Trivia / JonTron

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• Accidentally-Correct Writing:
  • In "Waterproofing My Life with FLEX TAPE", he makes a joke about Phil Swift having sniffed too much Flex Glue, a product which didn't exist at the time. A few months later, Flex Glue actually came out for real. Jon brings this up in his sequel video, "Flex Seal II: The Flexening", jokingly taking credit for coming up with the idea and demanding royalties.
  • In his review of Clock Tower (1995), he attempts to escape in the car to which the protagonist refuses. Then JonTron edits a part where the protagonist rushes out in the car. However, if one examined the car 3 times, the main character will get in it and run away though it doesn't go well for her.
  • In "Dr. Ho: License to Practice", Jon wished Predator would be in Mortal Kombat. It already happened four years before the video uploaded with Mortal Kombat X.
  • Lampshaded in his VR Troopers video, after joking about Brian Steele's Disappeared Dad paying child support in Bitcoin (the video was recorded months before the Bitcoin bubble).
  • Episode 3 of Starcade had two such moments.
    • At the start of the video, Jon's Imperial NES won't let him play a game based on A New Hope, and suggests he instead plays Alderaan Was An Inside Job. In Star Wars Legends, not only did the Empire tried to cover up the Death Star destroying the planet in question, one of the cover stories was that Alderaan destroyed itself when it tried to make a superweapon.
    • Later on, Jon comments on how the firing rate of blasters seem to get faster, leading to a skit where Jon (dressed as a university professor) predicts that "by the far-off year of 2002, the blaster will be firing off [at infinite speed]". One comment noted that Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast had a bug where the sniper rifle could fire 999 shots in one second.
• Approval of God:
  • JR Ralls, the writer and producer of Dark Dungeons thought Jon's review of the film was hilarious and thanked him on Twitter over it, as well as for clearly understanding that the film was satirical.
  • Vanilla Ice followed Jon on Twitter after his review of Cool as Ice.
  • Phil Swift made an appearance as himself in Jon's second Flex Tape video after Jon's first flex tape video gained nationwide attention. Phil even left a comment praising the video and approving the jokes about him and his products.
    ONE YEAR AGO...
    HISTORY WAS MADE!!! 💪
  • Jon's review of Kid Nation and frequent praising of Jimmy led to the now-adult Jimmy appearing in the sequel, taking part in an interview about what really happened during the show.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Jon only says "Ech" twice. He does it in A Talking Cat?! to imitate the famous MGM lion roar studio title card; it actually stemmed from his run on Game Grumps, but nevertheless it has been immortalized as part of him. His only other instance is briefly uttering it in the Space Ace review when looking at the circuitry of one of the arcade machines.
• Black Sheep Hit: Jon has been making videos since the better part of 2010, and is usually associated with video game and movie reviews. Who would’ve known that his most viewed and most popular video of all time was about poking fun at the Flex Seal infomercials? This was even lampshaded and parodied in the beginning of his Flex Tape II video.
• Breakthrough Hit: Jon's first major hit was his "DinoCity BRO!!!" video, after someone posted a link to it on Reddit and it made it to the front page of r/gaming. While it wasn't an enormous hit, it was enough to finally put him on the map and give him a substantial audience.
• Bury Your Art: Jon deleted a number of videos from his channels over the years due to either Early-Installment Weirdness or him being dissatisfied with the results in retrospect. One of these, "Apples and Breaks" (a video of him lamenting his broken Nintendo DS), became a popular "holy grail" among fans for two years, eventually leading to it being reuploaded by a fan.
• Colbert Bump:
  • Allison Pregler promoted his review of Birdemic on Twitter and earned him new viewers.
  • Jon himself gave a massive amount of exposure to the Flex Seal brand by making fun of their bizarre infomercials, helping turn the entire brand into a meme and Phil Swift into the next Billy Mays.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • In his Hercules episode, he points out that Herc's Adventures has a piece of soundtrack that sounds like the Binary Sunset theme to A New Hope. It's very clear from looking at the disc itself, as well as the title screen, that the game was made by LucasArts, which was well-known for inserting nods to the franchise in even unrelated games.
  • The bootleg Pokémon episode ends with Jon playing the Pokémon Black hack, depicting the game as being possessed, floating in the air, and reaching through the screen to steal Jon's soul. While this was most likely done for the sake of ending the video on a joke, it can put off those who enjoyed the original creepypasta because it managed to be creepy without including any supernatural elements, thus standing out from the likes of so many haunted video game creepypastas. He also refers to the Lavender Town Syndrome when describing this hack, even though Pokémon Black and Lavender Town Syndrome are two separate and unrelated creepypastas. There's also his listing of Moemon as a bootleg Pokémon game, when it's technically just a romhack.
  • While the grommet gag is funny, it slightly falls flat when you find out it is actually a very common surfing term, and it has been since the 70s, which means a young child. On a similar note, the graffiti reading SWOOD was probably meant to be SWOOP (although it's not like that is common lingo, and it may have been straight up Rule of Funny).
