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Bob Chipman
(aka: Moviebob)

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Bob Chipman (Creator)
I'm Bob, and that's the big picture.

TRUST THE BOB.

Bob "Moviebob" Chipman, also known as "The Game Overthinker", is a self-proclaimed "Z-list internet celebrity" who maintains a YouTube channel and a website and formerly contributed to Geek.com, Screen Rant, ScrewAttack and The Escapist. He rips apart bad movies, but his particular shtick is giving analyses of gaming culture and the industry, in a style closely reminiscent of college-lit-class style "close reading", overlaid with appropriate (and sometimes humorous) images. Bob's analyses are very much like you would see from a troper. Indeed, he's written an article that refers to "a genuinely wonderful website called TV Tropes". He has since described the website as "an evil Guttenberg [sic] Press".

As a method to going independent upon leaving work at Escapist, Bob has set up a Patreon page for his works.

    open/close all folders 

    Bob's current shows 
  • The Big Picture Bob Chipman
  • The Big Screen: His film Review show, originally called Escape to the Movies; updates a few times a week. He also created video reviews of films in a very similar style to Escape to the Movies on Geek.com.
  • Really That Good
  • This Movie Exists: A regular version of his annual Schlocktober Halloween Specials for The Big Picture, one in which he discusses non-horror films in a similar manner.
  • Film Theory: Bob was hired as a researcher and co-writer in 2021.

    Shows that Bob has discontinued/abandoned 
  • The Game Overthinker
  • Overbytes: Basically, The Game Overthinker minus the story-driven segments.
  • In Bob We Trust: A show, originally started on ScrewAttack and later continued on his personal YouTube channel, that was a continuation of The Big Picture. Not only is the show about pop culture and politics, but he also breaks out the term "Comics Are Weird", a Running Gag/Catchphrase from TBP. Originally a weekly show with new episodes every Sunday, he revamped it into a longer-form video essay show released more intermittently after The Escapist hired him again, as he didn't want them to clash with The Big Picture. Defunct as of his leaving The Escapist for the second time, since he now fully owns The Big Picture.
  • Intermission Bob Chipman
  • High Definition: A written column for discussing TV shows in various ways that ran each Monday while Bob was at The Escapist.
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D./Agent Carter Recap: A weekly recap/review of episodes of the series that runs each Wednesday while the series is active. During the gap between Season 1 and 2 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Bob took the time to talk about all of the past Marvel Comics-related TV shows.
  • American Bob: A political vlog on YouTube. Currently on hiatus, since he can't afford to do it at the moment due to lack of revenue.

He's also written a book titled Super Mario Bros. 3: Brick-by-Brick, an analysis of Super Mario Bros. 3 in the form of a "novelized Let's Play" that also goes into the history of the franchise and his experiences with it.

Tropes appearing in Bob's works include:

  • Ability over Appearance: In his review of Thor, Bob joked that "every scene Idris Elba is in might as well be subtitled "That's Why!" regarding the casting of a black actor as a Nordic Viking god who was traditionally white, because in Bob's mind, Elba's acting is good enough to justify it.invoked
  • Actually Pretty Funny: He actually found the Ascended Meme Spartan-1337 in Halo Legends pretty clever.
  • Alternate Reality Game: Seemingly parodied briefly (possibly specifically The Slender Man Mythos) with references to Wario's Woods and cryptic text after making an announcement proclaiming a realization that would change everything. The following video (while still showing brief influences from films like The Blair Witch Project and possibly Marble Hornets) however, confirmed it as an Evil Twin storyline. Also qualifies on kicking off a Story Arc.
  • Anti-Climax: After watching the first episode, he felt the controversy over Tropes vs. Women in Video Games to be this, stating that he wished Anita Sarkeesian had been the rabid Straw Feminist attack dog that her critics were calling her, simply to justify all the hype surrounding it. As it was, Bob found the documentary to be a dry and somewhat boring academic presentation, with at least some merit behind its assertions.
  • Anvilicious: invoked Discussed this trope a few times. He feels that movies can have a message to them and deliver it fine, that subtlety isn't always required, and that sometimes, a message just needs to be blunt. For him, whether or not a film's message works depends on how smart it is about it. He felt that the original RoboCop gave a very unsubtle but smart message about business and capitalism, and did so in a morally blurry and intelligent manner, and that films like Machete, the original Red Dawn, and Hobo with a Shotgun worked precisely because of how fiery and righteous their messages were, while other films like The Purge and the remake of RoboCop lacked that sophistication or fury, and suffered for it by talking down to their audience and failing to address the complexities of the issues.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In the form of a Take That!.
    "For the benefit of my international viewers, we're having a tough time in the good old US of A. The middle of the country is being ripped apart by tornadoes, someone sent poison letters to the President, the trajectory of our economy is still somewhere between Tank Girl future and Frog Town [Hell Comes to Frogtown] future, there are giant snakes in Florida, high profile Supreme Court cases are polarising civil discourse like nothing since the mid '60s, a bunch of shady crap is going down with the IRS, and someone let M. Night Shyamalan release another movie."
  • As You Know: The definition of this appears on screen while he's talking about Surrogates.
  • Audience-Coloring Adaptation: invoked Discussed when he reviewed the first three episodes of X-Men '97. He believes that X-Men: The Animated Series was this for the X-Men as a whole, saying that it kept the series in the public eye at a time when the comic books were at a low point and attributing the popularity of characters like Rogue, Gambit, and Jubilee to '90s kids who were introduced to them through the show. He also believes that it did certain storylines from the comics better than the comics themselves did, taking what was often years of pulpy, soapy, meandering sci-fi melodrama and condensing it into a half hour of thrilling Saturday morning action mayhem that focused on just the good parts without the fluff.
  • Author Appeal:
    • Boobies! "Scarlett Johheeehh... Scarlett Johansson!"
    • Lesbians. Even more than you might expect.
    • Movies of the '80s. Case in point: he strongly prefers The Terminator to Terminator 2: Judgment Day because he strongly believes that a gritty '80s horror movie will always trump a slick '90s action movie.
    • He's also massively, massively into anything related to NASA and the space program, considering space travel to be the ultimate dream of mankind. In his review of First Man he called Neil Armstrong landing on the moon "the coolest thing a human being had ever done ever up to that point" and admitted to being "an easier target for this specific kind of movie than I am for just about anything".
  • Author Catchphrase:
  • Author Filibuster: Many of his reviews are this.
    • He opens his review of Jennifer's Body with a two-minute rant about how much Megan Fox sucks as an actress and is completely boring and generic even as a sex symbol (though this has since become an Old Shame for him).
    • In his review of Rango, he pretty much admits that this is the only way he can get that review over two minutes.
  • Banned in China: invoked In his review of Monkey Man, he stated that he thinks this is why Netflix decided not to release the film (which was picked up by Universal instead after Jordan Peele stepped in). The film's plot is a not-so-subtle condemnation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his political party, the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, and given that Modi's India has very powerful Media Watchdogs and Culture Police that bristle at negative or otherwise "un-patriotic" depictions of their country, he believes that Netflix, which does a lot of business in India, chose to err on the side of caution and not release the film.
  • Berserk Button:
    • "Hardcore" gamers, who he sees as a Vocal Minority of "Stop Having Fun" Guys. Bob has gone on many a rant about how such gamers need to Stop Being Stereotypical with regards to how they treat minorities. And while games aren't the Murder Simulators that some people claim them to be, Bob argues that these gamers are really not helping the public image around gaming as a medium and as a hobby by gatekeeping just about every aspect involved with them.invoked
      "You heard me, you half-cocked message board fuckheads, the Wii is part of this console generation... so can we please stop it with this tired shit about GameCubes and duct tape!"
    • The Amazing Spider-Man Series really irks Bob. He hated the second film in particular, so much so that he considered quitting his job because he saw it as a symbol of everything that could go wrong with blockbuster filmmaking in the 2010s and a portrait of where it was headed.
    • Bob hates the new Transformers Film Series, as well as the bulk of Michael Bay's output for that matter. Though he did enjoy Transformers: Age of Extinction, and even called out fellow critics for not hating the movie, but hating Bay himself. His review of Pain & Gain (2013) also praises Bay because he feels that Bay's typical directing style helps enhance the plot's already-cartoonishly-insane-as-it-is absurdism instead of clashing with it.
    • Feel free to talk to him about Gameplay and Story Segregation as much as you'd like. Just don't mention the words "ludonarrative dissonance."
    • Animal abuse is a good way to get especially harsh criticism from Bob. His Big Picture episode about PETA mostly used its tangential relation to video games (PETA complaining about Mario's Tanooki Suit) as a way to discuss their habit of killing almost all of the animals they receive. On a later episode, when talking about Michael Vick being in the running to appear on the front cover of the (then) next Madden NFL, he stated that he considered his illegal dog fighting ring to be among the worst things a human could possibly do, short of cloning Adolf Hitler or greenlighting another Transformers movie.
    • The YA dystopian movies of the early-mid-2010s, most of which he sees as sanitized retreads of the dystopian sci-fi action thrillers of the '70s and '80s made for audiences too young to know any better. The film adaptations of The Hunger Games came in for especially heated criticism from him due to the aesthetics that they used, which he thought unintentionally turned the story into a right-wing fantasy of blue-collar red-state conservatives overthrowing a decadent and flamboyant liberal elite (he called it "Sailor Scout Ted Nugent vs. San Francisco").
