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Web Video / The Annotated Series

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/annotat_5304.png
A typical still from a video, complete with references.note 

The Annotated Series is a YouTube series that lampoons TV shows and public service announcements, such as Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animated Series, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, Captain N: The Game Master, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, and Donkey Kong Country via YouTube's annotation feature.

On October 3rd 2009, user CurtDogg uploaded an episode of Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animated Series and included a link to the video's annotation editor in the style of the channel UnoriginalMaterial, which had been going for a few months by this time. It caught on and The Annotated Series was born. Under the name beeupyou, CurtDogg continued to upload the rest of the series before moving onto other video game-related cartoons. However, YouTube eventually discontinued the collaborative annotation feature, forcing the move to the shared channel, TheAnnotatXperiment.

The Annotated Series is presented in a regular episodic format, usually in the original order of the series in question, with a break in the middle or end of each season. Each break is marked by an intermission in which group members annotate something completely unrelated but generally of similar poor quality as the main attractions.

A third account, HammerNationTime, is used for material that is considered too risky copyright-wise for the main channel.

In mid-2014 two strikes were leveled against TheAnnotatXperiment, resulting in a channel move. The new main channel is TheAnnotationStation while TheAnnotatXperiment will serve (for the time being at least) as an archive for old works. note 

In April 2016, Annotation Plus was formed to train fledgling annotators and finish some series. It was later indefinitely closed, remaining to be decided if it'll remain active in the future.

In October 2014, the annotators started uploading Five Years: The Annotated Anniversary Special! on [TheAnnotationStation], celebrating all of the content covered in the previous five years with a montage of key scenes for participants to annotate anew.

In March 2017, the annotators received a terrible wake-up call when YouTube announced that it will be removing the ability to add or edit annotations by May 2, bringing an end to The Annotated Series and its channel's trademark. It does seem like the crew has some plans for what they'll do for their last month of annotations, as well as after the date that YouTube pulls the plug on annotations... Unfortunately, on September of the same year, Youtube terminated the Annotation Station channel due to numerous copyright claims while TheAnnotatXperiment stayed up. They made an announcement video on that channel saying that while it wasn't the end of them and that many of the videos would be reuploaded on a separate channel, it also lead to the "loss of a fair few of Annotated Riffs" which weren't recorded before the termination of the channel and that they would be lost forever.

As of October 26, the crew has uploaded some of those lost videos onto a channel called Annotation Archive. On October 31st, they announced that they made an off-site annotation maker to continue the series. On June 8, 2018, The Annotated Series rebooted with the same video used to close out the old annotation series, but with annotations from the new annotation system. The new channel now called just Annotation Station, officially becoming active over a year since the initial ending of The Annotated Series, hopes to see a long and prosperous future. The new channel's name was later changed to Annoverse. From October 3rd, 2019 to October 9th and later November 27th, 2019, The Annotated Series celebrated its 10th anniversary by re-annotating material from what was saved from TheAnnotatXperiment and TheAnnotationStation channels from Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) to Kirby: Right Back at Ya! note 

A blog documenting moments from all eras of the series can be found here.

Attention: Please do not add links to the annotated videos. The Annotators have asked to avoid linking from other websites, in case potential copyright claimants were to find them. note 

Material they've annotated, in chronological order:

    open/close all folders 

    On beeupyou's channel 

    On TheAnnotatXperiment's channel 
Main series

Intermission material

    On TheAnnotationStation channel 
Main series

Intermission material

    On HammerNationTime's channel 

    On Annoverse's channel 
Intermission Material

Stuff Annotated Both By The Annotators And With The Beeupyoumatic1000

Stuff Annotated With The Beeupyoumatic1000

Series That Are Annotated With The Beeupyoumatic1000

Annotated Shows

    Exclusive to Annotation Plus 

This group provides examples of:

