MovieBob

Bob Chipman

His Channel

Yeah, I noticed there wasn’t a thread on here for this guy and his stuff. I had gone looking to discuss finding out he was dropped from The Escapist and couldn’t find any.

Too bad, he was the only thing I was going on that site for.

My feelings on Bob are:

When he's right, he's really right, and he's quite capable of making a compelling point or two. When he's wrong, he's really wrong, and he's uniquely stubborn about it. Yes I get it, you don't like the Amazing spider-man duology, that doesn't make it the second coming of the anti-christ! On the other hand you make a very compelling point when talking about orson welles and transformers.

Edited by jjjj2 on Oct 22nd 2020 at 11:38:37 AM

That's not an uncommon opinion, really.

About Bob, or reviewers in general?

About Moviebob.

He's also got some of the most obsessed trolls I've ever seen, especially for his relative level of success.

I'd say reviewers in general. The only ones who don't get the "When they're right they're AMAZING and when they're wrong they're SO OBNOXIOUS" treatment tend to be the milquetoast reviewers that waffle around a lot. "This is what I think, but it's just my opinion, and you're free to disagree, and maybe it's wrong, and in fact I don't even think it that strongly, and it's just one opinion in the sea of opinions, and also I don't think this at all anymore. You're right, whatever your opinion was at the start of this. Good day!" And that's basically garbage.

Content creators who are passionately vocal about their positions, who have very strong opinions and make no apologies for them, tend to inspire similarly strong opinions about their work from the audience that consumes it. You can tell a lot about a creator by just how strongly their fans and detractors feel about their work.

If you lob a name into a crowd and immediately hear a chorus of "BEST EVER" and "FUCK THAT ASSHOLE", then that creator is probably worth forming an opinion on. For better or worse.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 22nd 2020 at 8:53:21 AM

Still wondering why he got fired this time

I am too. I actually don't know much about Moviebob; I've just heard his name tossed around by Yahtzee and Jack Packard.

I tried to find a video about his firing to find out what it was about since I heard he was "fired for his views". That can mean a lot of things, good and bad. I found a video on You Tube talking about it, but within minutes it turned into aggressively grave-dancing the demise of an "One of the biggest SJW reviewers", which told me two things. One, no explanation of what had happened coming from this guy was going to be meritorious and two, I should definitely check out some of Moviebob's work.

People who piss off people who like to scream about "SJWs" generally have some pretty good things to say.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 22nd 2020 at 11:23:42 AM

This is a guy who said that "Nazi's ruined Eugenics" and did so as a way of being disappointed that it was ruined.

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Oct 22nd 2020 at 2:27:44 PM

The rabbit hole on Bob goes deep, but let me just say that while most of the time, people with opinions that anger the outrage mob are fairly innocuous, some of the stuff he's done is just not worth defending. Anyone who says "there are no bad tactics, only bad targets" is not someone worth defending as being just misunderstood. They are actively seeking out trouble.

Also blames the average person in the Midwest for us not having colonized the Moon yet. I'm not making that up.

Edited by Beatman1 on Oct 22nd 2020 at 2:28:17 PM

He parted ways with the Escapist after management decided to embrace Lamergate. Then new management decided to be not evil, and he and Shamus Young were invited back. More recently, he's left again, but according to himself it's just because his contract ended.

> Also blames the average person in the Midwest for us not having colonized the Moon yet. I'm not making that up.

someone from the midwest crashed his hopes and dreams of being an Astronaut probably

When it comes to that, he's talking about how every time anything even remotely progressive comes up, there's a bunch of people in rural areas who start wailing about it instantly and a lot of American politicians seem to want to please those people all the time. They're mostly whipped up by Fox News and Bob is really overstating the issue those people are.

The thing that bothers me about the sort of hate mob he has is that a lot of it is based on stuff that...is either wrong or not weird. Like, half the people who mob him on Twitter will post a picture of an overweight man in a Mario costume, apparently under the impression the picture is Bob. It's not, it's some other guy that doesn't actually look much like him at all, but it's apparently supposed to be a devastating attack? Also something about him skipping his grandmother's funeral to play a video game (didn't happen) and something about him marinating chicken in Mountain Dew once. Not actually that strange, using soda as a marinade is pretty common in a lot of places. He did make that eugenics joke though. And it was pretty obviously a joke because of how over the top it was. It was a terrible joke that he shouldn't have made, to be clear.

My read on him is that he's a really good media analyst when he wants to try, has kind of an iffy sense of humor, and he really doesn't deserve the hate mob he attracted, if only because of their bizarre incoherency and insistence on attacking him on specific, wrong, things.