  • Breather Episode: If you follow all of his shows, the Game Overthinker episode Bat-Slap comes out with Bob stating he doesn't believe gaming culture as a whole is ready/deserves to be taken as seriously as it so-often claims to want to. Come the following Tuesday, the Big Picture episode Science has Bob making mostly non-serious statements like "Space guys, if you don't want to pretend you've discovered oil on Mars to trick some funding out of the Government, how about telling Glenn Beck there's gold on the moon and not letting him come back?"
  • Brick Joke: His "Do The Mario" videos on the Escapist, the first one having a stinger showing SMB: Peach-Hime Kyushutsu Dai Sakusen and saying it's a story for another time (as in, not the week after the first). Two weeks later, Do the Mario PT. 2 was featured (showcasing said aforementioned Mario anime).
  • But Not Too Foreign: He sees Tim Burton as a subcultural example of this and regards it as the secret to his success. While he has a reputation as the main who helped mainstream Goth culture in the late '80s and '90s with his movies, he also had one foot in "mainstream" culture in a way that made his movies feel more harmlessly spooky like a Halloween store than outright scary in a way that would repel audiences.
    The secret sauce to Tim Burton and his whole groove is that he's weird... but not that weird.
  • The Cameo: Bob showed up for one in a Diamanda Hagan video, of all things — her review of Remake, to be precise.
  • Cerebus Syndrome: Somewhat. Early reviews felt slower, but they developed a more mature, and contemplative pace, dealing with more analytical subject matter.
  • Chivalrous Pervert: He agrees with feminism, and is one of the few vocal members of the gaming and general media community who believe women are still given the short end of the stick when it comes to society and representation. And while he hates The Twilight Saga for a whole host of reasons, he considers the constant male harping on it and works like over all the beefcake and Female Gaze to be unfair, because women deserve to have cheesy, lowbrow fanservice directed towards them as well. That being said, if fanservice is done tastefully, he will revel in it.
  • Close to Home:
    • This was one of the reasons why he loved Doctor Sleep and named it one of his favorite movies of 2019, as the plot about Danny Torrance's memories of his father Jack reminded him in many of ways of his own relationship with his father, a troubled man who ultimately drank himself to death. He wound up outright stopping the review and spending half the video talking about his childhood and his memories of his father.
    • On a lighter note, he's also said that this is why he's such an unapologetic fan of Seth MacFarlane. When reviewing Ted (2024), he described its humor and tone as so culturally specific to '90s suburban New England that he had to pause it at certain moments to reflect when he saw something that reminded him of his own childhood and teenage years, and was surprised so many other people found the show as funny as he did.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Delivered loud and proud during Part 1 of 'Batman V Superman: Really That Bad' in response to the movie gratuitously murdering Jimmy Olsen for shock value, complete with middle finger.
  • Compensating for Something: In his review of Oblivion (2013), he described Tom Cruise's career trajectory as a string of reactions to insecurity. He started out as an Action Hero in films like Top Gun despite being one of the shortest leading men in Hollywood, then took on meatier roles in films like Magnolia and Jerry Maguire once people started writing him off as a pretty boy, and now is returning to action movies like Jack Reacher and the Mission: Impossible sequels as he enters middle age.
  • Conservation of Ninjutsu:
  • Contractual Purity: invokedHe opened his review of Getaway with a brief rant about this in reference to Miley Cyrus' then-recent performance at the 2013 Video Music Awards. He says that this phenomenon has been going on since Elvis Presley's hip-shaking performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in The '50s, and that it's time to stop being shocked about teen pop stars trying to become more "adult" as they get older.
    • Also discussed in the episode "Worlds Within Worlds", which examined the late Dwayne McDuffie's Tommy Westphall hypothesis of television, and its criticism of comic books being too strict with continuity.
  • Crapsaccharine World: This picture is painted for this video to show the mentality of Nintendo's hugest, almost literally, cult supporters.
  • Creator Thumbprint:
    • While he admits their obvious flaws, he has a love of Nintendo games and often uses Nintendo characters in the B-Roll Rebus.
    • The word "douchebag" pops up heavily when regarding hardcores or Michael Bay, becoming his mainstay word to describe someone/something he really hates (naturally people call him this).
    • Discussed here. To be specific: Monkeys, Dogs, Monsters, Giant Monsters, Dinosaurs, Lesbians, Heavy Metal, Awesome Fight Choregraphy, Insufferable Geniuses as protagonists, The '50s, The '80s, and Honor Before Reason.
  • Creator's Apathy: invoked He believes that this is Roland Emmerich's Achilles' Heel as a filmmaker. He says that, while it's usually obvious when Emmerich truly cares about the material he's working on, and turns in great popcorn entertainment like Independence Day, 2012, and Anonymous (2011) when he does, it's just as painfully obvious when he doesn't, the results often being some of the most lifeless, dispassionate blockbusters of the modern era like Godzilla (1998) and Independence Day: Resurgence.
  • Critical Dissonance: invokedHe believes that this trope is inherent to criticism in general, and ultimately stems from the fact that professional critics, by the very nature of their jobs, approach movies quite differently from the average moviegoer. Watching dozens or even hundreds of movies a year as a job or a hobby, as is the case for most critics, means that one grows accustomed to various tropes and clichés and ultimately longs for stories that break the mold. Those stories, however, can be off-putting for people who only see a few movies a year and expect familiar story beats.
  • Curse Cut Short
    Ah, finally. Just a good old-fashioned straight-up revenge movie. No post-apocalyptic bible salesman, no angels with guns, no connection to anything remotely spiritual, religious, church-related or anything else that gets people's panties in a twist whenever I mention it. Ah, good. Good. ...Hey, who's in this again? *Shot of Mel Gibson as he appeared in The Passion of the Christ* Aw, Mother F- *Theme Plays*
    • Repeated in his Iron Man 2 review:
      I'd love to tell you all the thoughts that went through my mind about Scarlett Johansson and her performance in this movie... but this is a family show, so I'll have to summarize. HOLY— *end credits*
  • Dancing Bear: invoked His This Movie Exists episode on the 1945 thriller Blood on the Sun largely concerns how it was the first Hollywood movie to feature proper Eastern martial arts, in this case judo courtesy of Jack Sergel, who played the villainous secret police captain Oshima and taught judo to the film's star James Cagney. He called Cagney and Sergel's fight scene "a moment in action movie history" and described seeing an old-time Golden Age Hollywood movie star suddenly getting into a knock-down, drag-out martial arts battle that would feel right at home in a '90s Hong Kong action flick as the entire reason to watch the film, especially since the scene still held up eighty years later and didn't feel all that hokey.
  • Darker and Edgier: "Violence is Golden", "Complex Issues" and "Building a Better Gamer" focus on more complex issues than most of his usual Game Overthinker episodes.
  • Despair Event Horizon: His review of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which lead to his Heroic BSoD mentioned below. Just listening to his voice when he says "They broke something in me" is nothing short of heartbreaking!
  • The Devil Is a Loser: Discussed in his review of (appropriately enough) Devil, where he talks about this trope's roots in how The Bible itself portrays Satan as an ineffectual villain, one who only plays a major role at the beginning and end and otherwise comes across as "a snarky minion who got demoted to VP of discipline management and acts out by making mischief on Earth like a glib, middle-management Loki." He thinks it makes more sense for Satan to be portrayed this way in stories based on the Christian religion given how God is supposed to be all-powerful, and thus has trouble taking Religious Horror seriously when it portrays Satan as a powerful and dangerous supervillain in his own right.
  • Dirty Old Man: Shows tendencies of this sometimes, and says that's he is a lecherous pig in his review for Love & Other Drugs.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: The production of Salt foundered when it lost its star, but then Angelina Jolie signed up for the action, which is great. Really great. Mmm-hmm. Yeah... weren't we reviewing a movie?
  • Divorced Installment: invoked Discussed in his review of Rebel Moon, a film that began life as Zack Snyder's pitch for a Star Wars spinoff. While he didn't like the film, he felt that Snyder making a film that was nakedly inspired by Star Wars but set in an original universe where he was free to do his own thing was a better route to take than making a straight Star Wars movie where his vision would be constrained by the demands and limits of the franchise's canon.
  • Don't Shoot the Message: invoked
    • He argues that the film adaptations of The Hunger Games fall into this trap, specifically where their politics are concerned. While the series' stated message is a left-of-center one with its critiques of income inequality, imperialism, and the use of the media to control the masses, the film adaptations wrap this message in a portrayal of the heroic Districts as scrappy, blue-collar, rooted, salt-of-the-Earth folk in a way that he feels specifically calls to mind the idealized self image of "red state" conservatives, and the villainous Capitol as flamboyantly dressed, effeminate, and media-obsessed in a way that he feels just as specifically calls to mind how those conservatives see urban liberals. The result comes across to him as a distinctly right-wing framing straight out of a Republican politician's stump speech to Midwestern voters.
    • While he otherwise fully agrees with the anti-AI message of the final two Mission: Impossible films, he dislikes how they frame Ethan Hunt's battle against a rogue AI trying to destroy the world as a metaphor for old-school Hollywood standing up to the threat of A.I.-Generated Artwork, not only feeling that the metaphor is as invoked "hilariously unsubtle as a brick to the head" but also arguing that the Mission: Impossible films are exactly the sort of purposely dumb, shallow, broadly-written popcorn blockbusters where the descriptor "feels like they were written by AI" would ironically apply to most of them.
