The Noah/Spoony twitter account being passed around is supposedly a fake as are the rumors he's transitioning and using Patreon funds to do it. Please keep this in mind when you see it and before posting it.
Repeating: The Noah/Spoony twitter account being passed around is supposedly a fake as are the rumors he's transitioning and using Patreon funds to do it. Please keep this in mind when you see it and before posting it.
Helloooooo I'm not the Nostalgia Critic!
Channel Awesome, the parent company of That Guy With the Glasses and others, i.e. Nostalgia Critic, has had a long and sordid history in its 10 years of life. Lots of people have come and gone (Lindsay Ellis and Foldable Human and many many others), and there's been some real tragedies, like the suicide of JewWario and Spoony's very public meltdowns revolving around his apparent bipolar-ness. Recently, some former alumni have been on Twitter (basically the last 24 hours) recounting stories. It's all in various twitter threads and it is hard to follow, so I thought I would take the time to compile some of them here.
I used to follow the site quite a bit a long time ago. I really liked the goofy Nostalgia Critic videos before he started doing skits (every once in a while I will watch the Blank Check one for some reason), and Lindsay Ellis as the Nostalgia Chick was great and the launching point for her to be doing the amazing work she's done. Spoony was a favorite too when he did video game reviews like Phantasmagoria 2 and his odyssey through some of the Final Fantasy games. And, I knew of some drama before today, like some people really not liking Noah, the stuff involving the bad shows that were supposed to replace Nostalgia Critic after he retired the character, Doug Walker's "problematic" stuff involving LGBT and race issues, but there's a lot I didn't, and since I know some of you used to or still follow the site, here's the scoops.
Everything I'm going to type out should be started with the words "apparently" because I can't obviously fact-check this stuff, but these are all assertions from various people:
Doug Walker doesn't own the rights to Nostalgia Critic, the character and all other characters. Mike Michaud, the CEO and one of the original founders of Channel Awesome, does.
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/973801695494004739
Channel Awesome, you would think being a very small operated company, would be an LLC. Instead, it's a full-blown corporation, and they speculate it was done this way as a way to maybe offer people shares of the company. It's a tad on the odd side for it to be a corporation, but they may have their reasons.
https://twitter.com/CheapskateShow/status/974104388254908417
The sole owner of all of this, Mike Michaud, seems to not be the nicest of people to work with, particularly the women the site has employed over the years. He's also very difficult to get ahold of and isn't the best at communicating consistent policies to people. (there's a lot more links on this stuff you can find in the various twitter threads. While almost everyone seems to not like him, many are also ready to point out that he is not the sole problem and that the blame falls on Doug and Rob Walker as well.)
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973710304457777152
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/974023024931258368
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974019689847427072
Contracts have been an issue, where they (meaning Michaud and the Walkers) will pressure people into signing stuff to avoid lawsuits related to firings or injuries.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973997097816117248
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973997284429041666
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974206139368865792
The gaming website, Blistered Thumbs, didn't tell some of its people ahead of time the site was shutting down.
https://twitter.com/MarzGurl/status/973839128612794369
Sounds like payment was mostly about exposure on the site and free copy of the anniversary DVDs. Lots of broken promises, like the site was supposed to, in time, be less about Doug, but he kept wanting it to be mostly about him. Also, site enhancements and ways to better showcase people never materialized. There's lot of stuff about this, and a lot about Maker/Disney after the Blip apocalypse.
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973819413324615682
There's a lot more, and most of it being directed at Michaud. However, people aren't the warmest about Doug Walker either. There's similar stuff of him bullying people into doing what he wants and being callous. The Walkers would call people children for complaints or asking for increase ads on videos so the creators could make more money.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974192849255321600
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973841823474036736
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973988733933547520
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973710567574790146
In To Boldly Flee, the final anniversary video, Doug didn't tell everyone he was retiring Nostalgia Critic. Some took the announcement as if Doug was basically doing away with all on screen commentary, something that would have affected almost every contributor to the site.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974021284240740352
In Doug's original draft that Lindsay Ellis had to fight him on repeatedly, he had her character sexually assaulted. She got some of it fixed, but she still had to do "being assaulted" noises for VO in reshoots. Her original character was going to be called 60 of 9. They also didn't want to do a fight scene where she is slapped and called a bitch repeatedly.
https://twitter.com/thelindsayellis/status/974048280798777345
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973842907613532160
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974027772715782144
Doug Walker also had to be told basic things, like make sure the set had food/water. Everyone was cooped up in a hot attic waiting to shoot their scenes, and Doug gave everyone very little notice on what was being filmed. People had to explain to him basic filmmaking techniques/rules, to have a second camera, and to backup footage so it wouldn't be lost (some was anyway).