The thing with the picture of the other guy is especially weird because like, Bob has videos with his face in them. It's not that hard to find out what he looks like and posting a picture of an entirely unrelated person isn't much of a gotcha.

Edited by Zendervai on Oct 22nd 2020 at 3:58:13 PM

Him skipping his dad's funeral to play Mario and him comparing The Wizard to 9/11 is from his book, iirc.

Oh, that's where that came from. ...why the hell did the hate mob still get that wrong? And I didn't know about the latter thing.

Like, I think he really can be an absolute dumbass about some things, but he's really not this weird public enemy number one that a lot of people make him out to be.

At this point I personally find Bob too utterly loathsome with his viewpoints and with a level of unjustified smug that's so insufferable that I can't ever consider watching his stuff these days, even as someone who did check out his content back in the day. He lets his deep personality flaws bleed into his work frequently and there are plenty of YouTubers with much more interesting output and far less obnoxious tendencies.

For clarification's sake, the skipping the funeral thing to play Mario is based on a misunderstanding. There was an old fanfic MST site I used to follow (its since been deleted) that MS Ted the book and included that part.

What actually happened is he included two separate anecdotes about things that happened while writing the book close together that lead to people mixing them together. One is that he would play Mario in the car outside his house at night to not wake any other family members up, and that during his grandmother's funeral (not his father's who wasn't dead at the time) he left the funeral to buy an air-conditioner for the apartment where the wake was being held because it was super hot and he'd rather be "just miserable than hot and miserable."

The part about him describing the footage of Super Mario Bros. 3 in The Wizard as being "seared into his mind like the Kennedy assassination was for his parents' generation, and 9/11 for his generation" is accurate.

Edited by IHOP on Oct 23rd 2020 at 10:35:08 AM

Just to clarify a couple of things.

First off, the Mario picture is Bob, it was from 2006 and he said it was him in one of his early Big Picture reviews. Though I agree using a picture of him from 06 is kinda dumb, especially when you've got some newer ones that make him look just as bad.

Second, the marinating chicken in Mountain Dew doesn't tell the whole story. The first is that it's part of the fact that Bob loves to be an elitist who turns his nose down at the poors, but then does something that other people see as white trash. The second part is that he "vaccuum sealed" it by putting it in a plastic bag and closing it up with duct tape, which apparently counts, and then left it in the sink for a five days. No, I'm not kidding. And yes, he got sick.

Third, that story about staying in the car while his family slept is wrong. What happened was he'd play Mario in the car until his family went to sleep before going into the house. Apparently that's not as sad as it sounds, according to the book.

As for my own views on Bob, I'd say he's like many people who when they were younger had a view of where their lives were going and are disappointed it never turned out that way. He wanted to be a critic who used his contacts to transition into film making, but his attitude and laziness kept him from making that leap. He could have just grabbed some of the other content creators who were fans of his and made something schlocky but he wanted it to be a Hollywood production and wouldn't accept anything less.

So now he's past his prime, almost 40, and suffering from a mid-life crisis that causes him to blame anyone and anything that seems like it's preventing him from the magical spaceship utopia. And because of his lack of understanding of science and logistics, he genuinely believes we'd have a Star Trek style civilisation instead of Covid if the, to use his word, 'obsoletes' had their votes taken away so Hilary could have gotten in and taken away the farming subsidies and given that money to Nasa. And he'll try to pretend that he's joking, but he says it so often that I highly doubt it.

Schlocktober: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!. All of it.

I think there's a tendency for people arguing in bad faith to exaggerate his views, probably not helped by his attempts to pass some of them off as jokes. I don't think they're entirely equivalent, but it's oddly reminiscent of how many of the people on 4chan making Nazi jokes turned out to actually be Nazis.

As much as I just don't care for his political takes, I still like his videos. I like all the weird pop-culture stuff he digs up, and I'm reasonably sure that if he likes a movie then I'm going to like it too.

Review of Bit, where he tries using the Big Picture faces in a film review. YouTube comments seem to approve. He quite likes the movie.

I mean not really. As someone who actually lives in a rural area, there are a lot of people holding back policies for a better country because they hate "Da Cultural Elites". I don't think he thinks he would be effected, and I know I as a cisgender white man won't be effected by much politics but I have friends and loved ones who are. It's like if you know any Trans people you can accuratly blame a lot of people in Trump voting states for the military ban.

Bob has good points, he just jokes a little too much about them and is a really agressive guy.

...There is no pole or attention span long enough to touch this.