     A-H 
  • Aborted Arc: Sonic SatAM was dropped partway through the first season because it was viewed as So Okay, It's Average and there really wasn't anything good to mock. They eventually did the second season on the TheAnnotatationStation, but have no plans to complete the first season.
  • Accentuate the Negative: Kind of the point.
  • Actor Allusion:
  • Added Alliterative Appeal: Cheatsy Koopa once says "I'm the Emperor of Eavesdropping!" Every scene he appears in afterwards has at least one annotation with a new alliterative title for him. And every once in a while he seems to be reincarnated into another show briefly.
  • Alas, Poor Villain: A meta-example: With the knowledge that the penultimate episode of Sonic Underground marks the final appearance of Sleet and Dingo, most of the episode's YouTube comments consist of sorrowful send-offs for the pair.
  • Alien Geometries: Explored on shows with particularly bad backgrounds, such as this gem◊.
  • All-CGI Cartoon: The Donkey Kong Country cartoon, Theevan and Foodfight, among others. Naturally, their use of this animation was mocked to no end. Especially with regards to Theevan and season two of DKC.
  • All Gays Are Pedophiles: The subject matter of Boys Beware. Ruthlessly deconstructed, with the Annotators depicting the narrator and "victims" as raging homophobes who use it as an excuse to hate gay people.
  • An Ass-Kicking Christmas: The Annotated Panda Fighter, which was uploaded around Christmas.
    • In 2015 December was an "intermission month" featuring some of the worst things the Annotators have ever riffed, including We Wish you a Turtles Christmas, Sonic Christmas Blast and Rapsittie Kids. and the He-Man Christmas special.
    • 2016's Christmas intermission would follow suit, featuring the likes of Inspector gadget Saves Christmas, Turtle Tunes, Transformers Headmasters, Joshua and The Promised Land, Paddy the Pelican and then one-off The Adventures of Donkey Ollie.
    • 2018's intermission would see the group redo both Christmas in Pac-Land and Turtles Christmas, along with riffs of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, the How the Grinch Stole Christmas video game and the 2018 YouTube Rewind. Capped off with a new riff of the Bubsy pilot.
    • 2019 would forgo the Christmas theme and instead do a Star Wars week in anticipation for The Rise of Skywalker's release. Featuring the trailer for Star Wars Detours, "The Faithful Wookiee" segment from The Star Wars Holiday Special, Let's Jabs of both Kinect Star Wars and Jabba's Game Gallery and a re-riff of the Ctrl+Alt+Del Star Wars parody mini arc.
    • 2020 would make up for it for having two Christmas blocks: This first in July, featuring the actual Christmas specials (consisting of Casper's First Christmas, the Fat Albert Christmas Special and Rudolph and The Island of Misfit Toys), while the actual holiday season simply aired winter/Christmas themed episodes of Video Power and Super Duper Sumos alongside a commercial compilation.
    • For 2021, the group would tackle The Christmas Tree and The Smurfs Christmas Special, along with a re-riff of Sonic Christmas Blast courtesy of the Beeupyoumatic.
    • 2022 wwould have Looney Tunes at Carols by Candlelight and Elf Bowling the Movie: The Great North Pole Elf Strike be mocked in time for Christmas.
    • The intermission persiod between Seasons 11 and 12 would end up around the holiday season, with Dorbees: Making Decisions, Hermie & Friends, and The Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo Show being riffed and released around that time. With Flintstone Family Christmas being the official holiday special.
  • Angrish: In the early days when anybody could contribute, any moment of particularly horrible quality would result in the screen being filled with derogative remarks. Viewers usually need to pause the video in order to see them all. This still shows up occasionally, typically because of perceived Canon Defilement or something being seen as so stupid or nonsensical that a rational response is impossible. Often combined with Big "WHAT?!" and Sarcasm Failure.
  • Angst? What Angst?: Lampshaded. In Super Mario Bros. 3, a kid named Junior ends up in the Mushroom Kingdom by accident and remarks on how he's instantly, effortlessly come to terms with his situation. invoked
  • Author Avatar: Most of the current (and some former) members had theirs' debut during the Season 8 trailer.
  • Animesque: Mega Man and seasons 1 & 2 of Captain N. Unsurprisingly, this led to more than a few jokes about the animation becoming more... Japanese-y.
    • The Irony of American Rabbit being animated in Japan was not lost on the Annotators on both riffs.
    • My Life Me was heavily mocked for its overuse of anime cliches, such as the Super-Deformed style the characters turn into constantly.
  • Anticlimax: An odd example with Game Boy, Beauty and the Warrior, and Orko. All were hyped to be absolutely horrible only to turn out pretty average when the Annotators actually watched them.
  • Anvilicious: If a show or episode has a heavy-handed message, it's most certainly going to be mocked, such as Spectreman's environmental moral, or any episodes involving the threat of TV, in spite of it being produced for that medium.invoked
  • Apocalypse How: A couple of events in the shows have been discussed as such.
    • Kevin's destruction of a football-themed world* is interpreted as a class 5 planetary extinction and gets a lot of comments. Later on, annotators call him out for worrying about Faxandu being destroyed by The Evil One but showing no compassion for Football World.
    "Wow only Kevin could manage to turn a game of football into an apocalyptic situation like this."
    "And so the N-Team completely obliterated the grassy world of American Football...World."
    "Our heroes just killed millions of football players! Even as a nerd I am disgusted!"
    "Kevin, you just quite possibly made the 9/11 of Video Land. And you're going to pop jokes?"
    • In Felix the Cat Saves Christmas, the Professor freezing over the world was labeled a global catastrophe that would leave the biosphere in tatters, likely a Class 2 to 3a. The focus of the plot is still on helping Santa deliver presents to the children even as they freeze to death.
  • Arc Fatigue: Invoked a few different times:
    • Sonic Underground and The Super Mario Bros. Super Show caused a lot of annotators to just stop taking part.
    • The first season of Sonic SatAM, to the point where the annotators initially refused to do the second.
    • Archie's Weird Mysteries around the Summer 2016 had a lot of episodes whose basic plot was either A. Archie falling in love with a being that turns out to be evil in secrecy or B. Generic Monster plot. This generally bored a lot of annotators which is why the main uploader tried to mix things up a bit by saving the more boring episodes for later.
  • The Aristocrats:
    • "THE ARISTOCRATS!" is the final annotation in Chichi Miko.
    • It's also one of the final annotations in Super Duper Sumos.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
    • Felix the Cat Saves Christmas featured this gem, as the heroes frolicked with snowmen children snowboarding:
    Meanwhile, millions of people are dying of hypothermia, animals are going extinct, and Blue Sky Studios is currently getting ideas for the next Ice Age movie.
    • Doug's August calendar reads as such:
    Week 1: Wank to Patti
    Week 2: Wank to Patti
    Week 3: Wank to Patti
    Week 4: Wank to Skeeter
    August 28: School Shooting
    August 29: Buy some grocieries
  • Art Shift: Remarked upon and mocked several times whenever a series shifts to a different than normal style. Such as Captain N's gradual shift between seasons or Donkey Kong Country switching animation studios (and subsequent lack of Motion Capture) in Season 2.
    • In a more meta sense, the shift to the new Annoverse Channel saw an increase in quality regarding the text, with more fonts, colors, and the ability to bold or indent it. This is due to the videos now being annotated in a dedicated editor.
  • Ascended Fridge Horror: When a child's brain explodes in a musical number in Danger Rangers, one annotator jokes that the Danger Rangers just became Scanners. When the same episode makes reference to said musical number, the same annotator is shocked that their Scanners joke came to fruition.
  • ASCII Art: Extremely common in the early days before YouTube kept arbitrarily changing the annotation editor and breaking them.
  • Ass Pull: invoked Called out every time, the most infamous of which include Mario somehow gaining the ability to fly after getting a Star and Sonic using three power rings at once to prevent his own roboticization.
  • Author Appeal: With so many contributors they certainly show off many, many (many!) different loves.
    • If there's a nod to Humongous Mecha or Getter Robo it probably came from Irrelevant. NewStuffs time and again as well.
    • Near the end of Captain N, MrGuyPwnsYou begins making Kid Icarus: Uprising references whenever he gets the chance.
    • Almost every annotator loved Rick and Morty when it premired and referenced it often. Averted nowadays, where it's looked on rather disparingly and mocked.
  • Author Tract: They've popped up but the authors are polite and have them last a mere second. So if anyone wants to read them they need to go back and hit the pause button. The Armor Of Light invoked a lot of these.
  • Bad to the Bone: "Mega Move", known among annotators as "the surf music".
  • Batman Gambit: Irrelevant threatened to upload an episode of The Nutshack as a last-resort solution in case nothing else was uploaded for the weekend between the Captain N finale and the start of Sonic Underground and The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. Hurpdurpmanbry pulled out all the stops to make sure Dr. D's sequel and a few other things got uploaded. Until...
  • Bait-and-Switch: A favorite of the Annotators, especially duing the Annoverse era
    • Done with the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog one-off with the opening being one constant example between several of the annotators' most dreaded series before getting to the episode proper.
    • The premieres of both Schoolhouse Rock and Cyberchase were both subject to this not once, but twice- First with episodes of Johnny Test and The Nutshack replacing them, then with both shows featung the annotations of those riffs*.
  • Bait-and-Switch Credits: These are part and parcel to the group, especially once the Annoverse era rolled around:
    • Episode 12 of Donkey Ollie would open up with part of the VeggieTales intro before cutting to a montage of "memorable moments" from the show set to its theme.
    • A regular occurance on Video Power, where another show's intro will play (such as Starcade or Bad Influence) before the Johnny Arcade segments intrude.
    • The Tom & Jerry Comedy Hour starts up with the intro and company logos for Zack Snyder's Justice League before revealing its true nature.
    • Episode 3 of Captain Planet "Population Control" opens up like an episode SWAT Kats, complete with an accompanying title card, before it switches over to the actual episode.
    • The Christmas Tree starts with the title card for The Star Wars Holiday Special.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For:
    • Irrelevant wanted to see The Nutshack annotated for months. Then it was, and all hell broke loose.
    • He took it even further when he asked for Beauty and Warrior.
  • Behind the Black: Many a speech bubble represents a character speaking from off-screen.
  • Berserk Button: Each annotator has something that sets them off.
    • The slightest allusion — accidental or not — to any would-be "scrappy" from another series causes at least one person to speak of ways to murder them.
    • In the Captain N season 1 finale, everyone knowing the plan except for Mega Man pissed off a lot of people.
    • Irrelevant got really pissed by Mortal Kombat episode 5 when two people are supposed to be good friends but it's strictly told and not shown.
    • A lot of contributors also get pissed off by stuff relating to changing times.
    • Irrelevant also dislikes (potential) transgender digs.
    • "Fun Fact" annotations. Most of the time all they serve to do is parrot basic trivia about what's being annotated, and are considered to be a nuisance and not even "fun" at all.
  • Better than a Bare Bulb: Just about every visible trope or cliché will get lampshaded at some point or another.
  • Big Ol' Eyebrows: Renka in the Chichi Miko riff. Which creeped a few of the annotators out.
  • Bookends
