Creator / Bob Chipman

aka: Moviebob

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.

Bob's current shows

• The Big Picture: A weekly show on in which Bob talks about whatever the hell he felt like talking about. Usually, but not always, this is news in geek culture and tangential subjects therein. It was temporarily replaced by In Bob We Trust, and revived when Bob returned to The Escapist in 2018. When he left again, he took the series and assets with him, and now posts new episodes on YouTube.
• 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: A series based around in-depth exploration of past movies that are consistently celebrated, and discussing how and why these films live up to the praise by talking about the themes, style, narrative, pop cultural impact, and other tropes of the picture.
• Good Enough Movies (or GEMs): A companion series to Really That Good that he describes as "a celebration of the two-and-a-half to three-star movie", the kind of film that's not regarded as a classic but has stood the test of time regardless, and typically has a passionate fandom along with a lot of people who like it even if they don't love it.
• 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: Bob's first series. It originally focused on video game analysis, it grew into a more story-driven series about the line between the worlds of humanity and gaming getting blurred, a format that lasted for 100 episodes and two Channel Hopsinvoked. After the 100th episode and a hiatus that lasted for about a year, the showed continued for a while in ScrewAttack's YouTube channel while focusing on the analysis again in a shorter format for yet another year. Currently dormant, but the Overthinker persona is occasionally brought out when The Big Picture talks about games.
• 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: A written column accompanying the week's Escape to the Movies episode. Sometimes it's a further discussion of a particular element from that week's film, sometimes it's a discussion of older films or a trend in filmmaking, and sometimes (if more than one film came out that caught Bob's interest) it's another review. It was canceled when he leftThe Escapist; unlike Escape to the Movies, it never returned.
• 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.

For an episode and story arc guide to The Game Overthinker, as well as a list of all the films he's reviewed and discussed, see the Recap page.

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
• Acclaimed Flop: invokedThe Big Picture episode "The Numbers" was about how this trope leads to studios making safe, formulaic movies pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator. Specifically, it describes how Universal experiencing a number of these (particularly Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) caused them to fling Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness into Development Hell.
  "When great movies fail at the box office, other movies will suffer because of it."
• Actually Pretty Funny: He actually found the Ascended Meme Spartan-1337 in Halo Legends pretty clever.
• Alter-Ego Acting: Much of Bob's early body of work utilized this trope quite a bit. Moviebob and the Game Overthinker both shared his views and opinions but they were fictional characters, created to be snarky and overbearing and distinct from Bob himself. However, as time went on, Bob's channel dropped most of the characters and exaggerations; reviews in the 2010s and beyond, for the most part, are Bob speaking as himself rather than as a character.
• 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 surrouding 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."
• Artistic License – History: Discussed it in a Big Picture episode about American Sniper, arguing that avoidance of this trope is part of the reason why he loves superhero movies so much — they allow filmmakers to craft broad, exciting "good vs. evil" narratives in blockbuster action movies without running into the pesky moral gray zones that would result from trying to make films about real wars and the people who fought in them.
• 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 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.
• Because Destiny Says So: Did a two-part Big Picture episode claiming that this trope has been overused in recent Hollywood blockbusters to avoid having to write the characters undergo genuine self discovery. He also cites the Star Wars prequel trilogy, of all movies, as a deconstruction of it (albeit he points out he thinks the execution was still lackluster).
• Berserk Button:
  • "Hardcore" gamers, who he sees as a Vocal Minority of "Stop Having Fun" Guys.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 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").
• Bias Steamroller:
  • Bob once infamously stated that he preferred Metroid: Other M, one of the most controversial games in the venerable Metroid series and often considered a Franchise Killer, to the beloved and universally-acclaimed Metroid Prime Trilogy entirely on the basis that the Prime games were First Person Shooters, and thus automatically "creatively bankrupt."
