YMMV / The Blue Shell Incident

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Many of the random cameos are this, but the crowner has to be the painting of David Hasselhoff that comes to life for no reason and disappears just as quickly.
  Painting: "I'm David Hasselhoff."
  • There's a Freeze-Frame Bonus of Toad in an early part of the movie, usually done for jumpscaring the viewer. It falls flat.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Mario crushing the (already dead) CDI Link's head with a go-kart? Horrifying. Mario sledding back and crushing his head again just to rub it in? Hilarious.
• Narm Charm: Invoked by...the entire movie, really. The entire thing was basically improvised on the spot over the course of editing sessions that happened sporadically over the course of over a year, the animation is limited to 3DMM's rather limited toolkit, there's a lot of gratuitous violence... and it's hilarious because of it. The entire thing doesn't take itself seriously, and it's all the greater for it.
• Special Effects Failure: Thanks to 3D Movie Maker's limitations, certain things can look rather off. Special mention goes to Metal Gear McQueen, who is just Lightning McQueen on a couple of blocks that act as legs.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Duck's death. To cut it short, Duck uses a rocket launcher up close and sacrifices himself to destroy the Metal Gear McQueen. Luigi reacts in anguish, which gets worse when Duck's feather falls from the sky onto the ground.
  • The track that accompanied the scene is even sadder if you already knew where it came from.
  • Earlier on, Luigi tells Duck that he's the real Super Mario Brother all along, cementing the fact that he's more of a brother than Mario could ever be. It's even sadder that at the beginning of the show, no one could understand what Duck said. Over the course of their short-lived adventure, Luigi started to understand what he'd been saying and can even hear his last words upon retrieving the feather.
    Duck: "Damn, you turned this ugly duckling into a swan, Luigi."
  • At the beginning of the movie, Luigi ordered a spaghetti on the rocks before Mario interrupted him. After the ensuing conflict and his friendship with Duck, Luigi promises to buy him spaghetti on the rocks like what he would do with his brother. Later on at the end of the movie, Luigi gets to order the dish, but this time he's all alone.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Despite how primitive 3DMM is as a program and the various goofs mentioned above, the movie is still incredibly impressive given what Joel was working with.
  • Over the course of the stream, Joel was able to perform some serious feats with 3D Movie Maker despite its limitations. Later streams show a better scenography across the room and usage of fancy camera tricks. Special mention goes to both segments of the final fight between Mario and Luigi.
  • Whenever a scene involves gore, the blood splatter animation looks believable and vivid, making an otherwise comedic scene look way more gruesome than it should.
  • Handio is a standout mention in regards to Joel's creativity with the toolkit 3DMM provides; that isn't an actual model of a hand, since Joel didn't have access to any in his mod library and nobody made him one. Instead, he jimmy-rigged it out of various shapes and objects, and it still properly conveys what he was going for.
• The Woobie: Luigi, oh Luigi. First off, he sees his biological brother being killed off by a mysterious shooter in his own eye, then found out that's all just a ruse for Mario's grand scheme to kill him. It was revealed that it's not just him accidentally launching the blue shell and getting him to fall into last place that is why Mario always resented him, but also because Luigi got their father's good and dominant genes while he was left with inferior and recessive ones, which explained that even though Mario is the more popular brother, people actually like Luigi more. Made even worse by the fact that since Duck's super duper dead, he's all alone.