  • Easy-Mode Mockery: Bob is strongly critical of the idea that something easy means it's of lower quality, or that a game has the right to mock someone for playing on Easy Mode. Bob feels these tropes to be signs of an insularity in gamer culture that is locking non-hardcore gamers out of enjoying the medium. Bob's opinion is that, if there's also a "normal" mode, then people shouldn't be complaining. Bob feels that gamer culture's obsession with difficulty as a measure of a game's quality is a relic of the arcade era — arcade games were designed to be difficult so as to suck away quarters and tokens from the people who played them. Around the same time, early home video game systems featured numerous games that were incredibly hard to complete because with only a few megabytes of space, they had to stretch out the playtime. The mentality that games "need" to be hard was thus born from this era, and it hasn't gone away despite technology and the landscape of games changing rapidly.invoked
  • Elemental Powers: Obtained from the gems acquired by defeating Pyrothinker and Cryothinker. The Earth-oriented gem can raise zombies. The Air gem was the power source for Robothinker.
  • Epileptic Treesinvoked: He's responsible for the Super Mario Bros. "Rosalina is God" guess.
  • Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: One of the many things he criticized about Tomb Raider (2018) was its use of what he feels to be a Western version of this trope, that of all the characters having Mixed Martial Arts-style melee combat skills even though they'd have no logical reason to have them. He finds it even more ridiculous than the original version of this trope from East Asian martial arts movies, because at least he finds kung fu and karate exciting to watch in a way that he doesn't get with MMA.
  • Everyone Has Standards:
    • He loathes Michael Bay's directorial style but in his review of Transformers: Age of Extinction he rallies against "critics" who hate Bay himself. His review of Pain & Gain (2013) even praises Bay because his insane, overly-dramatic music-video-rythmn stylization helps augment the cartoonish absurdism of the so-crazy-the-"Not Making This Up" Disclaimer-appears-repeatedly plot instead of hindering it. He also sings Bay's praises for Ambulance, finishing with calling it not a good movie in terms of plot but still a genuine "wings-and-beer party movie".
    • On the same page, he is not one to mince words when it comes to criticizing Adam Sandlernote  but his Really That Good video on Sandler praised his capacity as an actor when he goes all out, tells exactly why the films he made people consider classics deserve it, and points out that Sandler's constant productions show a lot of love for those he works with, especially his Production Posse, who have a lot of actors given the virtual shaft by Horrible Hollywood.
  • Fallen Creator: invoked Discussed when he reuploaded his review of The Cabin in the Woods. He still loves the film itself on its own merits as much as he did back when he first saw it, but he now finds it to be somewhat tainted by all the scandals that have come out since surrounding its writer Joss Whedon, and doesn't begrudge anyone who might refuse to watch the film on principle.
  • False Dichotomy: Separating people into the If Jesus, Then Aliens groups, labeling people as either 'thinkers' or 'believers.' There's a bit of dodgy research with using Lisa Simpson to represent the 'thinkers' group.
  • Fairy Companion: Ivan the fairy intern. Occasionally doubles as Exposition Fairy.
  • Fanservice:
    • The hot model pics can sometimes be sprinkled throughout the "Big Picture" video series.
    • In his Heavy Metal review, he notes that this was the only reason the movie was worth watching at the time, since boobs were hard to find back in the early 80's, let alone cartoon boobs.
  • Fast-Forward Gag: He sometimes speeds up part of his voice-over in order to make the video fit the standard ~10-minute length while still including all the BIG WORDS he wants to use. It is usually accompanied by a graphic of a chipmunk and a cup of coffee.
  • Feeling Their Age: An emotional version of this trope came up in his review of How to Train Your Dragon (2025), a lot of which went into the fact that the original animated film was fifteen years old, had spawned a successful franchise, and was now getting the Live-Action Adaptation treatment. He said that watching the teens and twentysomethings in the audience around him have the same reaction to a remake of a film from 2010 that he'd had in the past to many adaptations of his own beloved childhood favorites from The '80s, all while he couldn't recognize any of the young actors on screen (which he compared to the Family Guy sketch about the Teen Choice Awards), made him feel older than any other film he'd seen.
  • Fiction Identity Postulate:invoked Discussed. Bob believes you can make a good movie out of anything, "but sometimes you have to rip out its guts to do it."
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: The Stinger for his review of RoboCop (2014) contained an extended screen-filling summary of his initial thoughts on Jesse Eisenberg being cast as Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, ending with "Yeah. Freeze frame action goin' on."
  • Freudian Excuse: He admitted that he was bullied in high school, and his comments seem to give away that his resentment from that era is the main reason behind his criticism to certain things. Like the "douchebag" video game crowd that came with the PlayStation generation (especially Xbox Live FPS users), his hatred towards the 90's (the decade in which he went to high school), and his fondness for Magneto-like villains. He's also specially done a Big Picture episode about nerd reactions to such actions and the mindset that if one was bullied, they can't in turn be a bully themselves. He admits that he's talking to himself as much as he is to the viewer.
  • The Future Is Shocking: The Retrothinker's arrival in the present day sees him shocked by what gaming has become, leading to his Face–Heel Turn into the Necrothinker.
  • Genre Deconstruction: He describes Bob's Burgers as a this to the I Just Want to Be Special fantasy of creative misfits whose geeky interests and outcast nature turn out to be their source of superiority, as seen with the X-Men, Peter Parker, Steve Urkel, and Lisa Simpson. He sees this trope as carrying the unstated implication that creative misfits and ugly ducklings who don't "show them all" later in life deserve all the mockery they get from their peers, which is part of the reason why he loves Bob's Burgers. Bob and his family members are all invested in one creative field or another, except they're all bad at it. Yet this doesn't matter, because at the end of the day, they're still portrayed as a loving family who all have value as human beings. Moviebob says that, ironically enough, this sort-of "anti-exceptionalism" aesop makes it quite exceptional.
  • Genre Killer: invoked In his review of Noah, he stated that the rise of the Religious Right as an organized force and the downfall of The Hays Code both killed the Hollywood religious epic. The former, in his view, created a divide between secular and religious viewers, with the conflicting demands of the two groups being impossible for Hollywood to satisfy, while also creating the stereotype of religious films as being Sunday-school proselytizing. The latter, meanwhile, eliminated the main justification Hollywood filmmakers had for making religious films — claiming that the material in one's film came from The Bible made it easier to get the censors to allow gratuitous sexuality and violence.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: invoked
    • His view of Green Room, a horror movie whose events are set off because a punk rock band fails to take a bar full of neo-Nazis as a serious threat, in light of the election of Donald Trump, of whom Bob is not fond.
    • He discussed this with regards to the "death" of Mr. Peanut, the advertising mascot for Planters Peanuts, in the Big Picture episode "Dead Nuts", specifically how it was meant as a Black Comedy parody of the cycles of performative grief that often accompany the deaths of beloved celebrities... only for the death of an actual beloved celebrity, the basketball legend Kobe Bryant, in a helicopter crash alongside his daughter and seven other people to suddenly make the joke a lot less funny.
    • Discussed on a video about Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling. At the time of the video's release, Rowling had come under fire for trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) viewpoints and opinions, as she said multiple transphobic things on Twitter. Bob doesn't spend much time talking about the viewpoint itself, instead going into the dissonance that some Harry Potter fans now have because of Rowling's comments. Eventually, Bob says that Harry Potter has now joined a long list of creative works where fans try to separate their experience with the work from its creator.
  • Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Every female character in every movie gets ranked based on how much she appeals to Bob's carefully explained tastes.
  • He Also Did: invoked Discussed in his This Movie Exists episode on Ginger, a "trilogy of trashy, violent, borderline-porno grindhouse films in The '70s" directed by Don Schain and starring his wife Cheri Caffaro that he described as excuses for the two of them to act out their lurid sexual fantasies. Schain, of course, would later move to Utah and pivot to a far more successful career in children's entertainment, one that made him best known to children of the '00s for producing numerous Disney Channel Original Movies. When he first watched High School Musical years later and recognized Schain's name in the credits, his initial reaction was "nah, that can't be the same guy, has to be a coincidence, right?"
  • Heavy Metal: Bob uses the metal fandom's rejection of neo-Nazi skinheads latching onto them as a model for how gamers should react to their medium's association with fringe whackos (like the Oslo killer) and disgruntled youth.
  • Heroic BSoD: His review of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, he wasn't exactly a fan of the first one (so much so he had to do two reviews: An initial one and another going in-depth why he didn't like it). But the sequel made him so depressed, he released the review early (on a Wednesday rather then a Friday), lead the show in with no theme music (something he normally only does when extremely pissed)... heck, he even replaced the normally red background with a black one to reflect his mood. But the worse of it was that the movie was so bad to him, he thought about quitting reviewing movies for the rest of his life.
  • Hollywood New England: Ever since he left The Escapist, Bob's speaking voice in episodes inexplicably changed from an accent-less broadcaster voice to an almost cartoonishly thick Boston accent.
  • Hypocrisy Nod: In the "Building a Better Gamer" video, Bob acknowledges the hypocrisy of a fat man telling people to get in better shape.
  • Hypocrite:
    • He came down hard on Francis Ford Coppola for this in the Big Picture episode "Old Man Yells At Crowd". He felt that Coppola's statements dismissing the Marvel Cinematic Universenote  were deeply lacking in self-awareness, given that, in many ways, his position and that of many of his contemporaries in the New Hollywood era — a bunch of film nerds taking disreputable genres like crime, horror, and sci-fi and elevating them with their artistry, and Coppola specifically adapting a pulpy Airport Novel into a classic of American cinema — wasn't so different from that of Marvel's filmmakers taking pulpy comic books and seeking to elevate them into blockbuster action movies.