    • The last thing annotated before YouTube disabled annotations was an episode of Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animated Series, the first thing ever annotated.
    • The Video Power riff opens up with the intro to Retro Game Master. The intro gets revisited as part of The Stinger for the finale after the end credits.
  • Bond One-Liner: Particularly cheesy ones are repeated. Also see the YMMV page under Never Live It Down.
    Sonya: Haha! Shocking!
  • Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
    • In episode 7 of Savage Dragon, when Frank asks Dragon what else cops think about when their partner is down, an annotation responds "Donuts? The meaning of life? The meaning of donuts?"
    • In Darkstalkers episode 7, one annotation says that the Morrigan/Harry teacher/student subplot could be interesting "if this show weren't written by morons. And intended for children." "And written by moronic children," another annotation adds.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: Invoked whenever a character looks towards the camera and pauses. Many of the characters' speech bubbles address the show's content from an unusually Genre Savvy standpoint too. Basically everyone can be Deadpool if the Annotators will it.
    "What do you think, viewers at home?"
  • Breaking the Reviewer's Wall:
    • ASCII boots stomping on SMB3 Kootie Pie whenever she has a tantrum on the floor.
    • A blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in Captain N where Mega Man is hit by a projectile made out of annotations causing him to blink from the damage.
  • Broken Record: Volume 3 of "The Surf Music Could Have Been A Lot Worse!" makes fun of the infamous CD skip at an ill-fated Milli Vanilli concert. The hidden video at the end does more of the same.
    "...song is for- song is for- song is for-"
  • Butt-Monkey: Nobody likes Jeffrey Scott, a recurring writer for these shows.
    • Hamsteere's computer constantly breaks down, enough that it's almost a running gag.
    • The Unbreakable Annotation, which always gets destroyed.
  • Call-Back: Lots. Watching any most recent episode by these guys will likely be full of references to past series they've annotated, though they try to keep it accessible to first-time viewers.
  • Call-Forward: Since Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World were annotated first, the Super Show run occasionally references them.
  • Calvinball: Referenced in Captain N season 2, episode 8, where Simon is made to say "All of our games turn into Calvinball" after being attacked and having his pants pulled down by Duke.
  • Crossover Cameo: Speech bubbles from characters from previous works show up, usually without a name but instead color-coded, making them almost an In-Joke. Character allusions not from works they've annotated have included slowbeef, ElectricalBeast, and BillyMC, as well as other Retsupurae references.
    • Episode four of Bucky O'Hare features a notable cameo from Bill Cipher, represented with a yellow annotation box and complete with two black boxes for Cipher's trademark hat.
  • Canon Welding: Occurs for humor. Examples:
    • Sonya and Guile both work for Escher.
    • The Mikes from Captain N and Cartoon All-Stars are the same person.
    • Both the Season 8 trailer and the Annoverse: The Animated Series short feature dozens of these in the background of many shots.
  • Cartoon Creature: Expect annotators to draw special attention to animal characters who look unidentifiable as to what they're supposed to be.
    What the FUCK are you?
  • Caustic Critic: If they can think of a better way a scene could have gone, they won't say it nicely. Also see Sophisticated as Hell.
  • Censor Box: This appears any time something appears suggestive. In Captain N they frequently appear over where Duke's anus would be. In Donkey Ollie, a big one reading "Trust me, I'm doing you guys a favor." comes up to censor an extended shot of Ollie's mutilated body.
  • Cerebus Syndrome: If the show they're annotating turns particularly low in quality, dark or just plain offensive, people will stop making jokes and instead offer serious critical analysis on why the scene is bad.
    • Subverted with "Tricky People". It went to some dark places, which meant that there were a number of awkward moments where none of the annotators said anything. Some feel that it was one of the darkest things the annotators have faced so far. But then by the end, the sheer Narm of the whole thing caused the jokes to come back
    • "Our Friend, Martin" went into this territory frequently. It used real archive footage of Civil Rights protesters being attacked by the police, uses Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination as a catalyst for the third act, and generally does not sugarcoat any of the struggles Dr. King went through.
  • Child Hater: If an episode has a child guest character or involves the cast being turned into children, the annotators won't much care for it.
    • The closest exception is Julio from the Paperboy episode of Captain N. He was mocked (like everything else) for selling newspapers that he knew brainwashed people. But many were touched that he would let his grades go to hell to make money for his family in secret after his dad lost his job. And even with the Unfortunate Implications the annotators agreed that Julio's illiteracy was genuinely topical.
    • Willy DuWitt from Bucky O'Hare also became another exception to a few of the annotators by the end of that series. Though this was mostly due to the fact that Bucky himself was ultimately useless in comparison and Willy proving to be somewhat competent.
  • Christmas Special: "Christmas Comes To Pac-Land", "We Wish You a Turtle Christmas" and "He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special".
    • First-Ever Intermission Month happened in December.
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
    • Mocked. In particular, the last episode of Street Fighter with Ryu and Ken has an annotation where Ken says that he's "borrowing" Blanka's technique since Blanka's no longer in the show. Also see Left Hanging.
    • Many of the intermissions; while some of them have established timeless running gags like the Dr. Rabbit cartoons, others are relatively forgotten. Sometimes subverted when annotators drop a joke or two to reference the obscure shows. Even then, this tends to happen only during other intermissions.
    Polaris: Quit the daydreamin' Pancada, you know I feel about you-u!
  • Clip Show:
    • In a rather interesting take on the format, Street Fighter ended with a music video showcasing the series' craziest moments.
    • "Five Years: The Annotated Anniversary Special!" is this, with the most memorable clips from the series 5-year tenure getting re-riffed by a new generation.
  • Cold Ham: Due to incompetent dubbing, Dr. Gori from Spectreman speaks with a calm whispery voice despite the footage clearly showing him bombastically shouting and gesturing.
  • Collective Groan: Pretty common. The biggest ones include the "red/blue segregation" episode of Super Mario Bros. 3, the return of The Nutshack, The Little Panda Fighter, the first Dingo Pictures production, Anything from Sonic SatAM Season 2 and the infamous Head Pun Song from Donkey Kong Country.
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
    • Speech bubbles usually match up with their attributed characters.
    • Annotator comments often are as well, to make them somewhat identifiable. In general:
      • Avirosb: Green background with white text, but since 2015 has used random colors.
      • Irrelevant402: Started with weird combos then settled on black-white (sticks to the right) with Captain N.
      • ReloadXPsiPlays: Blue/cyan (lower right).
      • MrGuyPwnsYou: Started with light blue, now light purple (tends towards the top).
      • ZetsubouSensei005: Transparent/black (top left).
      • HurpDurpManBry: Started with multiple colors, finally settled with dark blue on the lower right.
      • Hamsteere: Red-orange, (top left)
      • Cyberguy64: Cyan, (top right)
      • VonClutch: Slightly different Dark Blue (top left)
      • MagnumBill91: Maroon (lower left)
      • Mr. Yoshbert: Yellow (lower left)
      • NewStuffs: lemon yellow (lower left) and black (narrating only, upper left)
      • ShiningPokeStar: Green (lower left)
  • Comically Missing the Point: During the eponymous song and dance number of "Tricky People", a lot of sympathy was shown for the man asking for help finding his lost puppy. When offered free cash by a potential child molester, all the annotators had to say to it was "Well hey, free cash."
  • Companion Cube: Starting with Super Mario Bros. 3, random black specks on the screen have come to be known as Doug the Bug.
  • Continuity Cavalcade: The season 2 premiere of Archie's Weird Mysteries features a deluge of references to all the strange things that happened last season to highlight the show's abuse of Status Quo Is God.
  • Cordon Bleugh Chef: The whole topic of Let's Make An Annotated Sandwich was, of course, making a sandwich. The Annotators were not prepared for how horrible 1950s food was like, and reacted as such. This wasn't helped by the two female demonstrators making the food the worst way possible.
    • Unsurprisingly, Kowasaki in the Kirby riff was presented like this. Though even the annotators had to admit it looked good if nothing else.
  • Couch Gag:
    • Started with changing the words on the Ctrl+Alt+Del title card and expanded to changing the title cards of absolutely everything, including any writing credits.
    • The Super Mario Bros. Super Show episodes include the end credits in every episode as well, with another song often replacing them. Most often, this is a foreign-language version of "Do The Mario" or the Sonic Underground opening. Overlaps with Credits Gag.
  • Crazy Enough to Work: The reason for the word "experiment" in the name of the first shared-account channel — nobody was certain that having multiple people log in and annotate simultaneously would actually work.
  • Credits Gag:
    • Once per series, the end credits of the show are displayed for everyone to annotate. In Ctrl+Alt+Del, the credits were left in every time to lampoon the episode-specific credits gags. More recently, the credits are shown twice per season, once at the start and once at the season finale.
    • As mentioned under Couch Gag, The Super Mario Bros Super Show ends most episodes replacing the song "Do the Mario" with another theme song, often a foreign-language version. They typically come complete with misheard lyrics — or completely original ones if the replacement tune has none to begin with.
  • Crisis Crossover: Of a cosmic religious sense. Pastor Daniel from the Super Kids was able to not only annoy his very own God with his constant rambling but also much of the major Greek Gods demanded he shut up, the Siddhartha Gautama was disgusted, Allah wished for some of those misguided kamikaze extremists to kill him, Odin was ready to puncture his last eye, Ra suffered trauma, Raiden woed making Daniel a guardian of the Earthrealm and Xenu found the ending ridiculous.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Luigi vs. King Koopa's army in the "Ice Capades" video. Hell, Koopa himself just blows up when he's surrounded by kids. The first part was actually pretty awesome.
  • Darker and Edgier: The "Tricky People" riff, which was kind of unavoidable given the subject matter.
    • Mocked to Hell and back with Hatred and Hitmen for Hire.
    • Despite being a largely Christian production, Donkey Ollie ended up being this, due to including things like characters being stoned to death, a few disturbing aversions of Bloodless Carnage, a story arc involving children being kidnapped and sold into slavery where a sadistic slaver whips them constantly if they even slightly underperform for any reason, and an elephant getting the skin literally scared off of it during a musical number. Understandably, the annotators wondered if the series was even meant for its target audience at points.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Sometimes it's all you can do to break down the formulaic plots of these cartoons.
  • Deconstructed Trope:
    • One episode of Archie's Weird Mysteries ends with Reggie about to get beaten up by Chuck. Since the characters don't appear in the next two episodes, the Annotators create a storyline in the annotations in which Chuck assaulting Reggie in public ends with realistic consequences; he gets expelled and arrested while Reggie spends the next week or so in a hospital.