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/973848908601352192
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974213561496100865
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974216590848921601
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973853186019688449
Also, To Boldly Flee, originally to be titled "STAR SPACE: THE SEARCH FOR PLOT", is three and a half hours long, or about as long as Lawrence of Arabia.
Really, the making of To Boldly Flee sounds like something akin to The Disaster Artist.
Doug's comedic ideas/theories is that "comedy comes from misery,"all comedy comes from misery - so he'll make everybody jerks or do stupid, nonsensical things to serve the story. " and the people should be in costumes.
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973844973337677824
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973843458434764800
They never had time to learn their lines because the script was always changing.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973846677034618880
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973847350673330176
He's bad at scheduling, having people make costumes in less than two weeks time, forgetting about camera crews needing to leave and things shutting down, and so on.
https://twitter.com/MarzGurl/status/973843534347456513
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973847563399872512
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974214584897802241
Oh, and in one of the previous movies, Suburban Knights, someone was duct taped to a wall and fainted. I mentioned the contracts, but this is one of the reasons why they had them for the anniversary movies.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974434006094753792
https://twitter.com/MarzGurl/status/973996015165489152
There's a hell of a lot more, but if this document is correct, I'm over 1000 words on this. You're all welcome to go explore the threads yourselves. I limited my searching/reading to just a few individuals, that of Obscurus_Lupa, Linkara, FoldableHuman, and Lindsay Ellis. But, again, more were discussing it.
Other random stuff I didn't know. Foldable Human was on the site briefly. Never knew that. He, and here I'll explicitly use the word apparently, apparently made anti-GamerGate videos that made people angry and got him fired.
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/973825825303924739
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/974418746428112896
They had to film the game show pilot over a dozen times. Also, their massive studio/warehouse isn't used for shooting because they never sound-dampened it, and that's why so much of current Nostalgia Critic is done in the front office hallway/room.
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/974079990391218176
Here's a link to a long group Skype call where various contributors to the site aired their grievances. Apparently very little of this came to fruition. Only two newsletters came out, one of which was to announce the cancellation of all further anniversary specials for the site because of... weather.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FJO-DYK7inMmsB0YAslv8cys9-tp-IbX/view
There's a lot more, like stuff about Demo Reel, the game show they tried, the Facebook killer that was... barfiesta. And so on. There's even some stuff that others hint at that sound like big things, but that no one wants to come out and outright say; in other words, this is the stuff they're willing to talk about publicly and there might be worse stuff. It's hard parsing this stuff, so if I missed anything let me know as well as if I messed up some links. If anyone has other stuff, please feel free to post it. I know Lupa got a lot of crap, and stuff with Noah has been a saga. (Also, as a heads up, someone posted on the old site some videos a guy was making about Channel Awesome and the first video was about Noah. Turned out the guy who was making those videos is a GamerGator so if those get posted and you don't want to give him clicks/views, give a warning).
And, one last thing. Some are going to be upset by all this stuff coming out. That's to be expected. But, while you may go "I wish I never gave them any clicks/views" some of the people I've quoted who were hurt by all of this have expressed on twitter that it's ok, you didn't know, and they're somewhat grateful that they gained a following even after all of it. However...
I've spent about two hours reading and trying to compile all this crap.... so you don't have to!
*shoots gun wildly and screams*
Updates:
Their PR person, Holly Christine, and one of the very few paid people at Channel Awesome had to be escorted home by people with a baseball bat and a sword.
"Oh, hey, and who can forget the time Mike Ellis got fired and CA put me in a safe house for a few days because they were concerned he would come after me? Nothing was more strange than being escorted to my house with a group of guys with baseball bats and a sword so I could pack"
https://twitter.com/gookygox/status/974871593414545408?ref_src=twsrc^tfw&ref_url=https://s9e.github.io/iframe/twitter.min.html#974871593414545408
"To inject a bit of humor in the horror, I wish I could remember who carried the sword. I WANT to say Doug, but I'm pretty sure it belonged to Rob. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure it was Doug who tested the pepper spray by spraying it into the kitchen sink."
https://twitter.com/gookygox/status/974879076610727936
Another compilation of stuff:
http://marzgurl.tumblr.com/post/172243441932/things-that-channel-awesomes-management-has
Also, a google document is being compiled with contributions from a lot of people. I'll post it when it goes live.
