This is to point out fridge tropes in The Spoony Experiment, be they viewer reactions on the show itself or Noah/Spoony's reactions to works he reviews.
Fridge Brilliance:
- Spoony's particular irritation with the civilians failing to cooperate with the police and the restrictive rules of engagement in his Swat 4 Let's Play made a lot more sense when we learned his brother is a police officer himself.
- He manages to combine this with Hilarious in Hindsight in his review of Highlander II: The Quickening, where General Katana (the warlord of an alien planet) makes a Wizard of Oz reference. "Do they have Wizard of Oz on Zeist?" We then flash to an imaginary skit (with Spoony playing Katana) watching Wizard of Oz and saying "Yes! THAT'S what I need to defeat McLeod! Flying monkeys! You two! Come here! I have a plan!" Cue the two screaming, giggling, flying maniacs from earlier in the movie.
- One wonders why in a world where The Nostalgia Critic doesn't exist would Spoony become the new Nostalgia Critic. Well, he was a reviewer already before TGWTG came around, so naturally this would be a step up.
- One helped along by his commentary on the Deadliest Character video: everyone was extremely pissed off at the Dragonzord stepping in at the last minute to help Megazord beat Mechagodzilla...which is exactly the kind of crap that occurs all the time on Deadliest Warrior and makes him hate it so much.
- Spoony's review of the early Ultima games notes the bizarre aspect that on this Fantasy Kitchen Sink world, you can buy space shuttles from blacksmiths and there's an Unexpected Genre Change into space. This makes a lot more sense when you know that Richard Garriot's father was a space shuttle astronaut himself.
- If CR's theory holds any water, then time-warp Insano effectively erased himself from existence after sending Squall to kill Spoony One Prime. Since it's implied that having the clone Insano around helps Spoony repress any factors that would have made him Insano in the first place, it can be assumed that the course of history has changed, and in the future, Spoony is just as stable as he is now, at least until he's forced to give into the madness once again.
- At the end of his Privateer 2 review he brings out the Wing Commander movie, and Ultima IX, implying they would be his next reviews. And while the review for the movie came shortly there after, instead of skipping straight to IX he started going through the entire Ultima series from beginning to end. Finally at the end of his Ultima VIII review he explained he couldn't have possibly talked about Ultima IX without first showing us how great the series was before the final betrayal. A plan two years in the making.
- One would assume that "The Game" that Chuckles makes Spoony play in the Ultima VI review is a reference to the internet meme, but if you watch the Ultima VII review, you realize that it's actually the game from Ultima VII. Chuckles hits Spoony whenever he uses a multiple-syllable word, and only uses single syllables himself.
- Going on par with a Theme Song Reveal, a very Final Fantasy VII savvy person, or one who just watched that infamous scene for a while, would note just who will arrive seconds before he shows up by listening to the "music" or rather, sound effects from said scene.
- Why does Spoony use a Gunblade despite the fact he claims how nonsensical it is in his Final Fantasy VIII reviews? Because at the end, Squall finally showed him what the gun part was used for firsthand, so it does make sense to Spoony now.
- Some commenters have pointed out the irony that Spoony's complaint about Final Fantasy XIII's extreme Railroading (which he described as 'The Hallway') is very similar to the Fate Worse than Death hundred million mile long straight-corridor 'maze' Spoony himself inflicted on a character in a Counter Monkey episode that went up shortly before the review.
- It can take a while to get why the Guardian's choices are similar to Mass Effect beyond the use of music and color lighting, but here's some help. Notice the similarities between the choices he brings up and the choices the Catalyst presents.
- The Blue Ending presents rather good options, albeit with heavy consequences. For Ultima, it's destroying the Black Gate, but being rejected by everyone Spoony loves. For Mass Effect, it's being able to control the Reapers, but ascending to a higher plane of existence in order to do so.
- The Red Ending presents options involving mass destruction and is the most expected option out of the three, though how good or bad it is varies differently. The Guardian pretty much states destroying the world is a bad thing, since both he and Sephiroth know that Spoony will wind up doing this when he reviews Final Fantasy XIII. The Catalyst, on the other hand, presents the destroy option as a good thing. After all, destroying the Reapers was sort of what Shepard and the entire universe banded together to do.
- The Green Ending involves fusion with the presenter and is what the presenter of the choices sees as the best option on their end, but like the Red Ending, how good or bad it is varies on the work. In Ultima, The Guardian gives Spoony an Enemy Mine option and their fusion will pretty much cause the creation of a new Big Bad. In Mass Effect, Shepard could fuse with the Crucible and be able to evolve all life in the universe to the point where the Reapers won't be needed, and is seen as the best and happiest ending of the three.
- And what's the ending that Spoony took? The Extended Cut's alternate ending, which can be taken by shooting the Catalyst in the face, though this causes the cycle to continue and cause the apocalypse. This actually becomes Fridge Horror when you realize that despite the warning, Spoony still rips into Final Fantasy XIII.
- As for why Mass Effect was chosen as a reference, it's pretty obvious when you think about it. Both games were the grand finale to their respective series, but their endings were received poorly, and EA had their hands behind both games, whether it's true or not.
- Word of God is that it also serves as his recanting on his defense of the Mass Effect 3 ending; he had come to realize the Indoctrination theory was wrong and the ending really was just as nonsensical as the people he had been mocking had said.
- Take a look at the betrayal song music video that begins the later parts of his Ultima IX reviews, and you'll see that the montage of box art at the end includes the covers of Ultima I through Ultima VII and the title screen of Ultima IX. Why isn't Ultima VIII represented? Because it's where Spoony believed the series started to go downhill, and thus it would not be appropriate to use it to illustrate his fond memories of the series.
- There is a reason why Squall would want to off Spoony for free, which in a way is Heartwarming in Hindsight. Spoony referred to Rinoa as "Seifer's Sloppy Seconds".
- After seeing the completion of the Final Fantasy XIII videos and the interview with Richard Garriott back to back, Spoony's opinions on Final Fantasy become a lot more understandable. Both Ultima and Final Fantasy are long-running RPG landmarks, with very similar trajectories in quality and success (starting off as blatant D&D clones, developing beyond that into their own, and similarly dropping off around the 8th entry in the series). This leads into another bit of brilliance: one of the quotes from the development team shown in the FFXIII review mentioned how it was too difficult tell a story in an open world game, so they opted to make the game more linear instead. But Garriott showed in his interview his quite simple method of arraigning his plot points in a way to work in the very open world the FFXIII writers felt was too hard to do.
- His conversation with
[[Board Game/Nightmare The Gatekeeper]] perfectly foreshadows a major conflict that Spoony will have: worrying that everyone will leave him.
Fridge Horror:
- Spoony points out that Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a very entertaining film while you're watching it, but when you think about it, Ferris really is a horrible person who manipulates and deceives everyone in his life for the sake of having fun, and gets away with it.
- Do we even want to know what happened to Spoony (the character, not Noah himself) to make him who he is? To wit: he's a proud and accomplished rapist, requires medication to keep him from flying into a murderous rage (or killing himself), and makes frequent remarks about drug addiction. Oh—and he apparently needs to kill someone in order to get an erection. When you factor in his seriously fractured psyche, it doesn't exactly paint a rosy picture....
- In his "Death of a Soldier" review, Spoony admits to having strangled at least 7 prostitutes. At this point, he has officially beaten Jack the Ripper's record. Screwed-up doesn't even begin to describe it.
- And of course this leads you to wonder about the death toll he causes before Spooning with Spoony...
- A more disturbing thought would be this - what if nothing actually happened to him that made him this way? What if he just...is?
- An early version of the 'About' page on his website explained that the Spoony Experiment was a dangerous experiment undertaken by the parents of America through the 1980s: to raise a generation on nothing but Nintendo, MTV and Saturday morning cartoons; and he is the result.
- Even worse. His closest friend is Linkara, who actually cloned Spoony, and besides for adding shameless plugs, did nothing to fix him. That means that Spoony will forever be a Karma Houdini. Beware the Nice Ones indeed, because their friends come before the lives of strangers.
- Manure Golems. While overall the story is hilarious, in the Counter Monkey episode in which they are discussed Noah says that maybe instead of their touch turning you to poop and killing you, it turns you into a manure golem.
- The ending to his review of Game Over. The horror sets in when you begin to wonder how long has Spoony been trapped inside a computer simulation?
- Check out the end to The Ring: Terror's Realm part 2. It gets worse.
- At the time of the Minority Report review, the Experiment has apparently begun to break down, as Spoony flatlines during the opening credits, and the simulation glitches early in the review and nearly shuts down over the credits.