    • In his review of Wonka, he accused both Timothée Chalamet and the film itself of this, the former for how he made a big show of refusing to play superheroes only to go on to star in a Willy Wonka origin story, "which is of course completely different for some reason," and the latter for being a story about a young, creative thinker who shakes up a stodgy, set-in-its-ways industry that churns out nothing but bland product even though it is itself a perfect example of that sort of paint-by-numbers corporate product.
    • "Super Mario Bros Movie - WOKE BROKE OR JOKE" has Bob come down hard on content creators who were criticizing The Super Mario Bros. Movie as "woke", despite either only watching the trailers or not watching anything related to the film at all. Specifically, he calls them out for the criticism that Princess Peach is an Action Girl in the movie and much more proactive than her typical Damsel in Distress characterization where she needs to be saved all the time. And yet, when the movie actually came out, it was a mostly by-the-numbers kids film where Peach does needs to be rescued after all. Those same content creators were then suddenly turning around to defend the movie from "woke" Hollywood and reviewers, which Bob also calls out these content creators for as exceedingly hypocritical. Bob also notes that these kinds of opinions and reviews came out of the woodwork when other people in their social circles told them to hate it, yet the opinions suddenly shifted when they were told to like it.invoked
      Bob: They don't know what things to hate until they're told to hate it.
  • Incest Yay Shipping: Invoked by his audience when he reviews Frozen (2013).
    Bob: And the first thing that makes it a different kind of Disney fairy tale is that it's fundamentally a love story between two women.
    (cut to a poster of Blue Is the Warmest Color)
    Bob: No, not like that, guys. C'mon, cut it out. They're sisters.
    (cut to a poster of Sister My Sister)
    Bob: I said, cut it out!
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: Watching The Crow (2024) caused him to immediately reach for a big can of Mike's Hard Lemonade.
    Bob: Don't you dare give me shit for day drinking. This is a very bad movie!
  • Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!:
    Bob: A slew of material came out of this premise. Some of it good. Some of it bad. Some of it from Japan and featuring giant robots and therefore awesome.
  • Insult to Rocks:
    • From his review of The Amazing Spider Man:
      "To call this filmmaking-by-committee would be doing disservice to the idea of committees- this is filmmaking by accountants!"
    • He did pretty much the exact same thing with the sequel:
      "See, Amazing Spider-Man 2 isn't really even a movie. My first instinct is to describe it as a 2 1/2 hour trailer, but that's being unfair to trailers."
  • I Take Offense to That Last One: Inverted. He calls himself out on insulting Michael Bay:
    "I said that the movies of Michael Bay were made by a douchebag for douchebags, and that wasn't fair. I don't know Michael Bay, for all I know he's a perfectly nice person. Oh, his movies are still made for and primarily enjoyed by douchebags, but there's no reason to stoop to personal attacks."
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Invoked for discussion in "Junk Drawer Rises", with regard to the trope's usage in response to Super Mario Bros. and Call of Duty:
    Bob: On the one hand, in theory, it's a valid question to raise in the broader sense of gaming criticism and journalism grappling with the monetization of nostalgia as "generation NES" enters its 30s and 40s. On the other hand, yeah, even apart from personal preference, I see a distinct difference between a franchise that spends two decades in a state of near-constant innovation and change, moving between different genres, playstyles, mediums, polishing some, inventing others, that decides after 25 years to start also doing a series of revival entries for kicks...and a series that has innovated precisely ONCE in 9 years. Or a series whose last innovation of any kind was, "Hey, what if they're in 3D from now on"? I mean, this is kind of like getting mad at the surviving members of The Beatles for mostly playing Greatest Hits at their concerts. When YOU record Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, [and] The White Album in the course of only 5 years, YOU can rest on your laurels, too."
  • I Want My Jetpack: Devoted an entire Big Picture episode to this subject. Also a big part of his review of The Martian;
    Now folks... I'll admit I'm the easiest lay in the world for stuff like this. I'm "that guy" who never stopped being in love with outer space. I'm "that guy" who thinks we oughta be dumping as much funding as we possibly can into NASA come hell or high water because I do NOT want to die without at least seeing humanity be on it's way to something like Starfleet in my lifetime – and I'm that guy who if you hear this and come at me with some short-sighted "but people are still... and we need money for... but it's not as important as..." my response is always going to be Spaceship. Fuck You!
  • Jitter Cam: One of his Pet Peeve Tropes, along with the "found footage" genre that makes heavy use of it, though he sees why they're so popular nowadays. He feels that, for the generation that grew up with camera phones and social media as ubiquitous parts of their lives, this style of filmmaking is associated with realism, i.e. something that looks like it was shot on the street by random passerby rather than by a professional film crew.
  • Jukebox Musical: Does not like the genre, and discussed his disdain for it in his reviews of the film adaptations of Mamma Mia! and Rock of Ages.
  • Jumping the Shark: invoked He argues that this happened to South Park in season 19, viewing it as the point where Trey Parker and Matt Stone finally "got old". After years of being the transgressive, anti-establishment Gen-X voices mocking overbearing moralism and hypocrisy of all sides, he feels that the overarching story of season 19 felt less like their usual satirical take on politics and pop culture and more like it was simply them grumpily bemoaning the viewpoints and culture of the rising millennial "Tumblr generation" — especially given that all the complaints they raise are eerily similar to complaints that had been raised against South Park itself in the past. He also notes how Parker and Stone seemingly anticipated that this would happen to them, with the appropriately-titled season 15 episode "You're Getting Old", which Bob now feels has become even Harsher in Hindsight.
  • Kayfabe:
    • invoked He suspected that both sides of the battle between PewDiePie and T-Series to become the most subscribed channel on YouTube were in on it and using the battle to build their subscriber bases, with an outright comparison to the WWE. Furthermore, he also suspected that YouTube itself was in on it — and actually favoring PewDiePie (or at least a drawn-out battle), hoping that, by having such a magnet for controversy as the most famous figure on the website and a symbol of its independent creators, they'd be afforded a long leash to start sanitizing the site and turning it into exactly the sort of censored corporate pablum that PewDiePie's subscribers feared.
    • Bob mused that, while he didn't agree with the Conspiracy Theorists who thought that James Gunn's firing by Disney was a massive ruse as part of a Gambit Roulette, he did believe they had agreed to rehire Gunn long before they announced it and everyone at Disney and Marvel simply kept hush about it to avoid complications with Disney's acquisition of Fox's film assets.
  • Know-Nothing Know-It-All: One of his pet peeves is movies that try to sell themselves as "thinking man's" films only to deliver a very shallow understanding of the ideas they try to grapple with. He came down especially hard on Transcendence, The Creator (2023), and Civil War (2024) for this.
  • Kudzu Plot: His main criticism of Ne Zha 2. His review opened with him spending two and a half minutes simply recounting the backstory and Chinese Mythology needed to even begin to understand just what the hell was going on in the film.
  • Lampshade Hanging: Most of the time, less pointing out the tropes he uses, and more acknowledging them.
  • Laugh Track: The Retrothinker's appearances after the Necrothinker arc have all been done in a sitcom-style manner, complete with this.
  • Lighter and Softer: Escape to the Movies is done in less serious and less acknowledging tone than The Game Overthinker.
  • Mainstream Obscurity: invoked Discussed in regards to Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) underperforming financially and the Godzilla franchise failing to gain mainstream recognition. Bob argued that while everyone have a passing familiarity with Godzilla, the only movies that most non-Japanese audiences, including those who became creators, saw were mostly cheap disposable B-movies that gave negative impressions of the franchise.
  • Meta Fiction: In his review of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, he imagined that What If…? (2021) would one day do a Real-World Episode about how the Marvel Cinematic Universe might have evolved in a world where the COVID-19 Pandemic never happened and never scrambled Disney and Marvel's plans.
  • Meta Guy: Bob himself obviously by the nature of his job, also Ivan the Intern frequently fills this role in the Game Overthinker segments with frequent lampshading.
  • Meaningful Name: Ivan is a fairy companion whose name backwards is Navi.
  • Merchandise-Driven: Discussed in his review of How to Train Your Dragon (2025). Much of his review was less about the film itself and more about him discussing the real reason he thought it was made in the first place, which was that Epic Universe had just opened at Universal Studios Orlando with a How to Train Your Dragon area and Universal and DreamWorks Animation wanted to not only boost the franchise's pop culture profile but also show people what its universe would look like in real life by showing them a Live-Action Adaptation of such. Even though he liked it as a movie and thought it was better than most of the Disney Live-Action Remakes, he also described it as a more overtly corporate product than any of them in how it seemed designed to promote the Isle of Berk at Epic Universe.
  • The Mockbuster: Discussed in his This Movie Exists episode on Transmorphers. He points to how the business model behind low-budget Direct-to-Video movies changed in the 2000s as the video rental business was taken over by large chains like Blockbuster Video that could stock hundreds of copies of new releases at once, meaning that mockbusters and other assorted copycat films couldn't just compete on being available on shelves when the movies people wanted to see were out of stock. The Asylum adapted by getting their ripoffs on store shelves before the movies they were ripping off had even been released in theaters, let alone on home video, before eventually pivoting to making Made-for-TV Movies for Syfy.* Mundane Made Awesome: Discussed in his review of Unfrosted, wherein he describes the series The Food That Built America as invoked the good version of that film largely for how earnestly it embraces this trope, taking The History Channel's self-serious Docudrama approach and applying it to things like the invention of Buffalo wings and sports bars.
