Line #16 YMMV/ThePoparena


1	* AccidentalInnuendo: During his ''Megamorphs #2. In the Time of the Dinosaurs'' review, Greg points out in a ShoutOut to ''Literature/TheMagicSchoolBus'' that Phoebe's line "I like being erupted!" after getting blown out of a volcano along with her friends could be interpreted in a different way...
2	* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: The review of ''Stay Out of the Basement'' muses on the possibility of Dr. Brewer being either gay or bisexual, and the plant monster personifying the heterosexual facade he believes he needs in order to be a good father.[[note]]This interpretation disregards the story's final scare, in which a SuddenlySpeaking "dad-fodill" calls himself the real Dr. Brewer.[[/note]]
3	* BigLippedAlligatorMoment: Noted in his review of ''Megamorphs #1. The Andalite's Gift'' when the crazy cabin lady comes out of nowhere, traps an amnesiac Rachel, sets the shack on fire, and exits the story without explanation.
4	* CrossesTheLineTwice:
5	** Attempted. It's no secret Greg considers Cassie to be the weakest link on the Animorphs team, which is fine, but his FreudianSlip during his Alternamorphs review, when Cassie was killed and he had to stop himself from cheering out loud, was a bit too much even though it was being PlayedForLaughs.
6	** The opening of his review of ''Megamorphs #3: Elfangor's Secret'' did this as an homage to the book's jarring opening in an AlternateUniverse in which the Animorphs are militaristic, racist slaveowners. An alternate version of Greg uses racist and homophobic slurs and speaks approvingly of the government's execution of alternate versions of Creator/KAApplegate and Creator/MichaelGrant for allegedly supporting socialism. He complains that the narration of the ''Animorphs'' books contains only personal thoughts not devoted to the Empire and casually talks about vacationing in Brazil following a genocide. This goes on for three minutes before a portal is shown returning Greg to his normal self and he explains what he is doing. Seeing Greg adopt this over-the-top hateful persona is comedy gold.
7	* DeaderThanDead: In his review of ''Animorphs'' Episode 1.07 The Escape, after Tobias is shot by a Dracon beam and left for dead, Greg quips that "there's no way around it, Tobias is as dead as disco."
8	* EpilepticTrees: After finding almost nothing on the ghostwriter for ''{{Literature/Animorphs}} #40. The Other'' Greg developed a theory that the writing credit was a typo and it was actually a similarly named children's book author whose agent once listed ''Animorphs'' among her credits.
9	* FairForItsDay:
10	** This concept is viciously eviscerated in the pilot episode to Greg's Doctor Who book series when discussing the Epic of Gilgamesh and how, despite the Doctor's preaching that unwanted sexual touching should be respected simply due to the primitive time period, that in the actual era the tale comes from a stone tablet has the citizens of Gilgamesh's kingdom praying for a companion to come to their king so that he would stop molesting them. And it is ''[[SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome glorious]]'' to see.
11	** Played a bit straighter with the ''Series/{{Lassie}}'' episode involving a Japanese exchange student. He's still quite miffed at the hackneyed culture shock jokes and the villains being magically cured of their bigotry at the end, but grudgingly admits that just seeing the boy portrayed as a fully sympathetic character is quite impressive for something made just a decade after World War II.
12	** Ultimately his view of ''Series/MyThreeSons''. It had its share of uncomfortable racist and sexist humor, but they tended to be confined to just poor choices in the occasional script rather than anything endemic to the show itself. It was also quite ahead of its time in allowing its child characters to age along with the actors, and having a man doing traditionally feminine things while never being the butt of the joke because of it.
13	** Greg is not very forgiving of the various ethnic stereotypes in ''WesternAnimation/DangerMouse'', and is one of the reasons he considers the recent reboot to be a better show. Thankfully, while the same studio's ''WesternAnimation/CountDuckula'' also inevitably has its share of this, there's much less than he was worried about and he ends up giving it a firm recommendation outside one especially nasty episode.
14	* HarsherInHindsight:
15	** Greg chooses to show a clip from a sketch on ''Series/NotNecessarilyTheNews'' featuring Jay North as rage-filled and AxCrazy about being typecast as his role on ''Series/DennisTheMenace''. It is very hard to watch in light of the earlier revelations in the episode of the abuse North suffered from while filming that series and subsequent dark thoughts he had as a result.
16	** The ''WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes'' episode of ''Nick Knacks'' laments in the last chapter that after Time Warner refused to renew any non-Warner channels' contracts to show ''Looney Tunes'', the shorts became harder to access; Greg displays the ''Looney Tunes'' section of Creator/HBOMax as a "walled garden" blocking off cartoons from people who can't afford a subscription. HBO Max later removed all of the section's 1951-2004 shorts, making it even harder to revisit the franchise's Golden Age. Max reposted 130 of these cartoons in March 2024, but removed 130 others as well. It became a case of HeartwarmingInHindsight later in 2024 after the announcement of Creator/MeTV Toons, a new basic cable channel that promises easy 24/7 access to the ''Looney Tunes'' and other classic cartoons.
17	** Lampshaded in his review of ''Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp'', which featured an episode where a pair of YellowPeril villains release a flu bug as part of their evil scheme, which becomes akward after the Corona virus, specifically a) the fact it first cropped up in China, and b) accusations and conspiracy theories from hate groups claiming the virus was intentionally released.
18	* SugarWiki/HeReallyCanAct: In his "Batman & Robin Retrospective," Greg talks about how Mr. Freeze was one of Creator/ArnoldSchwarzenegger's better performances, which isn't typically said about his films.
