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  • Acting for Two:
    • At the end of the Excalibur 2555 A.D. episode, Merlin (played by Seb) exchanges a few words with Seb.
    • The Les Visiteurs/Astérix episode has a gag where Fred and Seb interact with Getafix, played by Seb.
    • In the Mortal Kombat episode, Scorpion and Sub-Zero are played by the same guest actor, Ironquest (animator of a French Youtube channel about bodybuilding). The characters never appear onscreen together, though.
    • In the Mission: Impossible episode, during the embassy sequence Fred plays both Methan (the protagonist) and the ambassador.
    • In the 11th Anniversary videos, Bob Lennon plays both the Pyro-Barbarian and George Yunohu, who at one point are present in the same scene (but not onscreen at the same time).
    • In the Robin Hood episode, the review of Robin Hood's Quest ends with Robin Hood (played by Fred) and Fred (as himself) venting their frustration by violently murdering Maid Marian.
    • In the ending of the Phoenix Games episodes, the four Teletubbies are dubbed by different actors but the scene has been made by blending four takes of Fred wearing the same costume, which has been recolored in post-prod.
  • Beam Me Up, Scotty!: "Ils ont pris de la drogue, les développeurs!" ("The developers took drugs!") Fred has noted in several streams that while he did make some jokes about developers and them taking drugs in the early episodes, he never actually said that phrase verbatim, except in the X-Perts video (which was a self-parody).
  • Cast the Expert:
    • Some of the police officers from an early scene in the 11th Anniversary video were real police. While talking about it on a stream, Fred wasn't even sure whether the guns they were brandishing were props.
    • In the casino scene of the Anniversary video, the extra playing the dealer is one in real life.
    • Most of the squad in the Mass Effect Papy Grenier is played by cosplayers cast as the characters they usually play, as well as Overwatch's Mercy in the Robin Hood episode.
    • In the scene where Fred parodies Playstation ads by chanting along a crowd of soccer fans in the Video Games Commercials episode, the extras cast as the soccer fans are played by actual ones. The banners and clothes used in the scene are a combination of actual soccer fans accessories (brought by the extras themselves) and official Playstation goodies belonging to Fred.
  • Celebrity Voice Actor:
    • The 11-year anniversary video has Frangipanus voiced by Richard Darbois, one of the most famous French voice actors of all time. Word of God said he was specifically aiming for the absurdity of having such a big-name dubber voicing a ridiculous character in a Youtuber's vid.
    • In the same vein, Jean-Louis the magic sock is voiced by legendary voice actor Benoît Allemane, who accepted for free to boot.
    • The Daikatana episode has Pierre-Alain de Garrigues a.k.a. PADG (known for his absurd number of roles in advertising and video games) as The Storyteller.
    • Most of the squad in the Mass Effect Papy Grenier is dubbed by their official voice actors from the French localization.
  • Corpsing:
  • Creator Backlash:
    • Fred has grown tired of the "The developpers took drugs!" Running Gag and heavily toned it down after a few episodes, as it was already becoming a Dead Horse Trope / Dead Unicorn Trope of game reviewers.
    • Combined with Critical Backlash; in their earlier videos, whenever Fred would talk about the Dragon Ball series, he would be very harsh towards Dragon Ball GT. However, he watched it again years later and went on to say it's not actually that bad.
    • Fred is not happy with the very short review of the Predator NES game at the end of the Total Recall video, as he later felt the review was bungled (the game has enough content to deserve a longer review) and reviewing it would have been more relevant in an Alien VS Predator-themed video.
    • Fred explained in the September 2019 FAQ that he isn't very fond of The Legend of Zelda-themed Papy Grenier, for reasons including the episode's jokes about the Zelda franchise having been seen over and over again in many other parodies before, and the mean comments insulting the actress who played Princess Zelda (the character has been reimagined as a vulgar woman). He also blames the bad reception to the focus being given on different actors.