  • Murder Simulators: Like most gamers, he rejects the idea that violent video games (and, by extension, other media) are responsible for violent actions, noting that Duck Hunt and Splatterhouse didn't contribute much to violence. If anything, he thinks it's the other way around, and that the reason why so many modern games are so violent and fixated on shooting things is because they come from an American culture in which guns, masculinity, and rugged individualism factor heavily into the national mythos, and that it's this culture that is more to blame for America's rampant gun violence.
  • Nostalgia Filter: Bob is a decidedly old-school-centric gamer, and has admitted as much on multiple occasions.
    • Played straight and averted, respectively, with his treatment of The '80s and The '90s. Bob is not a fan of the latter decade, frequently accompanying mentions of it with a stock photo of Randy "The Ram" Robinson with the caption "The '90s sucked" (fully aware of the irony of quoting a Disco Dan character to prove his point), and while he's willing to admit that there was quite a bit of good stuff in that decade, he has little love for most of the pop culture trends of the time (Nineties anti heroes, post-modern teen horror, et cetera). On the other hand, he loves the '80s, cheesiness and all. He states that this was because the '90s were his awkward, schlubby teen years that came in between his wondrous childhood in the '80s and his present-day success as an internet personality.
    • He's also examined pop culture's treatment of the '90s as a cultural dead zone and its inability to sum up what exactly the general "theme" of the decade was (like how it associates The '50s with social conservatism, The '60s with the counterculture, and The '80s with materialism). He finds the answer to this in Francis Fukuyama's famous treatise The End of History, stating that the West's victory in the Cold War had produced a sort of ennui that, in turn, produced a culture of nostalgia and introspection. 9/11, of course, quickly shattered that culture.
    • Averted with his treatment of The Simpsons. While going over the older seasons, Bob noticed that most of the episodes he thought were comic gold as a kid didn't age well in his eyes, while the episodes he thought were boring when they first aired became much better now that he was old enough to appreciate the humor. He concludes that The Simpsons didn't jump the shark like its fans thought it did, but rather, its fans grew up and their tastes in humor changed, and The Simpsons didn't change with them. Plus, there's the fact that the show, a broad satire of the greater pop culture, is a relic of a time stretching from roughly 1950-2000 when pop culture was largely monolithicnote  — the early '00s, the time most commonly cited as when The Simpsons "stopped being funny", is also the time when the internet and cable television fragmented pop culture into a million little shards and subcultures.
    • Examined with his treatment of the infamous Spider-Man storyline "One More Day", specifically in comparison to the then-recent "Superior Spider-Man" arc that was being compared to it. It's a bad storyline, to be sure, but it's nowhere near the worst thing that ever happened to Spider-Man. Instead, having gone through Marvel's DVD box set of every Spider-Man comic from The '60s to today, he concludes that it's merely the worst thing to happen to Spider-Man in the age of internet fandom; had the internet been around for such events as the "black costume", then "One More Day" wouldn't be seen as the nadir of the Spider-Man comics.
    • His review of TRON: Ares sees him discuss how he feels the original TRON has benefited from this trope, calling it the "Socratic ideal of the nerd nostalgia IP cycle" in how it became a invoked Cult Classic and ultimately launched a franchise despite getting mixed reviews and being seen as a financial disappointment in its time. Even as somebody who liked the first film, he felt that TRON stood the test of time on the strength of its visual style and Wendy Carlos' score more than anything, with the actual story and characters being fairly boilerplate. He called it the sort of movie that geeks who grew up in The '80s "like when they watch it but love when they remember it."
  • "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
    • For Devil, and emblematic of the whole movie's stupidity:
      A character who we're supposed to regard as the grounded rational and moral centre of the entire story proves that they're in the presence of the Devil by throwing a piece of toast in the air and seeing if it lands butter-side-down. [Reverb] I. AM NOT. MAKING. THAT UP.
    • Done constantly during his review of Street Fight- uh, "Future Cops" because of the film's over-the-top nature.
    • Done again in the Power Rangers Reboot when he mentions the sub plot point of pink ranger's revenge porn subplot by stating "Really."
  • "Not So Different" Remark:
    • States this between New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
    • Bob has also criticized his fellow Generation X geeks for scoffing at newer generation geeks that are un-ironically excited/nervous at the The Power Rangers movie, while they're un-ironically hyped for superhero movies and other facets of geek culture the generation before them scoffed at them for taking seriously.
  • Not Your Daddy's X: Discussed in his Really That Bad trilogy, claiming that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was trying to have its cake and eat it too by marketing itself with this trope (edgy, broody, Objectivist Superman vs near-psychotic Batman who straight-up kills people), while simultaneously counting on audience familiarity with and connection to "your daddy's characters" to avoid having to develop that audience connection itself.
  • Occidental Otaku: Discussed. He feels that childhood rebellion is part of the reason why so many young people in the US embraced Japanese culture in the form of video games and, later, anime and manga. As he sees it, back in The '80s (the time in which this trope first began to develop), most kids' parents viewed Japan as America's economic rival, while their grandparents still remembered Japan as having been America's enemy.
  • The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: In his review of Atlas Shrugged, Bob says that while he agrees with Objectivism's basic idea that society's best and brightest should be faced with minimal restriction, he's turned off by the extreme arrogance Objectivism seems to produce.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: He usually maintains a Newscaster / Midwestern accent, but sometimes his native Bawstin accent slips through or he just doesn't bother hiding it.
    • As of about mid-2016, he's pretty much given up on hiding his accent.
  • Or Was It a Dream?: He opened his review of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) by waking up and talking about how he had a terrible nightmare about how he was a film critic who went to see a remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) that turned out to be absolutely awful. Then the face of Michael Bay (a producer on the 2010 remake) flashes on the screen in a Jump Scare and the review proper begins.
  • Oscar Bait: He has accused The King's Speech of being this, even going so far as to make his video review of it into a "How To Make Oscar Bait" instruction video.
  • Overly Narrow Superlative: He listed Cars 2 as the best movie about a talking tow-truck you'll see this year.
  • Painting the Medium: His review of A Quiet Place Part II was done entirely in written form, in keeping with the film having very little spoken dialogue. When the "ding!" for his final review score plays, a monster kills him.
  • Pandering to the Base:
    • Invoked. When the JISM guard in the episode "Titanfoul" accuses him of doing this with his opening monologue about games being ever-lasting, he replies "that's not pandering, this is pandering" and cuts to Ivan singing "Let It Go". (With the caption "Here you go, Tumblr.")
    • Bob discussed this when it came to Star Wars.
      • Bob argued that this is why Solo bombed at the box office. The movie was microtargeted at diehard Star Wars fans as it was a Han Solo origin movie that explored his backstory and background events like Kessel Run that were briefly mentioned in A New Hope. However, while the movie did appeal to hardcore fans, it didn't win over mainstream audiences and casual fans who don't care about lore-centric story and only like watching Han Solo when he was played on-screen by Harrison Ford. Thus, by appealing to only a small subset of fans, the movie ignored the broader audience who would've helped cover the movie's inflated budget.
      • Bob would also revisit this trope after the Season 2 finale of The Mandalorian. While understanding why some of his fellow critics would disapprove of the Luke Skywalker's gratuitous cameo, Bob didn't mind it since it didn't retcon his later characterization and fits the show's spirit which was already made to pander to fans with its titular character being an ersatz Boba Fett turned Escapist Character.
  • Political Overcorrectness: He's not a fan of many people who criticize it, feeling that, while there do exist valid criticisms of political correctness, they are all too often used to provide cover for actual, retrograde bigotry as "hard truths."
    • He did, however, take issue with the #CancelColbert campaign on account of this trope, claiming that the people criticizing Stephen Colbert had missed the context of his jokenote  entirely. He attributes this to what he feels is an inability on the part of social media, by its very rapid-fire nature, to "get" the sort of long-form satire that The Colbert Report revolves around.
    • He also notes that he dislikes what the heavy religious mindset did to old Bible Movies, turning them from "sexy, sprawling spectacle" to "strident moralism and eschatological doomsaying".
    • His review of The Naked Gun (2025) described both it and Happy Gilmore 2 (which came out around the same time) as "anti-anti-wokeness" movies in which the main satirical targets were conservatives who felt that political correctness was suffocating pop culture, specifically in the context of reviving icons of '80s/'90s-style comedy of a sort that such people believe couldn't be made today in order to not only prove that they could, but to mock them as dumbasses who just want an excuse to be bigots.
  • Poor Man's Porn: Discussed with regards to the Biblical epics of the '50s and early '60s, saying that they offered a way around The Hays Code for Hollywood studios who could just tell off the Moral Guardians by saying that they were trying to censor The Bible, and arguing that the downfall of the Code in the late '60s heralded the genre's decline now that filmmakers no longer needed to use the figleaf of Biblical accuracy to get away with more sex and violence. He also thinks that this is why the Heavy Metal movie became a invoked Cult Classic in The '80s.
  • Poor Man's Substitute: invoked In his review of Bloodshot (2020), he described Eiza González's perma-scowl in the film as the look of someone who's realized that the next few years of her career as an actor are going to be defined by the words "Ana de Armas said no."
  • Pop-Cultural Osmosis: Bob peppers his videos quite liberally with geek culture references, and figures we'll get them.
  • Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: His review of Longlegs was a case where most of his viewers didn't get the reference. In his review, he said that he predicted the film's twist the moment he realized that its title was a reference to a particular work of fiction from the first half of the 20th century, with the people in the comments mostly scratching their heads as to what exactly he was talking about. A few weeks later, he put out a Big Picture episode just to explain it. The film's title is a reference to the 1912 novel Daddy-Long-Legs, in which a beautiful, orphaned teenage girl is secretly adopted by a wealthy older gentleman (as in, not even she knows who her Anonymous Benefactor is) as part of a Pygmalion Plot with the intent of grooming her into his future wife. Its 1955 film adaptation, while generally regarded as one of Fred Astaire's lesser films, was known for its dance sequences and thus lived a long life in repertories and film schools — ensuring that it would inevitably face backlash later on from feminist film critics who regarded its titular male lead as a lecherous, predatory creep. As such, when Bob was younger, he often encountered "Daddy-Long-Legs" used as a shorthand for a type of man who treats women well on the surface, but in a purely transactional way with the expectation of sexual favors in return, much like how the killer in Longlegs secretly guided the heroine into a career as an FBI agent (including being responsible for her Psychic Powers) as part of his master plan to psychologically torment her.
  • Pop-Culture Isolation: invoked In the 2020s, a growing trend in his videos and commentary was his belief that geek culture, after the salad days of the 2000s and '10s, was increasingly falling out of touch with mainstream tastes.
    • Discussed in the three-part Big Picture episode "The Internet is Stupid". He argued that much of geekdom and internet culture in general, and by extension an extremely online entertainment media, had come to suffer from this trope by 2022, with its fixations increasingly diverging from the tastes of audiences as a whole. He pointed to how few entertainment journalists saw the blockbuster success of Top Gun: Maverick in film or Yellowstone and House of the Dragon on TV coming, as their target audiences lay well outside the usual geek media demographics or, in the case of House of the Dragon, were more willing to forgive the divisive ending of Game of Thrones and give the franchise a second chance than the geek press was.note  Conversely, they also talked up niche movies and shows like Zack Snyder's Justice League, Euphoria, Billions, and Succession and made them seem far more omnipresent in pop culture than they were, while dismissing Ms. Marvel (2022) as a flop despite similar ratings that were, more importantly, concentrated in a young demographic that Disney's Marvel shows had trouble reaching before.
    • He also believes that this explains the massive invoked Critical Dissonance that Velma experienced. It was absolutely despised by the internet commentariat, uniting people across political and cultural lines to rag on it as offensive garbage, such that it became one of the lowest-rated shows on IMDb... and yet it was also one of the biggest hits that HBO Max ever had.
    • The Big Picture episode "Blocks Office" is about how A Minecraft Movie was predicted to bomb, with nearly every single YouTube video about it in particular (barring the actual official marketing and press) lambasting it as cringeworthy, pandering garbage that audiences would furiously reject, only to wind up becoming one of the biggest box-office hits of 2025, its opening weekend being more than double what even the most optimistic predictions suggested. In reality, a well-marketed "four-quadrant" family film with a big star like Jack Black (himself an actor who the internet thinks is a lot less popular than he is) and a recognizable brand name attached has always been one of the safest bets in Hollywood, and from his personal experience talking to ordinary people in real life (especially families, among them his own niece and nephew), there were a lot of people who were genuinely excited to see this film. He argued that its success indicated that the 2010s era of mega-franchises and geek culture domination in Hollywood was coming to an end, and that the entertainment industry and blockbuster filmmaking were returning to the equilibrium they had before then, a theme he returned to in the episode "Long Division", where he argued that geek culture's mainstream pop culture domination in the '00s and '10s led to a bad case of Pride Before a Fall.
      Let me be clear: Minecraft being a gigantic hit after getting 1.6M trailer dislikes and thus reminding Hollywood that YouTube feedback should just be ignored may be the most positive entertainment story of 2025.
  • Popularity Polynomial: invoked Discussed in his review of Spın̈al Tap II: The End Continues, specifically with how it relates to rock music. When he was a kid, his older cousins saw The Rolling Stones as a terminally uncool band for still trying to act like hip, youthful rock stars even though they were all middle-aged by that point, with shows like The Simpsons making a punchline out of them with jokes about the "Steel Wheelchair Tour". However, once he became an adult, he saw opinions on the Stones grow more positive not in spite of the fact that they were even older by then, but because of it, with the band seen not as cringeworthy Disco Dans desperately trying to cling to their youth but as elder statesmen of rock who'd been doing this all their lives. By that point, their insistence on continuing to rock hard in defiance of the expectations placed on older people became rebellious and cool in its own way.
    Here's a novel idea: play it, watch it, read it, and actually give some summation. Actually engage in a thoughtful way instead of using numbers and usually fake, doctored math (that's not real math) to try and drive engagement and clicks.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation: He thinks that the TV adaptation of The Boys is superior to the original comics, largely for toning down what he sees as Garth Ennis' worst excesses as a writer, even if he didn't quite love it.
  • Proud to Be a Geek: Zigzagged. He's an old-school gamer and has a disctinct fondness for the cheese of the 1980s, along with most things from that decade. However, he's not a fan of most things from the 1990s, and he's a self-confessed Fan Hater who calls out the Vocal Minority of geek and nerd culture as being too toxic for its own good. He's also devoted multiple episodes of The BIG PICTURE to nerds by telling them to Stop Being Stereotypical with regards to the gatekeeping around gaming. Even so, Bob mostly comes down on the side of defending the nerdy types, and he himself is rather happy with how his tastes have been shaped by nerd media.invoked
  • Qurac: Uses the term "Noniraquistan" when describing the plot of the original Modern Warfare game.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: In his Escape to the Movies review of Like A Boss, he criticises the villain for being "over the top rich and mean" for no real reason. While Bob acknowledges this type of person does exist in the real world, a character in a work of fiction still requires motivation to act the way that they do.
  • Real Life Writes the Plot: The big showdown between Robothinker and Necrothinker that was planned for episode 82 had to be delayed due to the New England Blizzard of 2013. In-universe, this was attributed to Cryothinker.
  • Real Men Wear Pink: He stated that he bakes.
  • Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: His Big Picture video "Pink is Not the Problem" is a takedown of this trope. He says that it's rather silly to come out in favor of arbitrary gender coding for stuff (like how girls' toys always have to be pink). But at the same time, Bob argues that the stuff itself — the things, objects, items, et cetera — is neutral, and it's how it's being used that's the problem here. In other words, the problem is rigidly-maintained gender roles that say boys or girls "have to" be certain things or act certain ways. The idea, Bob argues, is to say that traditionally "feminine" things are for everyone, not to say that traditionally feminine things are inherently bad. There's nothing wrong with girls liking traditionally girly things, in Bob's view, and people really aren't helping when they come down on anyone who acts feminine as being "weak" for it.
  • Recycled with a Gimmick: He described the early Supergirl comics as Nancy Drew with superpowers.
  • Redundant Parody: He feels that The Onion's crude Tweet about nine-year-old Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis being "kind of a c**t" wasn't pure rudeness like many people were claiming, but rather, an attempt at satire that fell flat because it too closely resembled the snarky, insulting tabloid culture that it was trying to make fun of, without any indication that it was a parody (hard to do when you're on Twitter / X).
  • Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: The Game Antithinker Story Arc is more satirical than Moviebob's newer episodes. The change has produced a bit of a Broken Base.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: For a professional writer, Bob's not much on proofreading at times. Even some of his books have major punctuation and grammatical errors.
  • Rule of Cool: Reviewing Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, he admits "I'm probably predisposed to liking anything that has a scene of a gorilla beating up a helicopter."
  • Running Gag:
  • Self-Deprecation:
    • Bob believes fat people to be amusing... citing himself as an example.
    • "I'm well aware that there's at least already one of you out there itching for this to end so you can run to the forums and get busy firing off some oh-so-clever missive about how film geeks only like to shit all over marginally-talented hot actresses like [Megan] Fox because we're using them as proxy punching bags for all the women who wouldn't fuck us back in high school. Well, to you sir or madam, I say... So?"
    • A pretty big example in "The Prophecy of Freakazoid", when talking about the expectations of the internet in the mid-90's;
      While the promise remains, the internet has become a vast ocean of memetic self reference, funny cat videos, pop culture revivification, and droning videos where embittered 30-something men re-frame their own nostalgic detritus in quasi-scholarly verbiage in a desperate attempt to recast their youth as something other than misspent. *ahem*
    • His Intermission editorials "I Wrote That Crap!" and "I (Also) Wrote That Crap", in which he discusses the past film scripts that he had written. They include B-grade monster movies, a Slasher Movie about geek/Comic-Con culture, a Troma-esque spoof of the War on Drugs, and an Author Filibuster with a Marty Stu protagonist; looking back, Bob regards all of them as So Bad, It's Good at best. He also discusses the stereotype of film critics being aspiring filmmakers who washed out on the road to realizing their dreams.
    • He seems perfectly aware of his long-windedness, and has pointed it out or lampshaded it on several occasions, including the recurring appearance of a "Hyperactive Chipmunk" note , and at one point saying, "This is the Game Overthinker, not the Bob-Gets-Right-to-the-Fucking-Point Show."
    • After a growing number of fans started calling him out on his constant plugging of Super Mario Bros. 3: Brick-by-Brick at the end of his videos, he made the plugs shameless to the point of parody, consisting of him literally waving the book in the air while yelling "BUY MY BOOK!" repeatedly. Which itself is a reference to The Critic.