  • Bob loves the 00s Spider-Man Trilogy and slams The Amazing Spider-Man any chance he gets, over emphasizing the qualities of the former and dismissing the positives of the latter. For Spider-Man: Homecoming, many were annoyed that he ignored the character story within and just dismissed the whole thing as disposable junk.
  • Because the 80's were his happy childhood, and the 90's were his difficult adolescence, he openly dismisses much 90's pop culture out-of-hand, especially when comparing it to the decades immediately preceding or following it.
  • He's a big Nintendo fan, and even in episodes where he ultimately comes out against them, he spends a long time defending the company. In one video he argues in favor of Nintendo's refusal to let players play with friends online, even though he also spends time admitting his disappointment towards the company.
• 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).
• Broken Pedestal: His opinion of Kevin Smith, which he did a three-part Big Picture episode on.
• The Cameo: Bob showed up for one in a Diamanda Hagan video, of all things — her review of Remake, to be precise.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: The Big Picture episode "So That Happened" is about the use of this kind of dialogue in action movies, shows, and games and how a backlash had developed towards it by the early '20s, specifically focusing on how it had come to be associated with Joss Whedon and the Marvel Cinematic Universe by detractors of both. He feels that the criticism is overblown, as he's invoked old enough to remember when it was stereotypically associated with buddy-cop movies, and how A New Hope relied heavily on it back in The '70s.
• Catchphrase:
  • "I'm Bob, and that's The Big Picture."
  • "And that's... pretty much it."
  • "COMICS/MOVIES/TV! ARE/IS! WEEEEEEEIRD!!!"
• 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:
  • Discussed in his review of, appropriately enough, Ninja Assassin.
  • Also invoked in Episode 56.
• 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.
• Continuity Porn, Continuity Snarl: Discussed in the Big Picture episodes "Continanity" and "Continanity Rebooted". While he feels that focusing too much on continuity has a habit of producing a Kudzu Plot over time, he doesn't feel that it's the big thing keeping new readers from getting into comics the way that many others do; rather, he feels that they need better marketing.
  • 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.
• Crazy Is Coolinvoked: When The Escapist made him start doing The Big Picture, he used a bit of the first video to officially dub his bosses as such.
• 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: invoked
  • He 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.
  • He also went into this in his Really That Good episode on Independence Day, noting the critical lashing it received and how many contemporary film journalists treated the box-office success of such a nakedly commercial, empty-calorie popcorn blockbuster as a sign of the apocalypse, only for time to ultimately vindicate the average moviegoer as the film became a nostalgic '90s classic.
• 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*
• 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' 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.
• Distaff Counterpart: The Big Picture episode "She-Hulk Shaming" mentions how Marvel created a bunch of these in The '70s, focusing on She-Hulk in particular. Contrary to popular belief, these characters weren't created solely as Affirmative Action Girls; rather, the success of Bionic Woman made Marvel realize that, according to their licensing deals with the networks running shows like The Incredible Hulk (1977) and The Amazing Spider-Man (1978), they could create spinoffs starring gender-flipped versions of the characters without paying Marvel a dime. As a result, Marvel created precisely those characters to avoid such a situation.
• 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.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Strongly critical of the idea that sometihng 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. He feels that gamer culture's obsession with difficulty as a measure of a game's quality is a relic of the arcade era, when games were designed to be difficult so as to suck away quarters and tokens from the people who played them.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.
• 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 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 Sandler^note even playing back part of his ten-minute review of Pixels that called it "the burning of the Library of Alexandria by way of a Hot Topics shirt press", a "crime scene of cultural vandalism" and ending with a Cluster F-Bomb insulting Sandler, Happy Madison Productions and whoever liked the film 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.
• 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."
• Franchise Original Sininvoked: In the Intermission editorial "Consequences", he cites four examples of great films that he feels started some of the more annoying and/or problematic trends in various film genres, and in moviemaking as a whole.
• 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.