  • In the Clock Tower review, he says that the Scissorman's real name is Dan. However, the first game's Scissorman was actually Bobby Barrows. Dan is actually the giant baby monster that made him vomit candy corn. (This is most likely the result of the fact that most runthroughs of the game will not see the sole scene to name the two characters while Dan returns as the Scissorman in the second game.) He also mistakenly claims that the game requires the player to restart upon dying even though it contained an autosave function.
  • In his top 10 best boss battles, when he talks about Jubileus he says that after punching her into the sun, Bayonetta has to go in the sun and destroy her. While in the game, she punches Jubileus so hard her soul went to the sun and she must destroy the body before it crashes on earth, hence the flames surrounding the body.
  • In the SNES port of Space Ace, Jon says that there are areas in which he could transform Dexter into Ace, but he tried pressing every button and nothing happens. The thing is, you could actually transform into Ace by pressing the left shoulder key on the SNES controller.
  • In "Food Games Part 2", one of the things that makes Jon launch into a Faux Symbolism sequence is the fact that there's no music in Pepsiman... except there is, meaning that something was wrong with Jon's disc/emulator. While it's justifiable (Jon mentions in the review that he hadn't heard of the game beforehand), the fact that the music is one of the most iconic things about the game makes it a pretty glaring oversight.
  • In "The Zoo Race", he comments on a flag reading "Shalom" seeming out of place. However, the game's focus is on an Old Testament story which is also part of the Jewish faith.
  • In his Disney Bootlegs video, he comes across what looks like a swastika, leading to some Funny Moments. However, it's an easy mistake to make: the Nazi swastika is flipped around and tilted slightly. The Buddhist one is said to represent the exact opposite of the Nazi regime's ideals, and was also made into a dungeon in The Legend of Zelda. May have been on purpose for Rule of Funny.^note For the exact differences, consult this handy graphic.◊
  • His Bubsy review has a rather glaring one on his discussion of checkpoints. He says he thought the gumball machine firing tiny projectiles was a checkpoint, and stands next to it for a moment before dying. Despite the fact he's very clearly already gotten the much more obvious actual checkpoint a little to the right of it, floating in place with Bubsy's face on it.
  • REAL LIFE EXORCISM has one regarding the scene where Friedkin discusses various locations that appeared in The Exorcist, with Jon edited in calling the police on Friedkin for trespassing. Georgetown's "Exorcist Steps" are a public historical landmark and tourist site, and the director would be freely able to come and go.
• Creator Backlash:
  • He removed his "Top 10 Most Overrated Video Games" list because his opinions on many of the games in question eventually changed.
  • In his Q&A video, he agrees that he and the Game Grumps didn't think through his departure from the series very well, which resulted with the slew of Epileptic Trees regarding his friendship with Arin.
  • This trope was implied in how Jon (back during his Game Grumps days) admitted he was very uncomfortable with the word "fuck", yet before and since then he included the word in his JonTron scripts as if it was a vital tool for his comedy. His feelings on the word may have changed, however, since he used it a lot in his much-later-made "Bootleg Pokemon Games" episode.
  • Jon had a brief foray into flash animation with this video. Given the date of publication, Jon could not have been more than sixteen years old at the time of production. Jon has never mentioned these videos except very, very briefly in one episode of Game Grumps.
  • "Top 10 Mario Party Minigames", which Jon bashes in an episode of Game Grumps. He felt it was incredibly stupid of him to make a Top 10 List where the vast majority of mini-games are from Mario Party 2.
  • From the early days of his channel, there were a lot of episodes he put as private that didn't fit with his usual format (such as the entire Sonic Team saga). The most infamous of these was the Apples and Breaks video. Fans started to scout this one out, discovering they could grab snippets of the video despite its private status using the thumbnail generator function of YouTube, and one fan asked Jon at a panel if he would re-release it one day. It got to the point the Game Grumps Subreddit banded together in a bid to get the video back online. And it turned out somebody mirrored it, who then posted it.
• Defictionalization:
  • The "GreenBoys" YouTube channel mentioned in episode 6 of Starcade became a real channel not long after the episode went up, featuring (presumably) Chris O'Neill still messing around with the same Yoda puppet.
  • The official Wikipedia plot summary for Santa Clause 3 was indeed Jon's edit for a time, however briefly.
• Development Hell: It turns out that the Takeshi's Challenge review started production in 2012, but because the game was so cryptically difficult, the actual review didn't come out until 2014.
• Enforced Method Acting: In Jon's review of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, he sees someone acting rather minimally after getting a bottle thrown at his head, and decides to replicate it with several bottles. Afterwards, Jon, reacting in a nearly identical manner, states that they actually hurt for real and he forgot whatever joke he was going for.
• Fake Russian: Malkovich speaks with a thick Russian accent that almost always eschews any cases of an "a" or "the" in sentences.
• Fan Community Nicknames: JonTron fans eventually nicknamed themselves "grommets" after the California Games review.
• He Also Did: Jon has a second (or fifth, if you count Game Grumps, JonTronLOL and JonTronStarcraft) channel, the contents of which include a video of Jacques either throwing up or trying to throw up (a sign of affection for birds), a Minecraft video with Barry Kramer of Grumps fame, and a video containing a photoshopped image of his girlfriend strapped to a rocket flying through the sky.