    • He opened episode 87 of The Game Overthinker, a Top Ten List of the best games of the Seventh Generation, mocking how such lists were everywhere at the moment, used as meaningless filler, before concluding that he might as well make one of his own.
  • Sequel Snark: His review of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes opened by listing the film's title as The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - Episode Zero: Advent Children - The Legend of Curly's Gold.
  • Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Usually accompanied with the graphic "Big Words".
  • Shaped Like Itself: Describing the performances in Thor:
  • Shout-Out:
    • While revisiting Metroid: Other M, he points out the first rule of internet gaming culture is to never disagree with the mass opinion. The second rule is to never do a Let's Play of Bart's Nightmare. (With a little subtitle saying he thought it was funny.)
    • In in episode 73, Ivan loves Navi.
    • During the credits of his Oz the Great and Powerful review, Bob compares the hat and red outfit Mila Kunis wears in the film to that of the Red Mage. The fact that the film also features a woman in white and a woman in black makes this analogy even funnier.
  • Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: Falls in the middle. While he'll deal with serious issues, or serious opinions, he'll usually be more serious, with some jokes thrown in. When he deals with something more silly, the jokes are more prevalent. His movie reviews usually fall under silly, with him giving his opinion in a easy-going tone, but can be more serious when going into complexity about the film.
  • The Smurfette Principle: Notes that one thing that New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Modern Warfare 2 had in common was a lack of female figures, though the former wins for having two notable female characters (Princess Peach and Wendy O. Koopa).
  • So Bad, It Was Better: invoked Discussed in his review of Borderlands (2024). He compared it unfavorably to the cheesy, low-budget '80s sci-fi action movies that it seemed to be a Genre Throwback to despite being better on a technical level and having higher production values, in no small part because those older movies' low budgets gave them a grimy, grungy feel that made it easier to enjoy them as the cheap pulp they were. Borderlands, meanwhile, had all their shortcomings but none of the cheesy fun, and so it was simply a bad movie. The casting of Cate Blanchett in a Playing Against Type role as an Action Girl was the only thing that worked, largely because it felt like she was the only person on set who actually understood the kind of B-Movie spirit the film needed.
    The effects look good, mostly. It would be more fun if they were bad. A goofy rubber mask on a monster is fun. A couple hundred million dollars worth of CGI on a monster that still looks like crap just looks like crap.
  • Spiritual Successor: invoked He's described Jason Statham as this to Charles Bronson, and The Beekeeper specifically as a modern-day Death Wish, taking the original film's righteous fury at street crime and Gangbangers and updating it to righteous fury at cybercrime and predatory Tech Bros.
  • Stealth Pun: In his review of Green Lantern (2011), when Bob says that Warner Brothers "struck out" trying to make a superhero movie that's not Batman, he shows a picture of baseball player Jim Reynolds striking out. note 
  • The Stinger: In his "Escape to The Movies" series.
  • Stop Being Stereotypical: The entire point of "Building a Better Gamer". While gamers aren't violent psychopaths as politicians tend to portray them, the Vocal Minority of hardcore gamers are really not helping by being gross, rude, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and generally acting like terrible people. Bob even invokes Strawman Has a Point by saying that he can kind of see why ordinary people are so averse to gamers, if this is how most hardcore gamers are going to act. According to Bob, the larger pro-gamer argument is one he agrees with, but the delivery needs a lot of work if gamers want to improve their image.invoked
  • Small Name, Big Ego: Invoked. He freely admits to this, saying that he likes to pick on on big names because it makes him feel big. Reading his twitter feed or blogs demonstrates this.
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequelinvoked: After looking through and hating the entire Twilight film series, he admits the last one, Breaking Dawn Part 2, falls so far into So Bad, It's Good that it's a genuinely enjoyable movie experience
  • Take That!:
    • Each major antagonist of the Overthinker series is a take that to parts of the video game community that Bob dislikes - The Anti-Thinker (hardcore gamers/the "douchebag" audience of recent pop culture), Strawman (the fans that criticized Bob for introducing story arcs to his show), the Pyrothinker and Cryothinker (those who abandoned game arcades), Retrothinker / Necrothinker (hardcore gamers who only play old school games) and the Robothinker (Xbox Live trolls).
    • At the end of his review of Furious 7, Bob delivers some pot shots to the Oscars regarding Vin Diesel saying this movie should win Best Picture.
      I mean, y’all gave Vin Diesel a ribbing a week or two back when he said this movie should win an Oscar, right? And we were right, but kinda for the wrong reasons when you think about it. I mean, damn right Furious 7 isn't Oscar material(!) There’s way too much diversity in the cast(!) The women have complete characters and personalities unto themselves(!) There’s no aging white dude monologuing about how relevant over the hill actors are or young white dudes pantomiming various ailments or disabilities(!) I mean, geez, what are ya thinkin’ there, Riddick(?)
    • In his Big Picture video "Avengers: Now What?" Bob took an inordinate amount of pleasure in mocking all the haters who had made a slew of videos about how Black Panther (2018) and Captain Marvel (2019) were going to be a massive Box Office Bombs and the downfall of the Marvel Cinematic Universe because they were "pandering to SJWs" by being black and female-led movies and they were all going to boycott it, after both movies passed $1 billion at the box office.
      Speaking of good guys winning, a big priority for Marvel post-Endgame looks to be making the general character roster a bit more on the diverse side, since as the sage wisdom of angry YouTube men foretold, "Get Woke, Go Broke"... in your knees and your lower back from carrying your giant sacks of money because Black Panther and Captain Marvel both cleared like a billion dollars and YouTube angry men don't know anything.
      <plays the "Hahaha, you stupid...!" clip from The Simpsons S5 E15 "Deep Space Homer">
    • The Big Picture episode "Elon Musk is Stupid" is, as the title suggests, a lengthy one towards Elon Musk. Bob sees his pop culture profile as a billionaire industrialist and genius innovator as having been built mostly on hype, the fact that he was born wealthy and made some smart investments in the '00s, and most importantly, how he was able to pander to the fixations of a generation of young computer geeks, the thing that he argues kept Musk from following in the footsteps of numerous other rich failsons who blew their inherited fortunes. Instead of a real-life Tony Stark, he sees Musk as a real-life Kendall Roy, and a go-to example of how being into nerdy things doesn't necessarily make you smart.
    • In his review of Rebel Moon, he says the movie is like an anime, in that it's mostly bad and mainly consists of interchangeable characters doing Infodumps about their backstories but fans insist it's really good if you get through the first three quarters of it.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: invoked
    • His opinion on Star Trek: Section 31. Unlike many Star Trek fans, he liked the idea of Section 31, seeing it as the logical response to the Kennedy/Johnson-era Space Race nostalgia and worldview that the show is rooted in by introducing a sci-fi version of the more morally gray elements of 1950s/'60s America in the form of a Space CIA doing all the things that made the real CIA notorious during that time. Instead, the movie wound up as a middling Star Trek version of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).
    • He felt that, for all that War of the Worlds (2025) did wrong, there was a seed of a good idea in there in the form of doing a modernized take on the infamous 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic novel as a Computer Screen Story, adapting it for the age of social media just as Orson Welles did for the age of radio. Unfortunately, while throwing viewers into the experience of desperately trying to get in touch with friends and family during a disaster while also keeping one eye on the news was an interesting idea, it was one that the film utterly failed to bring to life.
  • Tonight, Someone Dies: Episode 47 ends with such an announcement, and sure enough, Strawman is killed in the following episode.
  • Too Clever by Half:
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: invoked He praised Jackie Earle Haley for his performance as Freddy Krueger in the otherwise wretched A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), and said that he felt sorry for him given how he was working so hard to elevate a movie that otherwise squandered his effort and didn't deserve his talent. He even put Haley's face in a bubble that sat in the corner of the screen for the entire review, his way of saying that none of the scathing criticisms he was about to deliver should reflect badly on Haley or his performance.
  • Totally Radical: The episode "Not Your Father's Apple Fail" has Bob discuss the "Not Your Father's Oldsmobile" campaign by the titular carmaker. In the ad, Oldsmobile attempted to appeal to a younger generation by showing their cars as hip and attractive. Instead, all it did was trip a Nostalgia Filter for people who remembered their father's Oldsmobile as a symbol of a more innocent time. Young people didn't buy it — Bob mentions the fact that "Old" is in the company's name meant that this was always going to be a hard sell — and old people hated it for an ad that inadvertently insulted their precious childhood memories. In any case, the general public absolutely hated this ad campaign, and it contributed to the company's downfall. Bob argues that the same was true of Apple when they made their "Crush" ad for the iPad Pro, since they crushed a lot of objects with an industrial press while lifting it up to show an iPad. Bob says that while the message of the ad is clearly meant to show that all of the crushed things can be used on an iPad, it does so in a mean-spirited way. A lot of objects crushed were things that people had a childhood fondness for such as an arcade machine, a piano, a painting of a dog, vinyl records, and other objects that people could bond with, all which appear to resist getting crushed like they're suffering in pain before being flattened. The general public tore into Apple for destroying their childhood memories in much the same way that an older generation had for Oldsmobile, forcing Apple to apologize and pull the ad as fast as they could.
  • Transparent Closet: Invoked for Cammy in ep 14, complete with appropriate graphic.
  • Unconventional Learning Experience: invoked His general opinion of video games in Episode 16.