19	* HilariousInHindsight:
20	** In Nick Knacks Episode #004, Greg comments that ''Series/ShiningTimeStation'''s "pre-WWII aesthetic" would have made it a perfect fit for Creator/{{Nickelodeon}} in 1979, even though it premiered on Creator/{{PBS}} instead of Nick. Greg learned after posting the episode that Creator/NickJr reran ''Shining Time Station'', during the early 2000's. (This discovery also resulted in Greg announcing that the show would receive its own Nick Knacks video.)
21	** The Nick Knacks episode about children's pop culture in 1983 compared the original Creator/DisneyChannel to Creator/DisneyPlus, hiding a bunch of old Creator/{{Disney}} content and only a few original shows behind a paywall. Disney+ hadn't launched yet, but seemed to have enough original programming in the works to downplay this issue. However, a few months after launch, customers still ended up lamenting Disney+'s small amount of worthwhile exclusive programming[[note]]especially since several of the shows announced earlier either still seemed far from done, or got rejected from Disney+ for not seeming "family-friendly"[[/note]].
22	* MemeticBadass: He talks about the cape buffalo in terms worthy of Website/BadassOfTheWeek.
23	* NightmareFuel:
24	** The mortally wounded Taxxon chomping up its own guts in #25 The Extreme was one of the images from ''Animorphs'' that stuck in his head the most even after he forgot which book it was from.
25	** Brought up in ''#39. The Hidden'' on how much of a living horror it was to have an ant, from its collective HiveMind, morphing into Cassie and achieving individual identity.
26	** He gives one of his own in the ''Alternamorphs'' reviews, with a picture of a little girl chowing down on a tarantula the size of her head.
27	** The very real, specific kind of horror inherent in April's situation, that at any moment her counterpart in Everworld could be getting violently raped with those memories catching up with the real April to be dumped into her head in the middle of class, was brought up in ''#2. Land of Loss''.
28	* OlderThanTheyThink: "The Questionable Legacy of Creator/{{Disney}}'s ''WesternAnimation/{{Snow White\| and the Seven Dwarfs}}''" seems to treat Creator/WaltDisney's underdog story as a fabrication to keep ''Snow White'' noteworthy even after aspects of it aged poorly, or objectively pale to the Franchise/DisneyAnimatedCanon's subsequent movies[[note]]Greg notes that even the second one, ''WesternAnimation/{{Pinocchio}}'', at least boasts a title character with more development and agency than Snow White[[/note]]. However, even when ''Snow White'' just came out, [[http://filmic-light.blogspot.com/2013/11/1937-time-magazine.html Hollywood treated Walt as an underdog]].
29	* RetroactiveRecognition: In #075, Greg makes the case that ''WesternAnimation/CountDuckula'' is for all intents and purposes the first of the Franchise/{{Nicktoons}}, as it fits the brand by most definitions (it was commissioned, co-produced and premiered on Nickelodeon), and that it's only not considered such because of legal and branding semantics and Geraldine Laybourne's personal dislike of the show.
30	* SlowPacedBeginning: Nick Knacks can fall guilty of this if the viewer ever thinks that Greg spends too much time setting up the subject's historical context:
31	** #001 QUBE focuses mainly on the cable package that Warner-Amex bundled Nickelodeon's predecessor with, beginning Nick Knacks as a whole at a slow pace.
32	** #033 Series/{{Lassie}} heavily focuses on the history of the franchise as a whole going back to the original novel and even examples predating it, with the actual history of the series on Nickelodeon not coming until about 22 minutes in with it periodically going over each individual era of the show wether it related to Nickelodeon's broadcast or not. This is justified as to explain that Lassie was one of the big franchises to help carry Nickelodeon and how it was aired and distributed around the network throughout its 12 years.
33	** #047 Creator/NickAtNite spends almost 14 minutes exploring the origins of TV and Baby Boomers; Greg lampshaded the length by showing a card reading, "And now, the Nickelodeon stuff" afterwards.
34	** #073 WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes's history on Nickelodeon suffers from this only because the history of ''Looney Tunes'''s television distribution is composed of a complicated series of sales and rights issues that leads into how and why it eventually it aired on Nickelodeon when it did. The channel doesn't come into the picture until around the 30:00 minute mark, though it is justified as to explain why the cartoons offered on Nickelodeon changed periodically while the shorts also aired at the same time on Creator/CartoonNetwork, Creator/{{TNT}}, and network syndication for a while.
35	** #094 Nickelodeon Studios: A Complete History spends the first 18 minutes explaining the founding of both [[Creator/{{Universal}} Universal Pictures]] and how the Ride/UniversalStudios attraction evolved since its creation in 1915. Considering the videos length (roughly an hour and 46 minutes) it is justified to give the entire picture of the rise and fall of Nickelodeon Studios and how history repeats itself on that having a functional studio lot combined with a tourist attraction would lead to its downfall.
36	* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot:
37	** One of the main reasons Greg offers re-writes for the ''Goosebumps'' books, and dislikes the series in general, is that he feels they often have good ideas that are not executed to their fullest.
38	** He ended the Goosebumps Monthly without going through all the episodes of the show to compare them to the books. This is disappointing, as many episodes fixed problems present in the original stories, altering elements that he didn't like about the books, and it would have been nice to hear his thoughts on the changes.
39	* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: Goosebumps Monthly calls a ''lot'' of the protagonists too selfish or inconsiderate for Greg's investment.
40	* ValuesDissonance:
41	** Anytime there's an overtly racist thing that appears in an older work, Greg tends to cry out, "Oh, no! The past was a mistake!" A prime example is showing ''ComicBook/TheBeano'''s old BlackFace Little Peanut character at the top of the comic's header in the ''ComicStrip/{{Bananaman}}'' episode.

Context YMMV / ThePoparena