• Friend to All Children: Discussed at length in his Really That Good episode on the films of Adam Sandler. Bob suggests that much of Sandler's enduring appeal stems from his efforts to cultivate the comedic persona of a loveable Manchild who connects with children more easily than adults, and can talk to children on their level. And unlike many other popular comedians of his era who unexpectedly developed a young fanbase, Sandler seems to have openly and proudly embraced his massive popularity with children, and isn't shy about indulging in a style of comedy that seems calculated to appeal to them.
• 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.
• Girl-Show Ghetto: invoked Discussed in his Really That Good episode on Titanic (1997), which provides the page quote. He explored how its staggering box-office gross, rave reviews, and Oscar wins soon gave way to a ferocious Hype Backlash from the emerging internet film geek culture of the era, one that was directed as much at the film's fans as the film itself, often in highly gendered terms. The fact that such an unabashed Chick Flick became the first film in history to make over a billion dollars drove a certain breed of male film geek up the wall, and as a result, its success was attributed to screeching fangirls who only saw it for Leonardo DiCaprio. He believes that Titanic, for all its success, cost James Cameron his Auteur License and got DiCaprio typecast in Pretty Boy roles for a good solid decade.
• 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.
• History of Hollywood: He's done a series of episodes on this subject for The Big Picture.
• 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.
  • In the Intermission editorial "I Wrote That Crap!", he talks about the phenomenon of film critics who, when given a chance to make their own movies, often turn in products that are as bad as the films they criticize so venomously. Proving that he's not immune to this, he then describes a pair of film scripts he wrote in his younger days that, in hindsight, are just downright awful.
• 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 Universe^note Unlike those of Martin Scorsese (whom Coppola was defending), which were more focused on the filmmaking process and which Bob felt were rooted more in Scorsese's background as a "traditional" filmmaker who distrusted the Modular Franchise model that the MCU popularized, even if he also felt that Scorsese was being rather snobbish about it 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!
• 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!
• Irony: Discussed the "modern" definition of the term (namely, the "ironic" enjoyment of old So Bad, It's Good Guilty Pleasures) in the Big Picture episode "Dumping Irony".
• 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.
• 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.
• Moral Luck: Discussed in The Big Picture, when he compares the success of Guardians of the Galaxy with the failure of the much-maligned Howard the Duck movie. He notes that the unconventional concepts for both films were a gamble going in, but the same risks praised for Guardians are condemned for Howard just based on audience reception, which filmmakers can't fully predict (however hard they try).
• 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.
• No Ending: Moviebob/The Game Overthinker doesn't really find a conclusive point in "Who Will Be Remembered?" other than you will never rid the world of Kirby, and that he wouldn't have it any other way.
• 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 monolithic^note As in, most mainstream Americans, apart from those on the cultural fringes, watched the same three or four TV networks and the same movies, received the same news, listened to the same music, read the same books, et cetera. — 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.
• "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 Han Solo movie was microtargeted at diehard Star Wars fans as it was a Han Solo origin movie that recreated 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 not only did his appearance not recon his later appearances, but it 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 who exists to let fans go on adventures.
• 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 takes this view in both of his "Mississippi Pwning" videos.
  • In the Game Overthinker episode "'GTA V' Is Not A Satire (*Probably)", he also discussed a related subject, that of "shock value" comedians attempting to justify their racist and sexist humor by claiming that it's actually satirizing racism and sexism.
  • 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 joke^note Making fun of the owner of the Washington Redskins for defending the team's controversial name 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".
• 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."
• Popcultural Osmosis: Bob peppers his videos quite liberally with geek culture references, and figures we'll get them.
• 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 It was for this reason that he also predicted, correctly in hindsight, that Avatar: The Way of Water would be a far bigger box-office hit than the geek press thought it would be. 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.
• 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.