    • In "The Tier List of Crappy Games", Fred tells he has some regrets not having the means he has now when making some of the early episodes, due to how cheap some of the Mid-Review Sketch scenes looked at the time, and that we would have an absolute blast if he had to do them with all the resources he's now able to use. He explained this while reviewing the Jurassic Park games, pointing out the related episode's (released in 2010) mid-review sketch show featured Fred as an Alan Grant expy (dressed with Fred's usual Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat), there were no actor beside Fred and Seb, the exotic locations were shot on greenscreen, and the dinosaurs were World of Warcraft assets.
    • Fred is not very proud of the comic book series based on his character.
  • Creator-Driven Successor: The Dragon's Dogma ads. They aren't released as Joueur du Grenier episodes (the title of the series is Dragon's Dogma — Fred and Seb, Fred doesn't wear any of the iconic shirts) but are filled with the same snarky humour that the Joueur du Grenier and Papy Grenier series. The ad sequences for Free-to-Play games (and NordVPN) which open the videos since the end of 2018 are similar in tone to the Dragon's Dogma videos.
  • Creator's Favorite Episode: Fred told in behind-the-scenes lives on Twitch that the videos he enjoyed making the most are the Robin Hood and Mission Impossible episodes.
  • Development Gag: In the Indiana Jones episode, the misleading clue implying Archibald Von Grenier would be the fake identity of the Angry Video Game Nerd (while he actually is Alpha V Gelganek, an unrelated alien) refers to the fact the team actually approached the AVGN to ask for a cameo, but he didn't answer. The episode celebrates the AVGN's tenth anniversary.
  • Doing It for the Art:
    • Fred and Seb put a lot of time and effort into making an episode of Joueur du Grenier, and despite the change of the YouTube environment over the years which harmed their channel format in favor of more casual, less scripted content, closer to the TV format (which was alluded to in the Rambo episode), they stick to their guns and are still working to bring entertainment to their loyal fanbase in the style of small independent films.
    • Fred is entirely aware that, due to the unprecedented ambitious scope of the 10th anniversary episode, the video's own ad revenue will never be enough to refund what they spent to make it. He doesn't care and prefers doing something perfect, no matter the cost.
    • In a case of this, as well as Screw the Money, I Have Rules!, the special episode about video game advertisements originally came out with JdG's trademark Product Placement skit for a new sponsor. But an hour after the video's release, the team was contacted about a joke the advertiser was uncomfortable with and wanted to see removed from the video (to be absolutely clear, the sponsor didn't request an after-release change to sponsored introduction ad, they attempted to censor the actual video which followed the ad). The JdG team's response was to cut out their product placement instead.
  • Enforced Method Acting: The Mid-Review Sketch of the Fort Boyard episode has a scene where one of the contenders is sent into the room with the spiders and is completely scared. The actress suffers from arachnophobia, didn't know where exactly the spiders were, and the scene was really filmed with a night vision camera in complete obscurity.
  • Extremely Lengthy Creation: According to "The Tier List of Crappy Games", Fred and Seb started working on The Fifth Element review while they still lived in Southern France (i.e. in 2012, if not earlier). The video was eventually released in 2019.
  • Fake American: In the live-action portions of the Daikatana episode's prologue, John Romero and John Carmack are respectivelly played by Seb and Fred.
  • Fake Nationality:
    • Fred's wife, Sorina, is French of Cambodian descent. Any female Japanese character is played by her, as well as female Vietnamese and Middle Eastern characters on occasion.
    • François Lebreton, a Frenchman of Asian ascent, has been cast several times to play male Japanese minor characters.
  • Fake Shemp:
    • In the Hitman Papy Grenier and the Phoenix Games review, a few shots of Fred actually feature a body double shot from the back or from afar, because Fred had the Covid at the time. The body double in Hitman is a bald extra with a deepfake of Fred's face.
    • When Carole from Accounting (a crossdresing Fred with chest padding and a woman's wig) is introduced in the Daemon Summoner episode, the camera films a close-up of her body from her feet to her face. Fred clarified in a behind-the-scenes live that the scene is a montage of Sorina's legs and his own's torso, with an indistinguishable cut at the right time.
  • In Memoriam:
    • The Matrix episode has an in-memoriam for Willy Gauchet, the actor for Charlie in the Star Wars episode.