Repeating: The Noah/Spoony twitter account being passed around is supposedly a fake as are the rumors he's transitioning and using Patreon funds to do it. Please keep this in mind when you see it and before posting it.
Helloooooo I'm not the Nostalgia Critic!
Channel Awesome, the parent company of That Guy With the Glasses and others, i.e. Nostalgia Critic, has had a long and sordid history in its 10 years of life. Lots of people have come and gone (Lindsay Ellis and Foldable Human and many many others), and there's been some real tragedies, like the suicide of JewWario and Spoony's very public meltdowns revolving around his apparent bipolar-ness. Recently, some former alumni have been on Twitter (basically the last 24 hours) recounting stories. It's all in various twitter threads and it is hard to follow, so I thought I would take the time to compile some of them here.
I used to follow the site quite a bit a long time ago. I really liked the goofy Nostalgia Critic videos before he started doing skits (every once in a while I will watch the Blank Check one for some reason), and Lindsay Ellis as the Nostalgia Chick was great and the launching point for her to be doing the amazing work she's done. Spoony was a favorite too when he did video game reviews like Phantasmagoria 2 and his odyssey through some of the Final Fantasy games. And, I knew of some drama before today, like some people really not liking Noah, the stuff involving the bad shows that were supposed to replace Nostalgia Critic after he retired the character, Doug Walker's "problematic" stuff involving LGBT and race issues, but there's a lot I didn't, and since I know some of you used to or still follow the site, here's the scoops.
Everything I'm going to type out should be started with the words "apparently" because I can't obviously fact-check this stuff, but these are all assertions from various people:
Doug Walker doesn't own the rights to Nostalgia Critic, the character and all other characters. Mike Michaud, the CEO and one of the original founders of Channel Awesome, does.
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/973801695494004739
Channel Awesome, you would think being a very small operated company, would be an LLC. Instead, it's a full-blown corporation, and they speculate it was done this way as a way to maybe offer people shares of the company. It's a tad on the odd side for it to be a corporation, but they may have their reasons.
https://twitter.com/CheapskateShow/status/974104388254908417
The sole owner of all of this, Mike Michaud, seems to not be the nicest of people to work with, particularly the women the site has employed over the years. He's also very difficult to get ahold of and isn't the best at communicating consistent policies to people. (there's a lot more links on this stuff you can find in the various twitter threads. While almost everyone seems to not like him, many are also ready to point out that he is not the sole problem and that the blame falls on Doug and Rob Walker as well.)
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973710304457777152
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/974023024931258368
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974019689847427072
Contracts have been an issue, where they (meaning Michaud and the Walkers) will pressure people into signing stuff to avoid lawsuits related to firings or injuries.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973997097816117248
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973997284429041666
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974206139368865792
The gaming website, Blistered Thumbs, didn't tell some of its people ahead of time the site was shutting down.
https://twitter.com/MarzGurl/status/973839128612794369
Sounds like payment was mostly about exposure on the site and free copy of the anniversary DVDs. Lots of broken promises, like the site was supposed to, in time, be less about Doug, but he kept wanting it to be mostly about him. Also, site enhancements and ways to better showcase people never materialized. There's lot of stuff about this, and a lot about Maker/Disney after the Blip apocalypse.
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973819413324615682
There's a lot more, and most of it being directed at Michaud. However, people aren't the warmest about Doug Walker either. There's similar stuff of him bullying people into doing what he wants and being callous. The Walkers would call people children for complaints or asking for increase ads on videos so the creators could make more money.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974192849255321600
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973841823474036736
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973988733933547520
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973710567574790146
In To Boldly Flee, the final anniversary video, Doug didn't tell everyone he was retiring Nostalgia Critic. Some took the announcement as if Doug was basically doing away with all on screen commentary, something that would have affected almost every contributor to the site.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974021284240740352
In Doug's original draft that Lindsay Ellis had to fight him on repeatedly, he had her character sexually assaulted. She got some of it fixed, but she still had to do "being assaulted" noises for VO in reshoots. Her original character was going to be called 60 of 9. They also didn't want to do a fight scene where she is slapped and called a bitch repeatedly.
https://twitter.com/thelindsayellis/status/974048280798777345
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973842907613532160
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974027772715782144
Doug Walker also had to be told basic things, like make sure the set had food/water. Everyone was cooped up in a hot attic waiting to shoot their scenes, and Doug gave everyone very little notice on what was being filmed. People had to explain to him basic filmmaking techniques/rules, to have a second camera, and to backup footage so it wouldn't be lost (some was anyway).
