video.

** Greg absolutely ''tears'' into ''Say Cheese and Die Again!'' for the rampant usage of fatshaming, with [[NamesTheSame Greg]] slowly becoming morbidly obese thanks to the effects of the camera. Not only does he call out the book for using obesity as a horror trope, he also calls out R.L. Stine himself for including it in the first place.

* SerendipityWritesThePlot: Discussed out of necessity in ''073: Looney Tunes'' and ''#089: Cartoon Kablooey''. Greg details how the various ways Creator/WarnerBros'' fragmented the ''WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes'' library for television, which lead to the unusual package of cast-off cartoons Nickelodeon had available for its ''Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon'' program. The ''Cartoon Kablooey'' likewise goes into detail about how the show had limited access to Paramount's classic cartoon library because the shorts featuring its big stars (e.g. ''WesternAnimation/BettyBoop'', ''ComicStrip/{{Popeye}}, ''[[WesternAnimation/SupermanTheatricalCartoons Superman]]'' ''ComicStrip/LittleLulu'' and ''WesternAnimation/CasperTheFriendlyGhost'') had been, in Greg's own words "sold off for scrap" by the time Nickelodeon created that show.

** And then further shows Megabyte taking things [[UpToEleven one step further]] in his review of ''WesternAnimation/ReBoot'' Episode 6 "In the Belly of the Beast" by ''executing'' one of his underlings for ''doing something right''.

** Taken UpToEleven when he reaches Goosebumps ''#5. The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb'' as the child protagonist within that book, Gabe, reaches whole new levels of unpleasantness, thus rocketing him to the top worst among Greg's "Goosebumps Child Protagonist Pantheon."

** Greg reports that the shorts Creator/WarnerBros sold off to Associated Artists Productions in 1956 include the earliest appearances of WesternAnimation/BugsBunny, WesternAnimation/ElmerFudd, [[Characters/LooneyTunesMajorCharacters Tweety, Sylvester]], WesternAnimation/YosemiteSam, WesternAnimation/FoghornLeghorn, and WesternAnimation/PepeLePew... and [[WesternAnimation/WabbitTwouble Big Chungus]].

** #005.5 ''Hocus Focus'': Another [=YouTube=] archivist, [=JonQUBE=] managed to convince Jim Jenkins to turn over a copy of an episode to be hosted on their channel for archival and curiousity purposes two years after Greg's initial video.

* UnusualChapterNumbers: The second time Greg produced a ''Nick Knacks'' video about ''By the Way'' -- a show that took him a year to find any footage or background information on -- he numbered it, "#004.5". Similarly, the second video about ''Hocus Focus'' -- which took Greg ''two'' years to find a full episode of -- boasts the number, "#005.5".