  • Unfit for Greatness: This seems to be Bob's ultimate opinion about Zack Snyder's involvement in the DC Extended Universe, as discussed in Part III of his Really That Bad review of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. He admires Snyder's work prior to it and considers him a legitimately great film director, but also noted that Snyder is a fanboy of The Dark Age of Comic Books and his adaptation of Watchmen implied he had invokedmisplaced admiration for the work and missed the point of its underlying themes, on top of a seeming bent towards Objectivism; all of those things clash heavily with the traditional portrayal of Superman, and combined with a self-admitted distaste for the more traditional superhero stories of the Silver and Bronze Ages, Bob all but directly concluded that Snyder was probably wrong for the material from the outset.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: invoked
    • He regards The Simpsons as this to The '90s specifically and to the late 20th century more broadly, and moreover, this is why he believes that so many fans pin its Jumping the Shark date sometime in the early '00s — because that was the point where the things it was built to satirize started to fall out of the cultural mainstream.
    • His biggest problem with The Boys (2019) is that he didn't think it did enough to update the source material for The New '10s, and that it wound up reflecting the Turn of the Millennium preoccupations of such instead of how much the superhero genre had changed since then. For instance, its Captain Ersatz of Aquaman being portrayed as the Butt-Monkey of the team squares well with the character's reputation in the 2000s, but not so much his reputation in 2019 as one of the leading lights of the DC Extended Universe, where he's portrayed as a badass sailor-bro and extremely popular for it. The female superhero Starlight's more stripperiffic "new" costume likewise reflects how overly sexy female costumes had become a source of controversy and snark in comics during the 2000s, whereas the 2010s saw a full-blown backlash against the trend in comics art. But the biggest one, and one that goes beyond its handling of trends in the comics, came with Homelander, the Superman/Captain America substitute who's written as a satire of Bush-era militarism and evangelical Christianity, a reference point that pinned the story down, more than anything, as fundamentally rooted in a 2000s worldview.
    • He feels that this is why the 2011 continuation of Beavis and Butt-Head failed, and why the planned reboot on Comedy Central will suffer the same fate, as the original show and characters were tied to an era, subculture, and worldview that died with The '90s. He feels that, for a modernized take on the characters to work and feel authentic without being either a simple nostalgia trip for older viewers or a meta take on the material, the show would have to be soul-crushingly bleak, as the kinds of teenagers that Beavis and Butt-Head were in the '90s are now considered nowhere near as harmless. Running as an undercurrent through the original show was a satire of the stagnation of Middle America, with Highland being a dead-end, white-trash bunghole of a town where the titular duo, as a pair of dumbasses who got their thrills with simple pleasures like Heavy Metal and setting things on fire, were the only ones who seemed genuinely happy. He could easily see a modern-day version of those characters logically going in some very dark directions thanks to both the continued decline of places like Highland and the fact that the internet supplies far more extreme content than Headbanger's Ball ever did. (On a similar note, he sees Daria as having grown up into someone like Liz Lemon.)
  • Values Dissonance: invoked Discussed in relation to the early Supergirl comics of the '50s and early '60s, with him noting that it had some upsides as to the quality of the writing. Paradoxically, by having Supergirl conform to the era's rigid gender roles, the writers produced stories that were often better than the Superman comics of the same era, with Supergirl being a flawed hero who often had to fix her mistakes as opposed to always being on the side of what's clearly right and just.
  • Very Special Episode: "Violence is Golden" & "Building a Better Gamer" respectively deal with the Media Watchdog nature & portrayal of video games and the demonization of them in the media and getting & developing better habits for gamers. They are both some-what well done. "The Revolution" is also this, to a lesser extent, trying to convince people not to shop at GameStop for better retail.
  • Visual Pun:
    • The word "but" will show a picture of Ivy's ass, the word "thing" will be a picture of The Thing, God will show a picture of Shigeru Miyamoto, among others.
    • Sometimes played with. In ep6 he mentions "D-cups" and shows a cup with the letter D on it; the image then quickly changes to a photo of breasts with the caption "Just kidding. Here's boobs."
    • "Polarising": A polar bear. On the polar ice, you see.
    • Often when posing a question, he uses an image of The Question.
    • In "OVERBYTES on Tropes vs. Women": "Oh no she's come to attack our man things!" then an image of Man-Thing appears accompanied by a roar "No, not that man thing..."
    • Each mention of the titular protagonist's name during his review of Life of Pi is accompanied by an image of some kind of pie.
  • Vocal Minority: Discussed.
    • Bob takes gamers at large to task for not being more adamant about getting the worst elements of gamer culture out of their fandom, since Bob argues it goes beyond "Stop Having Fun" Guys and straight into hate groups like virulent racists and political extremists. In particular, Bob cites the fandom for heavy metal music rejecting neo-Nazi skinheads as an example of a fandom protecting itself correctly. When neo-Nazis began to seep into the metal scene, metalheads made it very clear that the neo-Nazis were not welcome, and their removal would be enforced by any means necessary if the neo-Nazis kept trying to butt in. Since metal in general is seen to be a rather passionate and even violent subculture at times, the Nazis knew that the metalheads weren't bluffing, so they stayed away. As a result, metal's fandom prevented its own from being infected by hate groups. Bob feels like the same thing needs to be done to gaming culture, as he argues that not doing so will make gamers and the discourse around video games themselves continue to grow more toxic.invoked
    • Bob believes that this is why both Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Solo were box office failure. Despite Scott Pilgrim having positive buzz at San Diego Comic-Con and Solo starring the most popular Star Wars characters, both films were too niched to connect with mainstream audiences as the Scott Pilgrim was based on an obscure comic and casual Star Wars fans only seem to care about Han Solo when played by Harrison Ford. Subsequently, Bob viewed the online geek discourse as a potential pitfall as it creates a feedback where studios cater exclusively to the whims of the most vocal fans at the expense of a broader audience.
  • We Care: In the Big Picture episode "Oscars So Transparent", he described the Academy Awards' announcement of new rules on behind-the-scenes diversity and inclusion for awards eligibility as this. He felt that the changes came about due to Green Book's Best Picture win in 2019 (especially invoked over Black Panther (2018)) provoking considerable backlash, seen as it was as a White Man's Burden story that was out of step with public opinion, and that the Academy's move was mainly a response to that and other criticisms. He found it to be ironically engaging in the very sin that they were trying to deflect attention from, using tokenism and empty platitudes to distract attention from long-standing problems with representation in Hollywood, noting that virtually every movie Hollywood ever made met at least two of the four criteria that the new rules covered (between their VFX teams being heavily staffed by mostly Asian immigrants and their marketing departments being some of the strongest bastions of diversity in the film industry) and would therefore still be eligible for Best Picture. Not only would Green Book still quality for Best Picture under these rules, so would films like Gone with the Wind, Song of the South, and even The Birth of a Nation (1915) that are notorious today for their regressive racial politics.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: invoked He had this reaction to Dog Man (2025) and how dark it wound up being for a family film, specifically how it recognized how similar its premise was to that of RoboCop (1987) and proceeded to focus on the saddest elements of that movie's depiction of Alex Murphy in how it framed its title character. This wasn't a criticism, though, as he felt it made for a deeper and more emotional film than he was expecting.
  • What the Hell, Hero?:
    • In his video "Nintendo... WTF is Wrong With You??", Bob has criticized Nintendo for some poor business decisions from its unintuitive e-Shop, mishandling of Amiibos, and hostile takedowns of Youtube and Let's Play videos. Bob fears that Nintendo's poor decisions will alienate the general gaming populace and damage its ability to function as a creative industry leader.
    • He is not above calling certain sections of "geek culture" for shitty behaviour, especially towards women, minorities, and LGBTQIA+ people. This is beyond simple political opinion on Bob's part (though that's certainly part of it), and more that the Vocal Minority needs to Stop Being Stereotypical in order for gaming to be taken more seriously. Furthermore, gamers need to work harder on purging such people from their spaces, since Bob argues that giving hate groups an inch will see them take a mile, and it'll be too late to stop them. Bob cites metalheads defending the Heavy Metal music scene as a good example of a fandom doing this right — when metalheads threatened to violently remove neo-Nazis from their scene if that's what it would take, the neo-Nazis got the hint and backed off.invoked
    • In his "Apu Trilogy" three-parter, Bob took more of an analytical approach when talking about how the writers of The Simpsons used Lisa as an Author Avatar, arguing that it created a tone-deaf response to "The Problem With Apu". Bob argues that this seemed especially odd, considering nobody was all that up in arms about Apu in the first place. He proceeded to hypothesize why said writers were so hostile — they've been used to being "the good guys" as a relatively progressive show for so long that actual legitimate criticism from "their own side" was a complete shock. Thus, the response was unnecessarily defensive, and only proceeded to put even more of a spotlight on the issue. Bob himself generally agrees that Apu's handling deserves plenty of criticism despite the showrunners' best efforts to make him more than just a one-note token Indian character. But Bob also believes the issue isn't entirely clear-cut due to The Simpsons being such an incredibly long-lived show that he wonders if changing Apu's voice from Hank Azaria to another actor would be pointless. Bob does point out that Azaria is more than happy to let a real Indian-American voice actor take over the part, so such a transition would likely be a good thing overall even if it doesn't ultimately amount to a lot.
  • X Meets Y:invoked Shows up in reviews on occasion. Such as when he described Angelina Jolie as playing Maleficent like "the offspring of Mae West and Vegeta", or describing Newt Scamander as "Doctor Who, Pokémon Trainer".

Alternative Title(s): Moviebob

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