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/973848908601352192
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974213561496100865
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974216590848921601
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973853186019688449
Also, To Boldly Flee, originally to be titled "STAR SPACE: THE SEARCH FOR PLOT", is three and a half hours long, or about as long as Lawrence of Arabia.
Really, the making of To Boldly Flee sounds like something akin to The Disaster Artist.
Doug's comedic ideas/theories is that "comedy comes from misery,"all comedy comes from misery - so he'll make everybody jerks or do stupid, nonsensical things to serve the story. " and the people should be in costumes.
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973844973337677824
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973843458434764800
They never had time to learn their lines because the script was always changing.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/973846677034618880
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973847350673330176
He's bad at scheduling, having people make costumes in less than two weeks time, forgetting about camera crews needing to leave and things shutting down, and so on.
https://twitter.com/MarzGurl/status/973843534347456513
https://twitter.com/Linkara19/status/973847563399872512
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974214584897802241
Oh, and in one of the previous movies, Suburban Knights, someone was duct taped to a wall and fainted. I mentioned the contracts, but this is one of the reasons why they had them for the anniversary movies.
https://twitter.com/Obscurus_Lupa/status/974434006094753792
https://twitter.com/MarzGurl/status/973996015165489152
There's a hell of a lot more, but if this document is correct, I'm over 1000 words on this. You're all welcome to go explore the threads yourselves. I limited my searching/reading to just a few individuals, that of Obscurus_Lupa, Linkara, FoldableHuman, and Lindsay Ellis. But, again, more were discussing it.
Other random stuff I didn't know. Foldable Human was on the site briefly. Never knew that. He, and here I'll explicitly use the word apparently, apparently made anti-GamerGate videos that made people angry and got him fired.
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/973825825303924739
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/974418746428112896
They had to film the game show pilot over a dozen times. Also, their massive studio/warehouse isn't used for shooting because they never sound-dampened it, and that's why so much of current Nostalgia Critic is done in the front office hallway/room.
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/974079990391218176
Here's a link to a long group Skype call where various contributors to the site aired their grievances. Apparently very little of this came to fruition. Only two newsletters came out, one of which was to announce the cancellation of all further anniversary specials for the site because of... weather.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FJO-DYK7inMmsB0YAslv8cys9-tp-IbX/view
There's a lot more, like stuff about Demo Reel, the game show they tried, the Facebook killer that was... barfiesta. And so on. There's even some stuff that others hint at that sound like big things, but that no one wants to come out and outright say; in other words, this is the stuff they're willing to talk about publicly and there might be worse stuff. It's hard parsing this stuff, so if I missed anything let me know as well as if I messed up some links. If anyone has other stuff, please feel free to post it. I know Lupa got a lot of crap, and stuff with Noah has been a saga. (Also, as a heads up, someone posted on the old site some videos a guy was making about Channel Awesome and the first video was about Noah. Turned out the guy who was making those videos is a GamerGator so if those get posted and you don't want to give him clicks/views, give a warning).
And, one last thing. Some are going to be upset by all this stuff coming out. That's to be expected. But, while you may go "I wish I never gave them any clicks/views" some of the people I've quoted who were hurt by all of this have expressed on twitter that it's ok, you didn't know, and they're somewhat grateful that they gained a following even after all of it. However...
I've spent about two hours reading and trying to compile all this crap.... so you don't have to!
*shoots gun wildly and screams*
Updates:
Their PR person, Holly Christine, and one of the very few paid people at Channel Awesome had to be escorted home by people with a baseball bat and a sword.
"Oh, hey, and who can forget the time Mike Ellis got fired and CA put me in a safe house for a few days because they were concerned he would come after me? Nothing was more strange than being escorted to my house with a group of guys with baseball bats and a sword so I could pack"
https://twitter.com/gookygox/status/974871593414545408?ref_src=twsrc^tfw&ref_url=https://s9e.github.io/iframe/twitter.min.html#974871593414545408
"To inject a bit of humor in the horror, I wish I could remember who carried the sword. I WANT to say Doug, but I'm pretty sure it belonged to Rob. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure it was Doug who tested the pepper spray by spraying it into the kitchen sink."
https://twitter.com/gookygox/status/974879076610727936
Another compilation of stuff:
http://marzgurl.tumblr.com/post/172243441932/things-that-channel-awesomes-management-has
Also, a google document is being compiled with contributions from a lot of people. I'll post it when it goes live.
Last edited by a moderator:
