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Trivia / Stuart Ashen

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  • Actor Allusion: In the Extra Ashens Avengers Mega Blocks video, he initially refers to all the members of the Avengers by the titles of other films their actors were in (such as Iron Man being "Sherlock Holmes" and Wolverine being "The Prestige").
  • Blooper: During his review of the C64 Mini, Stuart says that he wants to take a look at the joystick. This is then followed by about fifteen seconds of silence where he does absolutely nothing. Apparently he originally intended to put music over this bit, but forgot to edit it in.
  • Corpsing: Several items have amused him enough to completely break his usually deadpan delivery.
    • In the iPhone 5G review, he dissolves into a fit of uncontrollable laughter after discovering an ancient-style rabbit ear antenna on the phone. It just gets worse when he realises the antenna has a swivel joint.
    • He does this when he first presents the Mobile Phone Handset from Signalex, due to the product's design asthetics being Two Decades Behind. He stated that he had to redo the intro 14 times to get it right, because he couldn't stop laughing. He still has some trouble in the video itself.
    • It happens in his review of LaDiDa after playing back the first song he records.
    • He does it during his Poundland Clearance Special while reviewing a stack of random Green Lantern action figures due to some of the designs.
    • Happens twice in his knockoff He-Man action figures review at the sight of two ridiculous looking figures.
    • He actually had to restart the Violin "Wonderful Sound Strange Shape" review because he wasn't prepared for the deluge of Engrish, and the sheer number of gibberish-level mistakes (such as "6 act or talk like a fool key", "The violin can concerts and solo", and, in particular, "Anglicising" Antonio Stradivari as "Antonio Stella bottom tile" and Giuseppe Guarneri as "ji plug pu · melon nai") ended up making him laugh so hard he couldn't continue.
    • Happens in this Poundland Special. Throughout, he shows a set of "9 police vehicles," a set of "9 fire rescue vehicles," a set of "9 combat vehicles," and a set of "9 construction vehicles." It turns out that the four toy sets are all the same, only with different colors and decals. He starts laughing when showing the construction vehicles.
    • In the Toy Box, Geek Gear July 2016 video. After being all pleased with how the 90s box came with a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX on it, Ashen remarks that he's been having good luck with the boxes so far and jokingly predicts that he'll get a copy of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in the 80s one. Then he opens the 80s box. Cue Precision F-Strike followed by the technical difficulties screen. When we come back several seconds later we find out that Ashen was spot on regarding the 80s box containing the E.T. game, and was still struggling to regain his composure as the recording resumes.
    • Possibly the worst action official action figure ever, as soon as he realized how disproportioned the design of the action figure's body is. He broke down corpsing for a whole minute.
  • Defictionalization:
    • The action figures of him started out as a joke before becoming real for a limited run.
    • Vinnie Vole's Existential Nightmare has been adapted several times, even into a real ZX Spectrum game.
    • "Fifty Thousand Shades Of Grey" started out as a parody in one of his videos, with an actual printed prop. It is literally just the phrase "shades of grey" repeated 50,000 times. You can now order this book on Amazon as an actual product. Provided you wish to sit through it all, someone has done an audiobook version.
  • Follow the Leader:
    • After Dr. Ashen's videos increased in popularity, a number of "Ashens tribute" review videos in his style have appeared throughout YouTube. The video Ultra-Cheap Action Figures Review has a clip of Harry Partridge doing an impression of him included in the end.
    • In a VLOG made by several members of Channel Awesome for Magfest, purely by coincidence they ended up filming themselves in the back of a car while finding bits of plastic tat, holding them in front of the camera and talking about them: they ended up dubbing it "The Ashens Car".
    • It's unknown if it's done intentionally, but much of the review format and snark of Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation review series seems quite similar to Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of
    • Daniel Hardcastle, AKA Nerd³, hosts a LEGO-themed show called "Nerd³'s Bricking It" on his IRL channel. He uses the same hands-around-the-camera recording style as Ashens for the show, and is known to be a fan and friend of Ashens.
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes:
    • The A-Team review, which got taken down for copyright reasons, as well as the extra videos on his Revver account. They have all since been re-uploaded to YouTube by fans, although the parody intro from the A-Team review is still missing (likely not to cause any copyright issues).
    • Ashens Tech Dump has also vanished, but they've been saved on the Archive website.
  • Long-Runners: Stuart has been running videos continuously since April 2006 (arguably before then if you want to count things uploaded to Google Video and circulated before via b3ta), making him one of the - if not the - longest running still-active creators on YouTube.
  • Milestone Celebration: 10 years, to be precise. By his own admission, Stuart isn't fond of doing milestone celebrations (hence the understated "celebration" atmosphere of the video when compared to his usual output) but does so in order to give some background on the history of the channel.
  • Missing Episode:
    • His A-Team video game review was taken down due to copyright infringement (more specifically, a parody of the A-Team intro with the original theme music left in), but can now be found here, albeit without said intro parody.
    • His extras website (extras.ashens.com) used to lead to Stuart's page on the now-defunct video sharing site Revver. The videos formerly hosted there eventually were re-uploaded to this channel by a fan who managed to save them.
    • To an extent, The Proxy could count as a trace of this. Each of the descriptions link to its Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia pages. However, the Wikipedia page has since been deleted.
  • Money, Dear Boy: His video of him and Barry Lewis eating surströmming was made as his patrons who supported his feature film wanted to see him eat it.
  • Schedule Slip:
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Nintendo of America asked him to make a video for them, but he refused because they wanted full copyright without offering payment.
    • Guru Larry stated in the comments for POP Station Watch 2015 that there were plans at one point to make an iOS version of Street Overlord, featuring Ashens characters.
    • Ashens never made full reviews of either the Xbox One ("What's in the box" video released on November 22, 2013) or the PlayStation 4 ("What's in the box" released on November 30, 2013). In the description of the latter video, he says "I'm going to have to get a good look at both before I can really talk about either in depth". When asked on Reddit about it, he replied with "Cancelled due to terminal dullness."
    • Ashens was going to do a review of the PlayStation Classic like he did with the other Mini consoles, but he never finished it, because he found it to be underwhelming and too depressing to do a video on.

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