• Propaganda Piece: invoked Did a two-part Big Picture episode, "Pop! Goes the 'Ganda", on the history of propaganda in film. He notes that the term was originally neutral, and that most cinematic propaganda before The '50s was pretty open about it, serving much the same function as parades and rallies in terms of firing up the base. It was only during the Cold War, when Western audiences got more cynical about propaganda, that it developed its modern, negative connotations, specifically in association with communist countries where the state-sanctioned Socialist Realism style meant that most media still took the form of old-fashioned agitprop. Problem was, this kind of propaganda was effective in the developing world, and the fact that the West was no longer making much of it (save for a few private sponsors who genuinely believed in the message they were selling) gave the Soviets a ton of soft power in the early years of the Cold War. As such, the CIA started sponsoring the arts in order to demonstrate the vibrancy of American culture versus the Soviet Culture Police, effectively using American culture itself for propaganda purposes. He notes that the very idea of Show, Don't Tell as a maxim for good writing, as well as the rise of abstract modern art, came in no small part from these efforts, as the CIA saw it as a way to rebut explicitly communist propaganda that beat people over the head with the message. He also makes note of a soft example of this trope in modern fiction, that of how works that are Backed by the Pentagon will never portray the US military in a bad light nor directly criticize its foreign policy, citing the Marvel Cinematic Universe as one of the defining examples of this today.
• 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.
• Reconstruction: In the Big Picture episode "Six Seasons & Immortality", he describes Community as a reconstruction of older sitcom tropes (catch phrases, bottle episodes, and moral lessons), accomplished through a rejection of the detached irony that had come to dominate American comedy since The '90s. He called it a show built around the question "wasn't TV just a little bit better when it wasn't trying to be too good to be TV?"
• Re-Cut: After his second departure from Escapist, Bob did a recut of most of his older "Big Picture" episodes into one video. He also adds some sticky notes if there's any certain changes that happened during the years that might've happened.
• Recycled In Space: 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).
• 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:
  • Shigeru Miyamoto showing up when God is mentioned. Although he also uses Princess Rosalina for this.
  • There are loads of Visual Puns (see below), and a number of other running gags.
  • COMICS! ARE! WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIRRRD!!
  • From his 'Really That Good' episode on The Transformers: The Movie: 'Hot Rod Sucks'.
• Satan: Did a two-part Big Picture episode on the history of Western culture's idea of Satan and how it evolved over the centuries.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: invokedDiscussed in the Big Picture episode "Rights & Wrongs" as it pertains to why Spider-Man and the X-Men won't be showing up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe anytime soon, and why Sony and Fox are churning out new entries in those properties (and others).
• 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 Where Bob speeds his voice up to condense a long analysis, thereby sounding like a chipmunk in the process, 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:
  And Anthony Hopkins as Odin is...Anthony Hopkins. As Odin.
• 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.
• Signing-Off Catchphrase:
  • Ends his Big Picture segments with "I'm Bob, and that's The Big Picture."
  • Ends Really That Good with a summary of why the movie was chosen for the segment, then delivers with heavy emphasis: "[name of movie] is really that good."
• 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).
• 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.
• Spoiler Opening:
  • Episode 73 of The Game Overthinker introduced a new intro, the intro said "featuring" but included several villains he already defeated. Episode 78 saw the return of the Cyro and Pyrothinkers, Antithinker also returned an episode after the intro was introduced, but this had already been alluded to. The very same intro averted this by initially excluding Omegathinker.
  • And the spoiler opening finishes out in episode 81 when Retrothinker grabs the earth gem and becomes Necrothinker again
• 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  Hal Jordan is played by Ryan Reynolds.
• 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
• Story Arc:
  • Episode 43 had Game Overthinker's Evil Counterpart, the Anti-Thinker, come in and take over the show, by teleporting Game Overthinker to Wario's Woods. Many have noticed the Follow the Leader to the plotline based elements in Channel Awesome shows. Bob is revealed to have superpowers to a degree and kills the Anti-Thinker, who returns several times after.