    • The 11th Anniversary episode ends with one for Mabner Toussaint, the camera operator who worked on the episode and passed away shortly after it was completed.
  • Irony as She Is Cast: In RPG 2 and RPG 3, the odious behavior of the Old Sage toward the Elf is even funnier once you know their actors (respectively Seb and Shun-Geek) are together in real life.
  • Lying Creator: When he started doing commentary on his earlier episodes on his Twitch channel, Fred claimed they never did "the developers were on drugs" jokes on his series... ironically, during the Tintin in Tibet review, where he gets an almost Immediate Self-Contradiction as his older self mentions that the developers were on crack.
  • Meme Acknowledgement: Fred lost a lot of weight since the early episodes, and both his persona and voice evolved as well, to the point that he looks like a different man. This led to a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek rumor that he actually is another person, in a "Paul is dead" situation. In a FAQ, Fred only gives a last mysterious smile when told about this rumor... and he has referred to his older self in an older video as "it wasn't me, it was Fat JdG". He also did a crude drawing during a Twitch livestream where "Thin JdG" murders "Fat JdG". And during the ZEvent (a French charity event organized and animated by streamers) of 2021, Fred's ultimate donation goal (set at ten million of euros) was to reveal where the "Fat JdG" is hidden.
  • Missing Episode:
    • The pilot episode that was called Big Review and focused on reviewing Flash games. The only footage he has ever shown was a reaction clip repurposed for the Tintin in Tibet review, which also served as the basis of his icon and logo.
    • For a while, a playthrough of the Marsupilami game with Wahwah (from BackintoysTV) made in 2011 was withheld from public viewing because JdG kept calling the game an Infogrames game (which is false, it was developed by Apache Software), and this was too much of an embarrassing and distracting mistake to be shown as it was. This video would resurface in 2017, with an intro by Fred and Wahwah explaining the context.
    • A Papy Grenier of SimCity (2013) ending with an out-of-character review (relatively positive, but pointing out the map's size as a major flaw) was made but they weren't allowed to release it under heavy pressure from Electronic Arts.
    • They started shooting an episode for The Goonies II, but cancelled as they just didn't have enough material to do a full review. This is why there is footage of the game in the intro. This was addressed in the X-Perts video, where Fred explains that the intro was thrown together in 20 minutes and the game itself is nothing noteworthy.
  • Non-Singing Voice: Fred and Seb have been redubbed during the Battle of the Bands scene in Games and Metal.
  • No Stunt Double: During some of the action scenes in the Anniversary video's second part, Fred and Antoine Daniel's stunts had been performed by a stunt double, but almost all of Seb's didn't (his only scene with a stunt double is when Professor Humblebundledore performs backflips during the climatic fight against Thanus).
  • Orphaned Reference: The Addams Family episode has a scene where JDG keeps a shocked expression for several seconds and tells Seb he's taking the pose for the video's thumbnail. While this shot originally was used for the thumbnail, it was changed to a different face of JDG after all of the channel's thumbnails were overhauled.
  • The Other Darrin:
    • When he was introduced in the show, Viceroy Frangipanus was dubbed by Nico (the sound engineer of the team). In the 11th Anniversary video, he's dubbed by Richard Darbois.
    • In the Batman and Robin video (her first appearance), Barbara Magret/Oracle is played by Sorina (offscreen voice only) and by Alice Nicoli (a recurring extra) in her physical appearance in Comics Videogames #2.
  • Prop Recycling:
    • Papy Grenier and Jean-Michel Bruitages' costumes both use the same wig.
    • In the Bible-games episode, one scene has an Afterlife office worker summoning his assistant by pulling a lever. The "lever" actually was the handle of a toy axe, which was later reused in the same video as a weapon wielded by Noah.
    • In Mission Impossible, the shoulderpads on the ambassador's costume have been borrowed from Bob Lennon's iconic outfit.
    • In the Platoon - Metal Gear episode, Plato and God's robe are the same outfit.
    • The dressing gown worn by Laurent Croft at home during the Tomb Raider episode is also worn by the storyteller during the Daikatana episode.
    • In "Wii Games for Girls", the endive alternate universe version of Fred and Seb (It Makes Sense in Context) are endives dressed with the shirts of the Fred and Seb plushies which are part of the set's usual scenery.
  • Reality Subtext:
    • In the Terminator video, JdG's younger self, played by a child actor, is seen reading the Joueur du Grenier comic adaptation, and his father, who is played by Fred himself, calls it trash. Behind the scenes, this is because Fred didn't like the comic because its humor was toned down compared to the original series.
    • The Rambo video's Mid-Review Sketch scenes paint a disillusioned image of French Youtube (an opinion Fred confirmed in a serious special video made more than one year later). The story is a parody of First Blood in which John Rambo and his deceased army buddies are respectively Fred and several retired youtubers, and the equivalent of Rambo's Vietnam War PTSD is Fred's refusal to change his videos' themes or format to adapt what is now trendy.
    • The Tomb Raider video's Mid-Review Sketch is a mean satire of Youtube's monetization policy, which in real life caused a lot of problems to the Joueur du Grenier reviews and specials (most of them are now demonetized, usually due to copyright issues). More specific details about the allegory:
      • "Nothing happened between 10th and 12th of September. Nothing at all!" refers to videos including footages of the 9/11 terror attack being automatically demonetized (something Fred learned by experience).
      • The hobo stands for Dailymotion, a French concurrent of Youtube (Dailymotion still exists, but Youtube has the monopoly of video-sharing). His full name, "Tonio Madely", is a Significant Anagram.
      • The "Green Dollar" MacGuffin is the "video monetized" logo.
      • Carmen's heavily-censored exposition stating the situation started because of the Third Reich refers history-themed videos (especially in World War II and/Nazi Germany-themed videos) being often demonetized due to their sensitive content.
      • The clue in the museum sends Laurent Croft and Carmen to San Bruno, the real life California city where Youtube's headquarters is located.
      • The singing pirate represents videomakers using copyrighted contents in their videosnote , the bowling ball hitting him is a Youtube strike, and him suddenly dying right after singing along the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song while grabbing the Green Dollar represents a videomaker monetizing a video with copyrighted content, which results in either the video or the channel being deleted. The Green Dollar turning red is a reference to the "demonetized" icon.
    • In Streets of Rage/Final Fight, Papy Grenier is called out by the kids for promoting vigilantism and police brutality. Police brutality is an actual problem in France.
    • In the Mid-Review Sketch of the Scooby-Doo episode, Shaggy goes through a trashcan to find ingredients to make a sandwich and finds an article from jeuxvideo.com (big video games-themed French website), to his disgusts. In real life, during several months preceding the video release, jeuxvideo.com published a lot of articles about Joueur du Grenier or Fred himself, usually to report "Fred said X about Y", to the point the website has been compaired to celeb-themed press, and Fred himself expressed several times annoyance about it on his public social networks.
    • The X-Perts video's plot and production closely mimic how Joueur du Grenier videos were made in the beginning of the channel, while heavily lampshading it. Years later, Fred explained in a behind-the-scene live on Twitch that the video was a troll episode addressed to a vocal minority in the fanbase who regularly comments "Joueur du Grenier was better at the beginning when it looked cheaper and had much less plot", and was especially active at the time the video was made.
  • Real-Life Relative:
    • Recurring extra Sorina is Fred's wife.
    • Seb's brother had a few minor roles in the earlier episodes, like Ken in the Barbie games review.
    • Seb longtime girlfriend Shun-Geek makes the show's costumes and is a recurring extra.
  • Recycled Set: The finale of RPG 3 has been shot in the Château de Fougères (a Middle Ages castle in Fred's town), which has been reused for most of the Harry Potter video and in parts of the Robin Hood episode.
  • Referenced by...:
    • Astro Bot Rescue Mission lists David Goodenough and Jean-Michel Bruitage in its credits.
    • In Brocéliande, Seb plays the role of a druid called "Maître Bien-Assez", in a bilingual reference to David Goodenough.
    • The French History-themed Youtube channel La Folle Histoire has an episode about the Bavarian Illuminati (the real life, historical Illuminati). In the section about the society's dissolution and its aftermath, the narration jokingly mentions "the fat JdG's disappearance" in a list of events conspiracy theorists speculate the Illuminati are responsible of.
  • Screwed by the Lawyers: Due to their frequent use of copyrighted music, JdG's videos are often hit by copyright claims, a subject Fred regularly complains about on Twitter. Their review of Disney games has notably even been blocked on tablets at one point. Because of this, more recent episodes would rarely use "real" music anymore and Fred would often cry "demonetization!" if a sample appears.
  • Screwed by the Network: According to Fred, in The New '20s, YouTube's enforcement of censorship on JdG became not just strict, but increasingly excessive and random. The video on Duke Nukem Forever is a prime example of this: while working with a consultant from YouTube and following all of his requests to a T, Fred realized he was actively butchering the episode and decided to release an uncensored and unmonetized version alongside the censored one, only for both videos to get demonetized. In the behind-the-scene comment, Fred points out Youtube's demands were so absurd and arbitrary (much more strict than Youtube's official stance on nudity) that he seriously thinks Youtube tried to drown him under so much pressure to make him stop.
  • Throw It In!:
    • In the Fort Boyard video, the scene when one of the contenders slaps his wife has been improvised by the extras themselvesnote . It's incidentally the scene that attracted the most controversy and made the episode pretty disliked even among fans.
    • In the sketches of the Enter the Matrix video, Fred wearing awry sunglasses wasn't an intentional decision to make his character look goofier, but a honest mistake due to him wearing the wrong prop.
    • In the sketches for the second RPG video, in the scene where the party recruits the Pyro-Barbarian (Bob Lennon), he jumps from a ridge to land on the platform below. Fred told that Bob acted on his own to do this stunt, and that it was actually very dangerous: the scene was shot next to a ravine, the platform wasn't very large, and Bob would have fall down the ravine if he missed the platform.
    • The Resident Evil Film Series episode includes a joke featuring Fred as a Stage Magician, making the plot disappear before everyone's eyes. The second time the joke happens is obviously a failed-but-hilarious take, where the "plot" very loudly falls off the table as Fred starts cracking up.
    • Bible-games:
      • The shot where the Afterlife's office worker eats a sandwich while overseeing the recently deceased taking an exam was unplanned. The actress took an impromptu lunch break and the JdG team added it in the video.
      • In The You Testament review, the line where Fred's player character greets the crowd as Broly (It Makes Sense in Context) wasn't initially supposed to be the definitive take because it sounded off, as Fred used a cheap microphone instead of the usual gear and his voice was distorted because he was ill. They decided to keep the line instead of re-recording it because Fred actually liked the unusually deep voice which resulted from the take.
    • In the script of "Wii Games for Girls", the scene where one of the girls sarcastically offers a shoulder massage to the female JdG wasn't supposed to have a sexual undertone (contrary to how the scene appears in the released video). However, the actress assumed it had and answered accordingly.
  • Troubled Production:
    • A special episode to celebrate the 10-years anniversary of the channel was initially planned for the Fall of 2019 (roughly the actual date of said anniversary), but its shooting schedule was moved to early 2020. The Dragon's Lair: The Legend Bottle Episode (released at the end of August 2019) was intended to allow the release of a normal, monthly JdG video while saving time to allow working on the anniversary special, but in practice it didn't save enough time to be of much use. Then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic put the project on hiatus again, as the containment rules in France didn't allow Fred and Seb to meet the extras and shoot the planned scenes at the time they were supposed to do it. The two parts were eventually completed and released in November and December 2020.
