Did We All Misunderstand Nostalgia Critic: The Wall?
With 2019 coming to an end I figured it would be the perfect time to comment on a few things I didn’t get a chance to when they happened. To start off with, I’ll talk about what might be the most infamous YouTube video of 2019, Doug Walker’s review of The Wall.
One thing I should note is I like Doug Walker way more than I like Pink Floyd — if only because I don’t like Pink Floyd at all. I’m a pretty causal fan though and as such my dislike for Pink Floyd overshadowed my like for Doug, and I didn’t even watch the review for the first time until around 16 hours ago.
I would like to make this clear, this review is complete shit. It’s not funny, it doesn’t really do a good job analyzing the source material, and any jokes made are either so specific you’d need a PhD in The Wall to get them (just to remember that’s specifically not what happened) or are so obvious you remember Doug has told those jokes a million times before.
That entire school song was literally just the same joke from his Patch Adams review.
Now my only experience in criticism of this review was just some comments on YouTube and what I remember seeing on Twitter when the review came out just under three months ago. I didn’t watch any response videos from The Needle Drop, The Hardcore Kid, The Irate Gamer, and so on.
Yeah, The Irate Gamer made a response to it. And the like to dislike ratio on this is actually a number of times better than the original video made by Doug. Explain that to someone back in 2010 and they’d never believe you.
I should note much of the criticism I found of this review comes from Doug “not understanding,” the point of the songs. I don’t quite believe that’s the case.
What Doug was mocking wasn’t the songs by Pink Floyd, but instead it was how stoners in 1982 viewed the songs by Pink Floyd.
The dude that had “person you dislike here,” on his face as well as the entire school song are the two best examples of this. It didn’t feel like Doug was saying that’s what the band had in mind, instead it felt like that’s what people who watched the film and enjoyed it without any context to why it was made had in mind.
Hell, that’s basically the entire second song “When The Wall Broke Free,” is telling me. Although Doug also does a horrible job distinguishing when one song ends and the next one starts. I thought like the first three songs were all part of the first one — but no, the album told me otherwise.
Also, the scenery in this review is fucking awful. It looks like a knockoff for the music video of Pressure by Billy Joel. And if that’s what it looked like in The Wall, then the scenery in that movie is equally as fucking awful.
Also, even from that point of view the review is awful. For one, it’s not funny — the only song that got a laugh out of me was We Need More Victimization, if only for pointing out how the Holocaust reference was kind of in bad taste.
The main issue with this review is if it is a mockery of the fan base, it’s a bad one. Doug doesn’t really argue with anyone — in fact, the critic is defending it throughout the entire review. Was Doug a stoner back in 1982? He was born in 1981, so if that’s the case, that’s pretty cool.
Compare what Doug did here to what Mr. Enter did in his reviews of things like Magical Mystery Cure or Twilight’s Kingdom. In those reviews, he makes it clear who he’s arguing with literally by putting the points of his opponents on the screen.
In fact, Doug has done this before in his reviews of things like The Matrix and Raiders Of The Lost Arc. I guess The Wall is just to complicated, you know, unlike The Cell, Freddy Got Fingered, Felix The Cat: The Movie, Devil, and tons of other movies he did.
Why not have the fan of The Wall talk? Instead, the most we get is some weird CGI cat thing singing. It’s exactly as awful as it sounds, by the way.
This is the exact same issue Doug had when he reviewed Hocus Pocus. Although at least with that video, if you saw the movie it’s likely you would have got the jokes. Here, even if you got the jokes, you were more than likely pissed off — and even then you didn’t get the jokes!
Long story short, no matter which way you slice it this video is awful.