    • There was at least one occasion this trope ended up blindsiding the annotators: In the second episode of Spectreman, one of the the Annotators briefly jokes about how the town's civilians are unharmed from the monster attack, only for the news to state hundreds of people died due to said attack.
  • Delayed Reaction: In an episode of Ctrl+Alt+Del, Ethan's Everquest character sets Lucas's on fire. The first two times Lucas just stands there in silent horror as his entire body is consumed by flames. The third time he reacts more reasonably, to the annotators' amusmement.
    "Oh? Third time's the charm apparently."
  • Department of Redundancy Department: Often happens unintentionally; the same joke or bit of Fridge Logic will appear multiple times, since the annotators didn't see each other's annotations while setting up their own. For example, in the ninth episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, there's a chorus of variants on "what could possibly go wrong?"
  • Deranged Animation: The actual stuff made by the annotators themselves dive into this quite a bit.
    • The bumpers made for the 2016 Halloween intermission stand out for having these, with the first bumper being a direct reference to the "Dedede Right Back At 'Ya" bit in Kirby, and most of the later ones using cutout animation.
    • The trailer for Season 8 has a mix of both this and Limited Animation. With a lot of annotator Lolwutburger's regular visual quirks thrown in to add to the insanity of it all. This carries on over to the animated short.
  • Deus ex Machina: Lampshaded. Racer X saves Speed Racer out of the blue so often that the Annotators start referring to his appearance as the "Racer X Machina".
  • Disney Villain Death: A defied version in Mortal Kombat has these gems:
    "Is it too much to ask for a Disney Villain Death?"
    "Okay good I was about to ask why he forgot he could do that."
  • Does Not Like Spam: The Annotators have a field day with this over a Quaker Oatmeal commercial featured in the first episode of Kidd Video.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: ASCII penises are often added to alter the meaning of characters' motions, and pause annotations isolate anything that accidentally looks suggestive.
  • Dog Got Sent to a Farm: In episode 15 of Donkey Kong Country, when Dixie Kong is upset that her pet lobster Thermidor ran away, an annotation makes Donkey Kong wonder if it's a bad time to tell her that Thermidor got sent to a farm.
  • Don't Explain the Joke: Hoo boy, did they get on Ctrl+Alt+Del's case for this or what? And then they'll do it themselves.
    "Y'see the joke is: Yoshi eats everything."
  • Downer Ending: Sort of. There are lots of attempts to shoehorn one in every time a scene fades to black. Then they get better.
  • Driven to Suicide: Particularly bad scenes will often have an annotator wondering when the cyanide will kick in.
    • Gori's death in Spectreman is one. which caused the annotators to feel genuine sadness when he died.
  • Dumbass Has a Point: In "It's A Wonderful Life" in Donkey Kong Country, DK locks up the Crystal Coconut and is berated by Cranky for it. Most of the Annotators jumped to DK's defense immediately due to the Crystal Coconut constantly being more trouble than it's worth despite its abilities to grant wishes.
  • End of an Era: The title of the Annotators' final intermission month using the YouTube editor.
  • Epic Fail: In Sonic Underground episode 5, when Sleet insists on ramming fallen trees that are trapping his forces, people's comments were none too kind.
  • Erotic Dream: Annotators make a lot of characters have these when sleeping, mainly a Running Gag with Cranky dreaming of Tiny and Kirby dreaming of Ribbon.
    • Exaggerated in episode 24 (Actually episode 50) where almost every character is made to have an erotic dream when sleeping.
  • Establishing Series Moment: When a new series starts, you can generally tell how it'll go depending on the reactions of the commentary.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: Make a racially or culturally insensitive joke in front of these guys. We dare you.
    • After wanting to do The Nutshack and Beauty and Warrior, Irrelevant had an "oh crap" moment when Dingo Pictures reared its ugly head.
    • Sure, the annotators love to make "come get some candy in my van" cracks, but when an actual pedophile is the antagonist in "Tricky People" there are zero jokes in his defense and even some cheering for Yello Dyno when he takes matters into his own hands.
    • Typically they dislike child characters and scrappies, yet shockingly, many announced how disgusted they were with the death of the Gold Dragon in the second Dragon's Den episode of Captain N. Yes this is even after the Gold Dragon's baby form was a palette swap of the dreaded Puff. Basically, the writers killed off a five-minute-old creature with zero thoughts of the implications.
    • The annotators' version of Donkey Ollie's God is usually an angry jackass in response to people praying to him, Ollie especially. However, when children who are currently enslaved pray for freedom, God immediately and genuinely states that he's sending help.
  • Even the Subtitler Is Stumped:
    • Happens at one point during Captain N, with the "translation" of Mother Brain's lines.
    • Happens again during the tenth episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, with the mondegreen lyrics for the German theme.
  • "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Happens a lot, especially with captions turning it into King Harkinian's laugh from The Faces of Evil.
  • Evil Is Petty: Remarked on in the third Spectreman episode, where the plot gets kicked off by Karas kidnapping and horribly mutating some random guy because he accidentally got water on Karas's jacket.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Played straight most of the time by simple adding "The Annotated Series" at the end of a title, with the notable exception of the Mortal Kombat cartoon ("Defenders of the Annotated Realm") and many of the intermissions.
  • Expospeak Gag: In the Cartoon All-Stars special, there's a very long and roundabout description of Mel Blanc rolling in his grave after a certain line from Bugs Bunny.
  • The Face:
    • Thus far CurtDogg, Irrelevant402, ReloadPsi, and HurpDurpManBry have been the only ones to show their faces.
    • Avirosb, MrGuyPwnsYou, Hamsteere, Irrelevant402, and creatorofGandP are not at all shy about posting their opinions on the channel.
  • Fan Fic: Mouse Police: The Annotated Edition includes a side story in which Raiden's Defenders of the Realm incarnation (one of the Annotators' favourite characters) imprisoned each series' scrappies and forced them to watch this, breaking their wills until they either were trying to kill themselves or became babbling, nervous wrecks. The final glorious list:
    • The three Bouchedag leads died a la The Ark of the Covenant.
    • Kootie Pie became comatose while Big Mouth suffered a seizure. (Both from SMB3/SMW)
    • Phil got amnesia and might have been heading towards a more fulfilling life while Horatio frothed at the mouth.
    • Ethan (Ctrl+Alt+Del) suffered from despair.
    • Stryker (Mortal Kombat) became a nervous wreck.
    • Kid Icarus (Captain N) attempted suicide but it didn't stick.
  • Fanservice: Mocked often whenever a series (usually those by DiC) does something that isn't meant to be fetish material, yet ends up as such.
    • Doubly so if it's a Sonic series, or the episode was written by Jeffery Scott.
    • Every now and again, a character will say "This is/is not my fetish" in response to what's going on at that particular moment.
  • Fantastic Racism: Bucky O'Hare and his crew are jokingly depicted as a gang of violent anti-Toad racists.
  • Filling the Silence: Expect any scene without dialogue to be filled with speech bubbles.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode:
    • "MK4 - The Annotated Gold" has the distinction of being the first feature to be focused entirely on video game cutscenes rather than cartoons.
    • "Annotated Sex Is The Best!" is actually a Web Video parody which channel visitors voted to upload, much to the Annotators' dismay. It's unknown whether they'll put future material up to public vote.
    • Irrelevant's upcoming project/valentine/salute for the channel "Annotated Fan Fiction" was partially introduced by "Annotated Fan Fiction (Practice)".
    • "Club Mario" segments replace the usual Lou Albano segments for episode 31 of The Super Mario Bros Super Show due to Hurpdurpmanbry being unable to find an English version. It later replaced Saturday Supercade during the tail end of its run due to declining interest. it didn't go over so well...
  • From Bad to Worse:
    • First there was Bouchedags, then there was The Nutshack, then there was Jay's Life.
    • Similarly, Doctor Rabbit could never have prepared them for Dr. D.
  • Flat "What": Many times, but the most triumphant is in The Hobbit when the narrator announces Bilbo's sudden growing love for the clearly pre-teenage princess.
  • The Fundamentalist: Bibleman is depicted as this by the Annotators, obsessing over the bible even more than he actually does in the show.
  • Gratuitous Foreign Language: The annotators enjoy doing this every now and again.
    • Gratuitous Japanese: Done to Monster of the Week Sasuke in episode 8note  of Kirby towards the end. Kirby also speaks a line in it before moaning about it in English. Also pops up time and again in the scenes reinserted from the original Japanese that were trimmed out of the dub, complete with the obvious lampshading.
      • Even earlier than that, this was done with Magullah in Spectreman (also towards the end of the episode). With the creature not being able to understand the English being used by the titular character.
    • Gratuitous Spanish: The annotators mock Carla from Kidd Video for doing this at random times. Episode 9 the series also has a few scenes in the language due to the copy of the episode used for riffing.
  • Genre Savvy: The Annotators, due to the generally mediocre nature of the writing of the shows riffed, tend to very easily predict plot developments or recurring jokes.
  • Giving Up on Logic: If a show gets particularly bizarre or idiotic, especially around the end of a series, the Annotators tend to declare that they just don't give a crap anymore.
  • Ye Goode Olde Days: Frequently mocked since highlights and improvements (from hunter tribe culture to the 50s) in gender, race, sexual orientation, medicine, science and video games have made life better.
  • Grammar Nazi: Where there are typos in the shows, there will be annotations to point them out.
  • Grand Finale: As a result of the YouTube annotation editor shutting down, April 2017's line up, titled "End of an Era Intermission Month", was set up as such. With things going full circle with a riff of Ctrl+Alt+Del's first episode as done by the current annotators.
    • Often subverted with the shows themselves, as they tend to end on either cliffhangers, or simply leave the annotators Left Hanging. Kirby, Bucky O'Hare, Sonic SatAM and Spectreman are the more notable exceptions.
    • The Carmen Sandiego riff plays with this, with both the proper finale and an alternate version of the episode "Follow My Footprints" being used that killed Carmen in an avalanche for real.
  • Hair-Raising Hare: The main character of "The Bunny Rabbit Movie".
  • Heart Is an Awesome Power: Deconstructed in the riff of Double Dragon. Daj's animal control powers are used to their maximum ability, averting This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman. However the usage of his powers becomes an extreme Story-Breaker Power that demolishes any sense of tension and more or less ruins the show. So in this case Heart Is Too Awesome For It's Own Good.
  • "Here's Johnny!" Homage: Sully attempts one in Episode 4 of Danger Rangers when he and Kitty knock down a door with fire axes, but Kitty stops him.
  • Heroic BSoD: Sometimes the material is just that bad that some Annotators give up partway, or at the very least are so lost for witty remarks that they can only express their disbelief at the (lack of) quality.
  • Hijacked by Ganon: Enforced in one episode of Legend of Zelda when the Annotators get impatient waiting for Ganon to show up (which never happens in that episode) and start to add annotations of him discussing his evil plans.
  • Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Racer X to Speed Racer. See Deus ex Machina above.
  • Hypocritical Humor: Occasionally. For example, in SMBSS episode 20:
    "I mean what kind of idiotic group would enjoy overused DiC stock music?"note 

    I-Z 
  • I Am Legion: Since the axing of the collaborative annotations feature, it's no longer possible to hover over an annotation and see who added it, making it pretty hard to tell who's saying what. This has led to some viewers believe this is a solo project. Aside from color-coding their annotations, the annotators don't do very much to make themselves recognizable among one another, either. Among a list of almost fifty annotators, only a few stand out:
    • CurtDogg for originating the concept.
    • jmr48080 for being considered one of the funniest annotators during the beeupyou era.
    • Irrelevant402 for always picking horrible intermissions.
    • Avirosb for recording episodes and getting the ball rolling with the TheAnnotatXperiment channel.
    • ReloadPsi for essentially putting himself in some of the videos.
    • Hurpdurpmanbry for being a long-time annotator and (now former) uploader and having rather aggressive philosophy.
    • Hamsteere for being considered one of the funniest annotators during the AnnotatXperiment/AnnotationStation era.
    • DAC for being the founder of the annotated forums and one of the last few remains from pre-Super Show Era.
    • NewStuffs for being one of the most diligent modern annotators and having experience.
    • Annoying Old Party Man for archiving nearly every riff the Annotated Series has done and for having an extremely friendly personality.
    • MagnumBill91 for being considered one of the funniest new generation annotators and being well-liked by other annotators for his personality as well.
  • Ice-Cream Koan: The tai chi master in Episode 26 (actually Episode 53) of Kirby: Right Back at Ya! spouts one of these in his introduction:
    Tai Chi Master: Always remember, the tiniest stone can shine the greatest of the fish.
  • Informed Ability: One of the many things they love to rip on. Especially when the antagonists are so vaguely on the cusp of victory — The Armor of Light is one of the most triumphant examples of that.
    Pastor Dan: Now you all know that we face a very DANGEROUS enemy.
    Annotation: Perhaps we could take a few minutes to establish WHY they [NME] are so dangerous?
  • Inner Monologue: Sometimes inserted when a character is just standing there saying nothing.
  • Insistent Terminology: Don't call it a monster, call it a "kaibutsu". (Taken from an early episode of Street Fighter.)
  • Insult of Endearment: Captain N Simon was called "Faux-Simon" since he was very little like Simon's established character in the Castlevania games. As the series went on, the nickname was kept merely to tell the two versions apart with a lot less malice behind it.
  • Jump Scare: Pure audio variation - at the very end of Out Friend, Martin, the DiC Vanity Plate has the "DiC!" replaced with a ridiculously loud "NIGGERS!"
  • Just Eat Gilligan: They point it out whenever possible. For instance, "Why doesn't Felix just use his limitlessly-functional magic bag to fly to the North Pole in five minutes?"
  • Kick the Dog: Sometimes even the Annotators see some dog-kicking. One exception is in Captain N when Wombatman calls out Kid Icarus on "that 'icus' problem" — supposedly a cruel moment but lots went crazy over the in-universe acknowledgment of an annoying character trait.
  • Kid-Appeal Character: They hate these with a passion and often give lengthy rants and discussions about why they're so often terrible.
  • Killed Off for Real: Cheatsy Koopa's final appearance is reinterpreted into him accidentally jumping into a death portal and being incinerated.
    • After Oogtar disappears due to the order the shows were watched in, the Annotators decide that he was murdered and cannibalized by the rest of the cast.
    • Dr. Gori and Karas in the series finale of Spectreman, much to the Annotators' distress.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In more recent riffs, the characters are aware of the annotators' existence. And they generally don't like the presence of the little colored boxes.
  • Left Hanging: Street Fighter, in which every unresolved plot thread is listed during the final scene.
  • Leitmotif: If DiC replaces a licensed song with the "surf music" these people jump all over it — especially after it returns after a long absence in the first episode of Captain N.
  • Limited Animation: A common trait of their works, especially whenever it's something from Filmation, DiC or Hanna-Barbara. The group's own animations also wind up like this as a stylistic choice.
  • Made of Explodium:
    • The Kootie Pie tolerance meter explodes about five seconds after she begins to sing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun".
    • All the newspapers from the Paperboy episode of Captain N.
    • Mocked in Sonic Underground, where the annotators are increasingly baffled by the SWAT-bots' tendency to explode from anything.
  • Madness Mantra: Particularly with films, which get a response along the lines of "[x] more parts. [x] more parts. [x] more parts. [x] more parts." Or "At least it's not [x]. At least it's not [x]." [x] being one of the more infamous annotated targets.
  • Manipulative Editing: The Super Mario Bros. Super Annotated Show has the Legend of Zelda previews cut down to a single clip and the end title music replaced with something else.
  • Mondegreen Gag:
    • One common target is anything that sounds even vaguely like profanity.
    • Especially common during Captain N as annotators often had no idea what Mother Brain is actually saying.
    • Also from Captain N, "Havin' a Log!" from the Season Two song "Havin' a Ball". Became a minor running gag brought up whenever logs are involved.
    • Mother Brain-type subtitles were brought back for one-off character Kong Fu in Donkey Kong Country.
    • From ''ProStars episode 2, there's a kid who slurs his words:
    Andy: Bo, did you play Little League?
    Annotated Bo: I've never gone to Italy, fuck that place.
  • Men Are Generic, Women Are Special: Often when The Smurfette Principle rears its head, the female character will complain about not being allowed to be wacky, to be wrong, or to have plot focus outside of a Girl's Night Out Episode.
  • Misblamed:
    • Yes, Irrelevant is the one who whined for The Nutshack and Beauty and Warrior when intermissions were nearing. But he didn't upload them; the only feature he put up is "Annotated Fan Fiction".
    • The annotators seem to think that the Donkey Kong Country cartoon is a DiC production. It was actually produced by Nelvana and WIC Entertainment (and Hong Guang for season 2).
  • Mind Screw: Beauty and Warrior and Theevan confused annotators hard.
  • Mistaken for Masturbating: At one point King Hippo reaches into his pants for pieces of paper and briefly appears to be masturbating due to the way the scene is animated, much to the horror of the Annotators.
  • Mood Whiplash:
    • Pointed out repeatedly for Tricky People, which involved both a singing yellow dinosaur and uncomfortable scenes of implied child molestation. More so in the re-riff than in the original.
    • Pointed out during the beginning of Bibleman: A Fight For Faith where a group of thugs are robbing a factory full of bibles with the intention of burning them, and are cheerfully dancing around while loading them up.
    Annotation: Read your Bible everyday- or THIS COULD BE YOU
    • Our Friend, Martin constantly switches between typical preachy '90s DiC incompetence and showing the real-life trials and tribulations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, complete with real archive footage.
    • The Adventures Of The American Rabbit starts off as a standard riff, but then devolves into a ragefest during the New York segment.
    • The Adventures Of Donkey Ollie repeatedly stunned annotators with how often it changed its tone between scenes.
  • Morality Pet: Sometimes the annotators serve as these to one another to keep everyone in line, calling out child molestors or horrible ethnic stereotypes. In particular, Irrelevant tries to befriend all religions, and mocks extremists in general.
  • Ms. Fanservice: The Dark Queen from Battletoads and Alyssa Milano from the Ice Capades special both have "DAT SHOULDER."
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Sometimes Irrelevant thinks he goes a little too far... sometimes. He admitted that he played up Game Boy from Captain N as the worst thing ever, based on memories of hating Game Boy as a kid but tolerating Kid Icarus and Mega Man.
  • Mythology Gag: Given that just about every Captain N episode gets some element of the games wrong, correcting remarks flare up all over the place.
  • The Narrator: The Annotators (usually NewStuffs) will either take on the role, or more commonly, give a pre-existing one additional lines.
  • Necessarily Evil:
    • Why Irrelevant likes pushing for Bile Fascination every once in a while. Sometimes it is good to rage on something horrible and it helps appreciate the stuff that's So Bad, It's Good.
    • YouTube itself, given what triggered the creation of TheAnnotatXperiment.
  • Negative Continuity: Abused by Archie's Weird Mysteries, where the show always treats paranormal activity as though it's unproven despite the absurd amounts of strange things that happen to the cast, infuriating the Annotators.
  • Never Say "Die": Repeatedly mocked.
    Character: Destroy them!
    Annotation: But don't kill them!
    • Also inverted in the uncommon cases where a show does use "kill" or "die".
  • New Powers as the Plot Demands: Happens constantly, most noticeably in the various Sonic The Hedgehog cartoons, where the Annotators note how Sonic seems to gain a new ability whenever he faces something that could even remotely be a threat.
  • Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Doogan from "Dr. Rabbit Comes to School".
  • No Ending: Many of the shows riffed were Cut Short, with the result that they tend to have very lackluster finales that answer little. This happens so often that the Annotators were rather caught off-guard when Spectreman actually had a decent finale that wrapped up all the loose ends fairly well.
  • No Party Like a Donner Party: Oogtar's fate, according to the Annotators.
  • Nostalgia Filter: Generally averted.
    • Many of the series are based on late 80s/early 90s video games and the annotators are loathe to admit these shows do justice to any of those games.
    • There are also many derogatory remarks about 80s/90s fashion and lingo, and how the shows age poorly as a consequence.
    • One instance of playing this straight is Irrelevant considering Game Boy more tolerable than he remembered but Kid Icarus and Mega Man as much worse.
  • Not Bad:
    • Occasionally, one or two Annotators will compliment the plot in general for being (relatively) well-thought-out and interesting.
    • At least one of them complimented Ganon teleporting to his throne, and even more so when he teleported to stand sideways on the wall.
    • While others mostly disliked it, Captain N season 2, episode 8 had small praise for its ending, where the Dwarves and Elves go back into fighting right after settling their differences, judged as realistic by at least one annotation and comment due to problems like racism taking a long time to fix.
    • Some dramatic lines are complimented for good writing and delivery.
    • Some viewers have approved of DK's singing voice in Donkey Kong Country.
      • From the same series, the songs Pirates' Scorn, Booty Boogie, No One's Gonna Make a Monkey Out of Me, The Mirror Never Lies, One Of Us, This Friendship Is Wrong, both of Leo Luster's songs, and Gotta Get It Back! Take It Back! are the better received ones in the series going from how each of them either lacks annotations (see Gotta Give It Back! Take It Back!), or lacks annotations that are outright insulting or otherwise negative towards the song (for example, I'm Leo Luster).
  • Not That There's Anything Wrong with That: Eggplant Wizard and King Hippo — just make them an official couple already!
  • N-Word Privileges: Parodied in the My Friend Martin riff, with the animated Martin Luther King's speeches getting dubbed over with horribly inappropriate rap songs where the singers scream "nigger" every two seconds.
    • This is said by Savage Dragon at one point in their riff of that series.
  • Ocular Gushers: An annotater's edit in the Donkey Kong Country episode "Klump's Lumps" is made to give this impression when Klump is wailing and flailing on a log.
  • Oh, Crap!: The somewhat unexpected appearance of parts 2-4 of The Nutshack, and later The Little Panda Fighter.
    • A lot of "surprise" intermission videos can get this reaction, like (now taken down) Least I Could Do Pilot and Chichi Miko.
  • Ominous Visual Glitch: Episode 10 of ProStars has a lot of glitches in the video, which the annotators take notice of.
    THE GLITCH IS DEVOURING ME WHOLE
  • On The Next Episode Of Catchphrase:
    • Season two of Super Duper Sumos has "Open your eyes for the next sumosize."
    • Danger Rangers has "Ah! Danger Ranger da!" from the show's Korean dub.
    • ProStars uses Michael Jordan's "Don't worry, ProStars are on the way."
  • Once an Episode: Certain shows get this treatment. "X sez/says", as a tribute to Sonic Says, appears in the Mortal Kombat cartoon whenever a character has a moral to teach.
  • Out of Order: invoked
    • They swapped episode 5 and 7 of the third season of Captain N. Why? Because episode 5 was the final episode where the entire main cast as well as Mother Brain, King Hippo, and Eggplant Wizard appeared together.
    • Spectreman usually skipped chunks of the series, because they were doing the most notable episodes. This led to Annotators being confused at whether or not something has been explained, or if Spectreman's just getting a new power.
    • Kirby is set up to be air this way too, if airing "Kirby's Duel Role" as episode 2 is of any indication.
    • Street Sharks is also aired out of order.
  • Overly Long Gag: The title of Sonic Undergound will invariably have any or all of the mondegreens "On The Ground", "And A Graph", "Rubber Band", "Sir Nick The Rebel", "It's Annie Clarabel", "Kinda Growled", and "So Nick Ander's Crown" tacked on.
  • Over Used Running Gag: Bucky O'Hare has a running joke/plot point about the toads being terrified of Betelguesean Berserker Baboons which occurs in multiple times in almost every episode. By the end of the show, the Annotators are making no effort to hide how sick of it they are.
  • Pac Man Fever: Mercilessly lampshaded at times, especially considering 99% of these cases are in cartoons based on games — something you'd expect to get it right!
  • Playing Pictionary: Annotators have fun trying to identify strange or out-of-place shapes. Examples:
    • Xbox 360 games packaged in VHS cases in an episode of Ctrl+Alt+Del.
    • Mother Brain's army wielding giant pizza cutters in Captain N.
  • Political Overcorrectness: Joked about. When a Danger Rangers villain tells the kids they can't ride a vehicle in the race because that might give them an unfair advantage, one annotator calls him a "politically correct asshole".
  • Politically Incorrect Hero: Guile and Mega Man are depicted as casual misogynists who berate their female allies for trying to help. Meanwhile Bucky O'Hare and his crew are depicted as mammal supremacists performing hate crimes against toads.
  • Pungeon Master: The cast of the Super Mario cartoons can't seem to go five minutes without making some kind of pun about pasta. The Annotators consider it one of the show's worst failings.
    • Annotators themselves are guilty of making these, most of the time following a bad one from the show itself whenever annotator's not expressing disgust.
  • Pyrrhic Victory: Because Irrelevant didn't know how to upload he clamored/whined for Beauty and Warrior to be annotated... and he finally got it! Only problem is what came before it was Mouse Police — a film that made less sense, had poorer animation, and was dubbed awfully, all of which helped to make Beauty and Warrior shrink to So Okay, It's Average during the same weekend intermission!
  • Quip to Black: A few of these are inserted, and they come complete with sunglasses made out of black box annotations. YEEEEAAAAHHHHHHH!!!
  • Reference Overdosed: It's based on MST3K and the subject matter is overwhelmingly cartoons and/or video games — this was unavoidable. Also see Running Gag and Shout-Out.
  • Remember the New Guy?: Thanks to skipping some episodes, Killamari's introduction comes out of nowhere.
    "The fun of skipping episodes; the collective "Who the fuck are you?""
  • Retirony: When CurtDogg was uploading Street Fighter: The Annotated Series on the beeupyou channel, the collaborative annotation feature was discontinued with only two episodes to go.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: Just about any pair of annotators. For example, Irrelevant believes in being aggresive and striking at as many works as possible, while Avirosb prevers focus firing when intermissions occur.
  • Religious Edutainment: A regular target, Bibleman in particular, for the annotators during intermissions. Armor of Light, the Mormonism short, Joshua and The Promised Land and JayJay The Jet Plane also count.
    • The Adventures of Donkey Ollie serves as the group's first full series with this trope in play. Though it too started as a one-off during the 2016 Christmas intermission.
  • Rhymes on a Dime: The ad-libbed lyrics for the surf music throughout season 1 of Captain N don't usually rhyme until the chorus.
    • Attempted in the fifth anniversary when it got to the recap for "Night B4 Christmas".
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: At times.
  • Running Gag: Enough to have their own page.
  • Sarcasm Failure: At times. An unfortunate side effect of it being all done in text.
  • Say My Name: A monster rising from a bayou in an early Captain N episode shouted "Captain N!" in a manner similar to Strong Bad singing Trogdor. Cue suggested alternate lyrics.
  • Science Is Bad: The plot of Episode 4note  of Street Sharks involves Paradigm attempting to mutate the citizens of Fission City via a pill that he pretends is a vaccine against it. Cue jokes about how the writers of the show were anti-vax.
  • Spiritual Successor: The Annotated Series is this to the "TV mock reviews" from the late 2000's-early 2010's age of YouTube in a way (both have a similar format with annotations making fun of the video), except the TV mock reviews were done by trolls (or really annoyed British TV euthanists depending on who you ask) while the annotators make fun of stuff just for fun and are anti-trolling for the most part.
  • Seasonal Rot: invoked The Annotators tend to notice drops in quality rather easily.
    • Captain N's third season was plagued with an 11-minute format, half of the cast not being present for the episodes, and losing what little coherency the series had up to that point.
    • invoked Donkey Kong Country's second season was disliked for half the cast becoming much more unlikable, the plots more often than not relying on characters forgetting K. Rool's the series antagonist, clumsier humor, and the animation style becoming much uglier.invoked
    • Archie's Weird Mysteries ratcheted up a lot of the characters' very worst traits, with even fan-favorite Reggie, after a three month absence, becoming rather hated, and episodes became much more boring and repetitious. By the end of the series, people just wanted it to be done.
  • Self-Deprecation: They all tend to make fun of themselves from time to time, such as claiming to have no lives.
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: See the Spoiler entry below.
  • Series Fauxnale: The sheer amount of annotations for The Hobbit, Foodfight!, and Doug Live, ending with the climax of Super Hornio Brothers (a spoof porno of the Mario series) would have made a good finale. This wasn't the intention, and the channel stayed up despite expectations that Hornio would land the project in hot water.
  • Serious Business: Apparently The Nutshack and a number of other horrible shows are akin to nuclear weapons. Make a threat with one and people will do whatever it takes to stop them being uploaded.
    • The whole shtick with HurpDurpManBry, most notable example is his reaction to Donkey Kong Country Season 2 Episode 9 "Head Pun Song" which isn't played for laughs.
  • Shameless Self-Promotion: Just about all the material they annotate comes across as this.
    • Played with in "Annotated Daydream" which was uploaded because one of the annotators wanted to see them make fun of his old band that had broken up.
  • Shown Their Work:
    • People will sometimes throw in actual production tidbits into their annotations.
    • "X does not work that way!"
    • During the Captain N episode "Videolympics", Kevin is made to suggest "Swimming gala?" when Mother Brain issues her challenge. The letter "N" on a letterman jacket signifies being on a school's swimming team. Naturally the annotators were delighted to learn he really was on the swimming team.
  • Shout-Out: Plenty, so they get their own page.
  • Sincerity Mode: Surprisingly common when you take into account all the moments that fall under Not Bad, Cerebus Syndrome, Shown Their Work, Dude, Not Funny!, and so on.
  • Silly Simian: Monkeys and apes are a common feature in the shows riffed, frequently leading to jokes relating to Donkey Kong.
  • Sophisticated as Hell: Sometimes there are well thought-out analyses of pacing problems and inconsistent characterization, with some swear words thrown in.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: Invoked during the My Friend Martin riff. See N-Word Privileges above.
  • Spared by the Adaptation: Ironically subverted by having Cheatsy Koopa, one of their favourite characters, run into some kind of death portal in his final scene. Given that they annotated Super Mario Bros. 3 after Super Mario World, the original canon had him going on to make many appearances in the next series.
  • Spoiler:
    • "GAME BOY IS COMING"
    • If a plot point is brought up it will be highlighted.
    • Sonic Underground's theme song proclaims "Will the prophecy come true?!" The annotators immediately respond with "NO" and "Spoiler: They never find their mother."
  • Spoof Aesop:
    • The moral of Cartoon All-Stars is apparently "take drugs and all your favorite cartoon characters will show up to talk to you."
    • The DS Lite sketch from Ctrl+Alt+Del Episode 5: Eating disorders make you beautiful!
    • Episode 9 of Donkey Kong Country has "BUY ATARI" as the moral (as a reference to that episode's commercial breaks being nothing but Atari commercials).
    • One episode of Yo! Yogi has "Bees don't give a shit about your manners! RULES OF NATURE!"
    • In the first episode of Danger Rangers, Fallbot warns the audience not to create artificial life or the revolution will come.
    • In Episode 2 of Danger Rangers, when Sully and Kitty tell the audience that guns shouldn't be played with, Kitty asks kids to write to their congressmen to repeal the second Amendment.
    • Father of the Pride's moral is "if you fuck elderly women, you can have yourself a fancy casino."
  • Squick: invoked Everyone's reaction to Chichi Miko, an ecchi visual novel that heavily involves incest, lactation, and truly humongous breasts. Especially the ending, where the protagonist has children with (among other people) his own mother... and then proceeds to get his own children pregnant.
  • Status Quo Is God: Mocked a lot since they're not big fans of episodic series without story arcs. When there are continuity nods or signs of character development the praise is heaped on.
  • Stay in the Kitchen: Discussed in Mega Man; in the show's early episodes Mega Man keeps trying to insist that Roll not go in the field with him causing the Annotators to mock him, under the belief that it's this trope. But than as the show goes on, Roll seems to become increasingly incompetent and useless, causing several of the Annotators to actually agree that Roll shouldn't be out in the field and noting that Mega had good reason to not want her help.
  • Stealth Mentor: They interpret Simon Belmont from Captain N as this, essentially pretending to be dumb in order to encourage the rest of the team to grow into proper heroes themselves.
  • Stranger Danger: The subject matter of Tricky People, Professor Garfield: Internet Safety, and Boys Beware. Mocked and deconstructed to Hell and back, especially with the last one.
  • Stylistic Suck: Any time the annotators make something, it tends to be this:
    • Irrelevant's fan fiction has shades of this.
    • The Sonic "tribute". Done up similarly to a AMV made by a teenager. In a similar vein, the tributes to Captain Lou Albano and Roddy Piper as well.
    • HurpDurpManBry's Let's Play of Bubsy was intended to make fun of terrible LPs. It worked a little too well.
    • The Halloween bumper released before Solbrain: Knight of Darkness, which takes a page from Dedede: Right Back At Ya! and makes everything look like an amateur's first animation.
  • Sudden Downer Ending: Hurpdurpmanbry wrote some very depressing endings to the members of the N-Team in credits of the final Captain N episode. The only characters he gave mercy to were the Ensemble Darkhorses — Simon, Duke, King Hippo, Eggplant Wizard, and Game Boy.
  • Suddenly Speaking: Often done to silent or unintelligible characters (or inanimate objects). Most prominently with R2-D2 in the Droids riff, most of the monsters from Spectreman and more recently, Kirby.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Many new series and intermissions will have the main characters' names in the opening credits replaced by the names of characters from Ctrl+Alt+Del.
  • Sword of Damocles: Before an intermission that looked to be sparse, Irrelevant threatened to upload The Nutshack — leading to several other uploads.
  • Take That!: Admit it, of the shows these guys annotate, even when you were a child you thought they were a bit rubbish.
    • Aside from this, when the star of "The Annotated Bunny Rabbit Movie" begins to dance in an awkward fashion, it's said to still be "better than the dance from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010)".
    • "YouTube Copyright School" gave many annotators a chance to call out on YouTube's unprofessional standards on what is considered "copyright infringing". As well to the WWE for being dicks.explination
    • The April Fools 2015 video was a huge Take That! at a banned Annotation Station forum user named GoseiGreen. She would constantly suggest preschool shows for riffing material despite being told that they weren't worth annotating, insisted that the Annotators had to take her suggestions and that it was their "job" to annotate bad material, created multiple sockpuppet accounts after getting repeatedly banned, and even tried to suggest a new set of rules regarding suggestions after not taking the hint.
    • One was made towards The Family Circus being canceled (in universe) in the Woody Woodpecker recycling video.
    "My prayers were finally answered!"
    • Episode 22note  of Kirby manages to do this all over the place, with several of the (in-universe) drawings themselves being attributed to the likes of Toby Fox, Andrew Dobson, annotators HurpDurpManBry and NewStuffs, Rebecca Sugar and perhaps most scathingly, John Kricfalusi. Thrice.
      • Other things, like outsourcingnote  and the "CalArts" style were also mocked.
    • Their last commercial compilation on The Station took multiple jabs towards YouTube's removal of annotations, as well at their takedowns of both I Hate Everything and Team Four Star.
    • SkakoanScarecrow gives one to World of Warcraft's story at the end of the fifteenth commercial compilation.
    "THE ALLIANCE AND HORDE CONFLICT IS A CANCEROUS GROWTH ON THE STORY THAT BLIZZARD KEEPS COMING COMING BACK TO BECAUSE IT MAKES FOR EASY MARKETING PASS IT ON!"
    • Episode 2 of Kidd Video makes a few jabs at Prince's music.
    • The first episode of Street Sharks has a few jabs at anti-vaxxers.
  • Tempting Fate: "THE UNBREAKABLE ANNOTATION"
  • 10-Minute Retirement: It isn't too odd for one of the annotators to announce they are taking a break from mocking stuff.
  • The '50s: Mocked in Captain N S2E4:
    Mayor Of Tetris: Well I'll be a son of a cube! You're round faced!
    Annotation: Hmm you're different from us. Are we going to have to chase you out like those Muslims, queers and blacks?
    ...
    Mayor: We haven't had any round faces for hundreds of years!
    Annotations: And we're going to keep it that way! / We can start a lynch mob, just like the old days! / Because we killed them all!
  • The Unintelligible: During season 2 of Captain N, Mother Brain seems even harder to understand.
  • Theme Tune: Usually considered one of the high points of any given show they riff on.
    • Bragging Theme Tune: common occurrence, and are usually accepted (as Bucky O'Hare, Kirby and Spectreman prove). But even they got annoyed with the theme to Skippy the Bush Kangaroonote .
    • Expository Theme Tune: Another common occurrence, but not something they take too kindly to by comparison. Particularly evident with Sonic Underground, Darkstalkers, Bibleman and Savage Dragon.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: invoked Sometimes Annotators will complain about cool or at least interesting ideas that could have been done better in the shows riffed. One example at the end of Spectreman's 7th (actually 27th) episode, has at least one person wondering why a showdown of several previous monsters, along with an opponent with Spectreman's abilityset, with Spectreman caught in the middle wasn't a two-parter, but more or less just a standalone one-off.
  • This Is Gonna Suck: Every series and intermission starts out like this. Not entirely unjustified, however.
  • Throw the Dog a Bone: Whenever the annotators' least favorite character in a series does something redeeming.
  • Title Sequence Replacement: The annotators love doing this, be it the Alternative Foreign Theme Songs used during the TAX era to more elabarate instances during the Annoverse era. With some instances swapping out the regular intro animation for something completely different, such as The Archie Show intro for episode 2 of Archie's Weird Mysteries, or the first level of Donkey Kong for the original riff of the Donkey Kong Country episode "The Big Switcharoo".
  • Took a Level in Dumbass: This happened to King Dedede according to annotators, arguably after annotated Episode 30Note. His accent underwent a Flanderization to the point of his dialogue being almost incomprehensible, and his behaviour became far more manchildish and egoistical, rather than just being straight up sympathetically evil like the show usually potrayed him beforehand.
  • Took a Level in Jerkass: To annotators, this officially happened to Reggie Mantle towards the end of Archie's Weird Mysteries, with him being a whiny self-centered loser who never gets any screentime instead of being a show-stealing lovable jerk who more often than not is right about our protagonists. It went so bad people started wishing for a "Reggie Tolerance Meter".
    • The vitriol against Reggie would only intensify in The Archies Meet Jugman. Not only does he act like a colossal dick towards his Robot Buddy sidekick Bits throughout the movie. He also attempts to profit off of the recently-revived Jugman's existance without caring about the safety or well-being of either Jugman or the rest of the gang. All of this happening because Veronica turned down his offer to go to a school dance with him. Needless to say, the annoatators were estatic when the concequences finally caight up to him at the end of the movie.
    • Dedede combined this with an excessive case of Took a Level in Dumbass (as mentioned above) towards the end of Kirby: Right Back at Ya!. Getting to a head with the episode "Shell-Shocked" all about wanting to smash open Escargoon's shell for his own selfish gain. The fact he became The Unintelligible around this time didn't help his case.
      • Upped a notch during "De-pretiation Day", where his behavior is unfavorably compared to post Season-12 Homer Simpson and Caillou. Kirby also gives him a speech comparing Dedede's downfall to that of Reggie's near the end of Part 1.
  • Time for Plan B: After many ignored attempts to convince YouTube to restore collaborative annotations, the shared channel was set up.
  • Took A Level In Bad Ass: People sure liked the Luigi from the Ice Capades that took on Koopa's army all by himself with a bazooka-rifle.
    • Similarly, the Swatbots in Satam were beloved for being so much more competent than the ones in Underground, which seemed to explode at the slightest touch.
  • Token Evil Teammate: Irrelevant, who's completely willing to use particularly bad shows to blackmail the other Annotators into getting things done.
  • Totally Radical: They hate this.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: invoked Due to a lot of the shows they riff generally being as old as a decade or more, they tend to be mocked for how poorly they've aged, from the Shout Outs that were new no longer being so, to politics that have changed since the show went off air, to the fashion and lingo that have since become outdated. Sometimes they're even made fun of for having been outdated at the time they were made due to Production Lead Time.
  • Un-Paused: Less common now, but stray frames and sounds from previous episodes or cut credit rolls left in by editing errors prior to upload would be subject to at least one joke.
    "Uk!"
  • Unusual Euphemism: "Miscarriage" for, oh, pretty much anything.
  • Victory Is Boring: According to alternate character interpretation, Eggplant and Hippo decide to "fall" for the heroes' ploy of I Surrender, Suckers because they prefer the challenge of being villainous sidekicks.
  • Villain Decay: Complained about with Arachnid in Savage Dragon, who started off as fairly creepy and menacing, but his first appearance in season 2 features him as far more humorous and comical.
  • Villainy-Free Villain: Lampshaded and mocked with the sexual predators in Boys Beware. The Annotators note how the predators are never actually shown engaging in the molestation the narration claims they're committing, with the result that all the characters and the narrator look like hyper-paranoid idiots/bigots.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds:
    • Annotators Avirosb and Irrelevant in the early TheAnnotatXperiment days
    "I remember when Arachnid was slightly more terrifying than now.."
  • Wall of Text: Used occasionally, but when Super Duper Sumos was annotated, these got used to block the extremely repetitive transformation sequences.
  • Wham Episode:
    • The Nutshack. The Annotators knew going in that it was bad, but they didn't understand just how horrible it was.
    • Tricky People, mainly because of how unexpectedly dark the PSA got.
    • Felix The Cat Saves Christmas seemed to just come out of nowhere.
    • The Adventures of the American Rabbit, specifically the final act in New York. This segment was so stupid, it brought the Annotators to Felix levels of anger. This would get parodied in the re-riff of the movie. With the annotators themselves admitting that the orignal rage against it was (mostly) uncalled for.
  • Wham Line: In a meta sense, Our Friend, Martin has one.Context
    White Mother: I want you people to stay away from my boys, you hear?
    Miles: Say what? "You people"?
    Miles' White Friend: Miles and I are best friends! We hang out all the time!
    White Mother: Well, it ain't natural, I tell ya. I suggest you leave them Negros alone or the only hangin' you'll be doing with them is from a tree.
    Annotations: ...Ouch. / Dude.. wow. / ...Nope, I've got nothing. / Um... points for not sugarcoating the truth, I guess. / Jesus Christ, DiC! Calm down!
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: invoked Parodied with the playlist description for Kirby: Right Back At Ya, which jokingly suggests that the show is an allegory for the failings of capitalism.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Brought up whenever some plot point or bit character is seemingly forgotten:
    • Because the Mario cartoons were done in reverse order, Oogtar seems to disappear between shows. This gets jokingly explained as him having been "eaten for nourishment" while the heroes were traveling through snowy lands.
    • The last episode of Street Fighter features a list of all the plot points and characters that remained unresolved.
    • In the final episode of Bucky O'Hare the Annotators repeatedly note how the Air Marshall, a fairly major recurring villain, seems to have randomly disappeared despite nearly every other major character being Back for the Finale.
    • During both riffs of American Rabbit, the annotators bring up the numerous gaping Plot Holes and unresolved elements with startling regularity.
  • "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: At the end of shows, a mock epilogue in this fashion is given, describing the Annotators' fanon ideas about what happened to the characters.
  • Who's on First?: In Captain N S2E12:
    Kid Icarus: Who-icus?
    Julio: No, HOO-LI-O.
  • With Lyrics: Captain N episode 2 and onward gave lyrics to the surf music. Then in season 2, episode 8, they heard the real lyrics. Also those willing to click the "Bonus Feature" annotation that shows up at the end of some of them get an interesting treat.
  • You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Frequent with awful plot twists and resolutions.

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