  • The Overthinker series continued having this trend. He becomes a vigilante fighting video game mooks for the local police chief Commissioner Bunnyface and ninja Senator Lieberson. He battles elemental ninjas Pyrothinker and Cryothinker who are demolishing arcades as payback after Bob killed their dad Strawman. He then meets Retrothinker, a time-displaced 1980s TV host who became a Human Popsicle to see the future of video games. He was turned evil by the show's mysterious Big Bad, becoming Necrothinker, who resurrects an army of forgotten game characters to destroy modern gaming, but is saved by Bob. The most recent arc involved the Robothinker, a renegade android who is destined to destroy the world, but a Dragonball-parodying time traveller named the Omega Thinker comes to the past to find a way to defeat him, with the Devil himself being introducd for further shenanigans. The arc ended with Robothinker's destruction, but Bob is housebound by Bunnyface when he learns who Retrothinker is, and Lieberson forms an anti-gaming Tea Party. The Anti-Thinker returns, frees Retrothinker from prison, and reveals to the Overthinker that the mysterious badguy who employed him, Retrothinker and the ninjas is called the Ultrathinker, a cosmic entity who needs the four elemental stones collected during the arcs to gain his own corporeal body.
• 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.
• Tonight, Someone Dies: Episode 47 ends with such an announcement, and sure enough, Strawman is killed in the following episode.
• Too Clever by Half:
  • He believes that some of the worst movies ever made aren't made by poor or mediocre directors, but by genuinely great directors who couldn't deliver on their vision for a movie. Examples include John Boorman's Zardoz, Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, Ridley Scott's Prometheus, and Spike Lee's She Hate Me.
  • This has always been his biggest problem with the Scream movies, feeling that the post-modern meta humor and wisecracking tone that they're famous for make it harder for him to care about the suspense and the characters' fates, since they always go out of their way to remind him that invoked "it's just a movie."
• 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.
• 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.
• Values Resonance: invoked Discussed in his Really That Good episode on the films of Adam Sandler, where Bob argues that Sandler's early films owe much of their continuing popularity to this. Whatever their shortcomings as films may have been, they were surprisingly ahead of their time in their implicit condemnation of toxic masculinity (a term that wasn't even in common parlance in The '90s) and general willingness to portray emotional vulnerability and earnest wholesomeness as praiseworthy virtues in men, messages that weren't nearly as common in American pop culture in the '90s as they would become in the late 2010s and early '20s.
• 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.
• Video Game Movies Suck: invoked Discussed in the Game Overthinker episode "Going Hollywood". He feels that the reason for this trope is because many of the "great" games, especially many of the classics from the early days of gaming, either have Excuse Plots and more of a focus on gameplay, or have certain story mechanics that work well in games but would translate poorly to a film (he cites Assassins Creed as an example of the latter). He feels that the solution to the problem of "how to make a great video game movie" isn't to adapt the story of a game, but to try and adapt its gameplay mechanics — for example, a Call of Duty movie filmed entirely in first-person, or a Metroid movie that's built around the main character exploring the alien world around her.
• 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; metalheads kept making it very clear that the neo-Nazis were not welcome, and their removal would be enforced by any means necessary if they kept trying to butt in, which prevented metal 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 flopped at the box office. Despite Scott Pilgrim having positive buzz at San Diego Comic-Con and Solo's popularity among hardcore Star Wars fans, both films were too niched to connect with mainstream audiences as the former 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.
• The War on Straw: Lampshade Hanging. In a few early episodes a peripheral character makes feeble and fallacious arguments so that the Overthinker can refute them with his main thesis. This character is named Strawman and is a bale of straw.
• 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 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.
  • 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.
• What Were You Thinking?: He dedicated an episode of the Game Overthinker (and interrupted an arc) to question Activision in having Oliver North — a war criminal — as a spokesman for Call of Duty: Black Ops II. The Overthinker's point is not that the ads should be pulled or changed, but rather to explain why making them in the first place was such a poor decision.
  Opening Note: The following episode of The Game Overthinker focuses on a controversial ad campaign.
• 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".