Web Video / Uncle Dane

Uncle Dane, the Engie Main.

"Dispenser, goin' up!"

—The Engineer at the beginning of every video

Uncle Dane is a Team Fortress 2 Youtube Personality who specialises in creating informational videos on the game that largely center around The Engineer class from that game.

The name comes from an old skit of his; Uncle Dane's Famous Hot Cocoa that, according to Dane himself, "just sounded right" and became his online handle when he started making Team Fortress 2 videos online.

Has a secondary channel; the memetically titled 2uncle2dane and Whatever We Want, a sketch comedy channel also featuring Dane and his friends.

Compare with Lazy Purple, a fellow TF2ber known for providing tips on classes, Mann's Guide, a series that explains popular weapons, and Team Service Announcement, an SFM skit series that tries to educate new players of the game.

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Tropes Comin' Up!

• Alt Text: Parodied in "Machete Mechanic" where he edits the description of the Prinny Machete to read:

(in green): Makes you a badass in every imaginable way possible

(in red): You will drown in pussy.

• April Fools' Day: For April 1, 2023, Dane released the video "I Main Pyro Now", admitting in the first minute that it was more or less a "joke", but otherwise a straight-faced experiment to main his least-played class, the Pyro, for a month. While he didn't exactly come around on loving the Pyro (finding the push-and-pull of their gameplay less rewarding and intuitive than the Engineer), he did learn more about his own personal biases and preferences, and found skill-intensive weapons like the Flare Gun and Dragon's Fury very fun to play with.
• Ascended Meme: The thumbnail for this Q&A video has the words "I use RaysHud Thanks for watching". A common question in his comments is what HUD Dane uses.
• Author Avatar: His videos have him represented by the Engineer wearing the Danger Gold Digger and the Insulated Inventor, all painted in "An Extraordinary Abundance of Tinge" (A.K.A: White).
• Bilingual Bonus: The title for "新入り! You Underestimate The Power Of 短絡 !" is partially Japanese. When translated, it reads: "Newcomer! You Underestimate The Power Of Short Circuit!"
• Boring, but Practical: The "Stock Engineer Weapons Trilogy" of videos have this as a running theme:
  • The Shotgun really is quite powerful, but not many people use it as the engineers' other primaries are simply more beneficial to you and allies. The Rescue Ranger lets you heal buildings from afar, while the Panic Attack can be used for its consistent bullet spread (which is disabled on shotguns in casual servers) to hit players reliably, meaning the basic Shotgun essentially becomes disused, and anyone using it is invoking Underestimating Badassery in Danes' eyes.
  • The Pistol is overshadowed by The Wrangler, which lets people take manual control of their sentry (as well as giving the sentry more damage resistance as it has a shield when active). The two benefits of the pistol are useful, but boring; It's accurate, even at a fairly long range, and it has functionally infinite ammo (200 bullets!) so you can kill people just by spamming lead into their torso.
  • The Wrench is simply outclassed by every other option, and even the Jags' downside of taking an extra swing to remove sappers isn't much of a downside. He even recommends using the Southern Hospitality as while it cannot do random crits, it can apply a bleed effect on cloaked spies, making them easier to track down. He does note, however, that it's actually the best option for Mann Vs. Machine as the game mode's upgrades make other wrenches redundant, leaving the stock wrench the only one without any functional weaknesses.
• The Cameo: Dane has on several occasions collaborated with other TF2 stars:
  • Dane has hired Nathan Vetterlein, voice of the Scout, to appear in his videos, most notably being the voice of the person making the common arguments for randoms crits in "Remove Random Crits from TF2".
  • Arrayseven appears in "Will it Kritz?" as the Medic healing him with the Kritzkrieg.
  • "The Ninjaneer" has Dane and his backdooring strategy getting shilled by iDubbbzTV.
    (in his "foreign" accent) "Uncle Dan is a veary goud sentry man!"
• Failed a Spot Check: During his second video on Ninjaneering, Dane is able to more effectively teleport behind enemy backlines thanks to the Eureka Effect's teleportation ability, which allows him to travel to the teleporter exit even if there isn't an active entrance. Not only does this mean the teleporter isn't glowing at all times, it also doesn't even generate any effects when he appears (and thus Dane simply blinks into existence), so nobody ever seems to notice where he even came from.
• Hypocritical Humor: In Machete Mechanic, he berates another player for building a sentry gun on Watergate because, as he claims, doing so is against the rules. So how does he punish them? By using his own sentry against theirs with his Wrangler.
• Leitmotif: Has one of his own, appropriately called Frontier Justice.
• Not the Intended Use: He's tackled a gameplay style he calls "The Ninjaneer", where rather than playing Engineer as a defense class who creates sentries to create a fortified backline, he sneaks behind enemy lines and plants down a teleporter and level 3 sentries to catch the opposing team violently off guard. The strategy is even crazier with the Eureka Effect as all he has to do is place an inactive teleporter exit down, and the wrench's teleportation ability allows him to blink back and forth between his spawn room and the exit nonstop as long as the enemy can't find the teleporter exit.
• Parody:
  • "Will it Kritz?" is a pastiche of Will It Blend?, and Dane's handle in-game was changed to the "don't breathe this" meme. The point of the video was to show off the Kritzkrieg being used on all the engineer weapons in the game.
  • "Dealing With Spies | Engineering 101" is an extended reference to the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Krusty Krab Training Video", being a faithful recreation of the same documentary-style presentation and adapting several of the episode's jokes to TF2.
• Shoutout: TF2 Maps (Actual Size) has a thumbnail parodying Mr. Worldwide.
• Take That!: In "The Funslinger", "The Mini-Sentry hate bandwagon was popularized by someone who has just as much respect for necessary class counters as he does for the community who got him the amount of popularity he has today", which is emphasized by that someone's video intro faintly playing over Dane's gameplay footage as he talks about it.

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