    • The Hitman episode of Papy Grenier was also notably troubled. They were forced to shoot the video early on schedule, as the location had very limited availability. Fred had to wear a bald cap that took two hours for a make-up artist to put on. The bald cap, however, originally came up as Special Effect Failure: it looked too messy to pass as realistic, and it looked too neat to pass as Stylistic Suck. Because it would have been too distracting for the viewers, it was decided to put a fuzzy VHS filter on the footage to hide the details. The filter also washed out the color balance, much to the creative team's regrets. Several scenes involving close-ups of bald cap-wearing Fred were cut, as the faulty details would have still been too visible. Fred also caught COVID-19 on set, and was very sick. Despite this, he forced himself to act his scenes, while being cold, shivering and miserable. The bald cap also would break, leaving miscellaneous sticky shreds in Fred's hair that took over an hour to remove (Fred even tore off a patch of hair in frustration). His bald cap being busted, he couldn't shoot the pool scene, and so a different actor, who was actually bald and also bearded, acted as a Fake Shemp and got a Digital Head Swap through "deepfake" technology.
  • What Could Have Been: See its own page.
  • Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Fred stated in November 2022 that he tolerated YouTube channels that reuploaded clips from his Twitch livestreams as long as they didn't create drama by uploading old and/or out-of-context clips, but if such behavior continued, he would take steps to start shutting them down. Come January 2023, due to said behavior continuing, he issued an ultimatum for the channels in question (except one run by a person he trusts), demanding they delete all clips within 48 hours, lest he take them down himself.
  • Word of God:
    • The September 2019 FAQ video gives explanations about why the Zelda-themed Papy Grenier has key differences from the usual Papy Grenier formula:
      • The episode is told as a fake news report instead of Papy Grenier telling a story because Fred was aware his jokes about the franchise were overused/cliché, and the news report format was an attempt to make them look more original.
      • Link was played by a guest instead of Fred because the costume didn't fit him.
    • In July 2020, Fred and Seb made two videos, titled "The Tier List of Crappy Games", where they quickly commented most game reviewed in Joueur du Grenier so farnote , and sorted them in various categories, corresponding to grades ranging from the least bad to the worst. The games ranked as belonging to the worst category were Ghostbusters (NES), Bubsy 3D, Link: The Faces of Evil, Dragon's Lair (NES), Airwolf (Amstrad CPC 464), Fantasia (Mega Drive), and Instruments of Chaos Starring... Young Indiana Jones. They then crowned Bubsy 3D as the absolutely worst game they ever reviewed, though Fred found it a tough choice, as Dragon's Lair was a serious contender for the title.
    • Fred explained in a behind-the-scenes live that he played the Saint Seyia game for at most 10 minutes. All gameplay footages from the video are recordings of Seb playing it.
    • The Children Television special's second half focuses on shows from Quebec and has been released on June 24, 2023, the date of the main holiday of Quebec. After receiving praise from Quebecois audience for this choice, Fred clarified it wasn't a Meaningful Release Date but a complete coincidence.
    • While many videos had a weird improvised ending because the team didn't have ideas, Fred clarified in a behind-the-scenes video the end of the Phoenix Games episode — one of the most surreal endings in the show —note  isn't one of them.
    • Similarly, the ending of the Scooby-Doo videonote  isn't improvised due to lack of ideas but is completely intentional: Fred explained in the behind-the-scenes comment on Twitch that the lack of actual explaination was spoofing Fridge Logic in some of the Scooby-Doo's episodes plot (i.e. the plot couldn't work unless there were unambiguously supernatural elements in the story).
    • X-Perts is a troll episode from 2016 made exactly like the videos from the channel's beginning video (while heavily lampshading it). It was made as a deliberately cheap video to refute the "it was better when it was cheap" recurring opinion from a vocal minority. Except Fred was unexpectedly happy with the result and the video had a very positive reception, which means he considers this episode as a real life example of Springtime for Hitler.
  • Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: According to "The Tier List of Crappy Games", the Gainax Ending of the Nightmare Circus video's ending was this. The written script ended when Seb entered the cabin in the forest (they started the episode's shooting without writing the actual ending), and the final scene with Santa Claus, Fred, Seb, and Japanese ghost Benzaie headbanging on "Silent Night" has been improvised because they didn't know what to do next.
  • Working Title: The script for "Wii Games for Girls" is titled "Special Wii" (due to the original premise being much broader than the final script).

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