• Missing Episode: Some of his older videos are put as private/deleted from his channel. The most infamous one however is one called Apples and Breaks, which according to some found information (due to the fact Jon hastily put it on private), was about Jon's broken DS. It was eventually uploaded by a fan.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Overlaps with Deleted Role, as the original trailer for his Starcade series contains several shots and lines that ended up being left out or changed, most notably a missing interrogation scene where an unknown female character asks Jon, "How are you just so goddamn handsome?"
• Money, Dear Boy: Jon has stated multiple times that the need to pay his rent is the main driving force behind making videos. The explains why he mostly does reactions videos and abandoned making game reviews given the significant amount of time it takes to beat and then review a game.
• Parody Assistance: Phil Swift actually appears As Himself in the Flex Tape Part II video, portrayed as the supreme almighty god of his own dimension of Flex Seal products called "Flexworld".
• Portmanteau Series Nickname: Jon eventually starts pronouncing Dino City as if it were one word (pronounced "Dye-NAW-sih-tee").
• Promoted Fanboy: Jon's a big fan of James Rolfe and The Angry Video Game Nerd series, so much so that he actually cites him as one of the main inspirations for his channel. Rolfe himself would eventually invite him to appear on his channel as a special guest.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • Why did Jon lose Rockington in the "Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts" video? Because Jon lost the Rockington prop in real life.
  • Jon has admitted Jacques was Demoted to Extra starting in Season 3 was a result of Jacques becoming less willing to to stay still for long enough to record any substantial footage.
  • A sort of reverse example, but the edit that Jon did to the Santa Claus 3 Wikipedia article can be seen here.
• Recycled Script: Both "Hercules Games" and "Food Games Part 2" have a gag where Jon collapses on his couch, sick from having eaten a comically small amount of food in the previous scene. In the former, it was a gyro, while in the latter, it was pizza.
• Schedule Slip:
  • Initially he uploaded his videos weekly. However, the gap between new videos has gotten bigger and bigger to the point where the series had updates once every couple of months. Game Grumps could be blamed for this, just like how all of Egoraptor's animations ground to halt around the same time, though both insist that isn't the case, and just happen to both be really slow at updating these days.
  • However, after he left Game Grumps and started making videos again, he seems to be updating regularly on a monthly schedule. This trope is still played straight In-Universe in regards to the Home Alone review, where his Christmas special is delayed to January due to his Mushroom Samba.
  • In recent years, his content production has slowed to a crawl. In the entirety of 2017, he managed a whopping six videos. He didn't publish any in 2018 until December 2nd.
  • Jon, after a steady schedule of videos through August 2020, had another upload gap that lasted till April 2021.
• Similarly Named Works: In the early 80s, there was a game show called Starcade where contestants competed by playing arcade games.
• Spiritual Successor: THE HEAD TO HEAD GAME JAM is one to the notorious Green Label Game Jam of 2014, which Jon and another participant, Tom Jackson, had been involved in. A number of that earlier (and abortive) game jam's flaws were consciously avoided, such as the attempt to stir up drama between contestants in the vein of a Reality Show, the gratuitous and intrusive Product Placement, and the arbitrary challenges.
• Throw It In!:
  • According to his 2015 Q & A video, several of his jokes were improvised, most notably the line "I aiiiiiiint' havin' that shit!" in his Nightshade review.
  • The only reason Jon mentioned losing Rockington in his Nuts & Bolts review is because he actually managed to lose the prop. Somehow.
  • In the Christmas with the Kranks review, Jon gestures with a large jar of eggnog and accidentally spills it on himself. He ends up making a joke out of it in the spur of the moment.
    "Good things never last! (spills eggnog) ...like this pants."
  • In the ending of the same video, it's quite obvious that Jon legitimately has no idea what the fuck is going on when the random street-preacher guy starts proselytizing for his church, and can even be seen trying futilely to take the mic back while the guy continues ranting, obliviously.
• What Could Have Been:
  • On this episode of Game Grumps Jon admitted that Jacques was originally going to be a "jive black man" and that he was very happy he hadn't gone through with that decision. Jacques was also going to be animated with Synchro-Vox rather than glowing red eyes, and the show was going to be called "JonTron 2.0".
  • Jon revealed during the 2014 ScrewAttack Gaming Convention that he had planned an episode all about games based on Disney theme parks, and even showed off clips that had been recorded for the episode, but ultimately the episode remains unfinished because Jon wasn't very happy with how stuff turned out. He's stated it may be completed one day, but for the time being has no plans to do so.
  • While still on Game Grumps, Jon mentioned that he was making a The Legend of Zelda video alongside Arin's Zelda focused Sequelitis. While Arin's video eventually came out after a long Schedule Slip (and eventually received Creator Backlash), Jon opted to cancel his video for unknown reasons.
  • Also on Game Grumps, Jon quickly mentioned during their Sonic 06 play-through that he was going to do a video on the game but never got around to it, thinking it was too obvious given the game's infamous reception.

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