Trivia / RedLetterMedia

• Accidentally-Correct Writing:
  • In the Half in the Bag review of Solo, Mike conjectures that when George Lucas was writing the script to A New Hope, he didn't know what a parsec was. The review cuts to Obi-Wan giving Han an incredulous stare, implying Obi-Wan finds the claim as ridiculous as Mike does. However, what Lucas actually wrote in the script for Obi-Wan's reaction shot to "twelve parsecs" was "Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation." Meaning that Mike accidentally got Lucas' correct intention across without realizing it.
  • In the Revenge of the Sith review, Plinkett mocks the evolution of Force lightning from being something Palpatine pulled out to torture Luke to being his and every other moderately powerful Sith Lord's primary battle tactic, and concludes that he was surprised Yoda didn't start shooting green lightning. Plinkett would likely be enthused by the fact that Legends continuity featured a depressing number of instances of Jedi using Force lightning, which is often green.
• Acting for Two: Mike and Jay live in a world full of people played by Rich Evans.
• Approval of God:
  • Towards the fanmade Super VHS: The RLM Game. Not only did Mike retweet a link to it, but he also got Rich to sit down and play with him. As the entire playthrough shows, both are highly flattered, amused, and impressed by the level of detail and love put into the game.
  • All are aware of Noiselund's remixes of audio from their videos, and shouted him out in Best of the Worst and the Raising Arizona episode of re:View. The official RLM Twitter follows Noiselund, and Mike has even engaged with him on there.
  • The gang likes the fan animations of Wee Zachary P enough that they commissioned him to do the animation for their Red Letter Media Animated pilot.
  • Their "Watchbait" video has a lot of comments from people claiming to be the screenwriters or other crewmembers of the films discussed, all of whom wholeheartedly approve of their comments.
• Colbert Bump:
  • Roger Ebert, who gave both The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith three and a half stars (out of four) and couldn't have missed Plinkett's jab at his credibility, posted a link to the Revenge of the Sith review.
  • Simon Pegg and Damon Lindelof also tweeted their approval of the reviews.
  • Jacksfilms gifted about 35,000 subscribers to the crew when he made a video describing them as The Best Channel on YouTube. This allowed them to cross the million-subscribers threshold mere weeks before YouTube changed their subscriber display system, preventing sites like Socialblade from displaying live subscriber count updates.
• Corpsing:
  • Jay finally gets Mike to really laugh (after 45 episodes) during the Haunted House discussion, which segues into a riff on the Seltzer and Friedberg films (ironically, it's about how unfunny their jokes are). Jay is clearly taken aback by how hard Mike is laughing, even starting to ask him "Did your brain...", before being overcome with laughter himself.
  • Common in The Nerd Crew due to being a tongue-in-cheek, semi-improvised comedy performance. Occasionally someone in the crew will break character to laugh at someone's riff.
• Creator Backlash: They discourage people from seeing their thriller film The Recovered.
• The Danza:
  • Mike and Jay, the protagonists from Half in the Bag, are played by Mike Stoklasa and Jay Bauman, respectively.
  • Officer Rich Koslowski, Comic Book Guy Rich Evans, Lightning Fast Employee Rich and Building Inspector Rich Minerski are played by Rich Evans.
• Deleted Scene: RLM filmed somewhere between 25-35 minutes of footage for Doc of the Dead, but only about 2 minutes ended up in the final film. RLM were eventually allowed to upload a 15-minute cut of their segments on their YouTube channel.
• Denial of Digital Distribution: In 2022, Mike and Rich found four more photos of young Rich in his infamous "Dick the Birthday Boy" t-shirt. They took great steps in never letting the internet see them, including destroying the raw video recordings of the pictures they censored over. The photos now sit framed in their studio wall, only shown to very special guests under heavy supervision. A tactic which later backfired, as one of those very special guests (Freddie Williams) made some very detailed sketches from memory alone and posted them online for all to see.
• Development Gag: Mister Plinkett refers to the Nemoidians as "the Shatnerians" in his Star Wars the Phantom Menace review, which was the name for them in early drafts of the script.
• He Also Did: Members of RLM have actually worked in the film industry:
  • Mike and Rich appear as extras in Never Been Kissed. Mike got motion sickness due to being stuck on a ride for the duration of a multi-hour shoot and Rage Quit due to filming conditions, taking Rich with him.
  • Jay was a stand-in for Kyle Gallner in A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). He admitted to seeing Jackie Earle Haley as somewhat of a Broken Pedestal after he talked shit about the original in-between takes.
• Milestone Celebration: Parodied with a setup meant to seem like a typical celebration, with the whole crew on a webcam watching the subscriber count tick upwards to a million. When it crosses the line everyone except for Rich Evans leaves nonchalantly with visible mild-to-moderate disgust. Rich is left alone in the dark with a party popper and in a post-credits gag is left cleaning up the mess by himself.
• Missing Episode
  • The first Pre-Rec stream was believed to be lost until a fan uploaded a nearly complete version. Seen here.
  • The fake Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Half in the Bag review was taken off of YouTube twice due to YouTube's policies of misleading titles. To avoid having their channel taken down, Red Letter Media set their April Fools' Best of the Worst video and their many fake review videos for Transformers: The Last Knight to private.
  • The Best of the Worst episode and special interview with Max Landis were de-listed after his numerous sexual harassment allegations. The Best of the Worst episode can still be viewed by its direct link.
• No Budget: While the gang's rather shoddy production values are part of the charm of their reviews, they're actually extremely well-produced for internet videos. They have a large studio space for filming, several fully decorated sets, and a large collection of props, which is a lot more than most people have.
• The Other Darrin: Sorta. The Plinkett character originated in a couple of short films, where he was portrayed by Rich Evans. Mike Stokasa, the main writer of those shorts, decided to use the character for the reviews, and performed the voice himself. Evans portrays the character in a full-length movie that came out well after the reviews started, but was produced earlier. Unlike other examples of this trope, the two versions of Plinkett are not in canon with each other, and it's possible that Evans will continue to portray the character in the future.
  • The line between the two different Plinketts (described by Stoklasa as "Plinkett A" and "Plinkett B") was blurred in "The Revenge of Nadine" short and the Half in the Bag series. In them, Plinkett (as played by Evans) is the same Plinkett that made the Star Wars reviews and became an internet sensation (and who was, of course, voiced by Stoklasa); essentially they seem to have become a kind of The Other Darrin tag team; this was Lampshaded in a Half in the Bag intro which has Plinkett shouting "I don't even know who I am anymore!!!" at the top of his lungs.
  • The teaser trailer for the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull review seems to establish the two Plinketts as two different people who just happen to be very similar to one another, even though this blatantly contradicts "The Revenge Of Nadine". This may be because of Villain Decay on the part of Evans's Plinkett, given his portrayal in Half in the Bag as docile and incredibly senile. The mysteriously revived Palpatine, an established Straw Fan, naturally refers to Evans's Plinkett as "Fake Plinkett" and Stoklasa's Plinkett as "the real Lord Plinkett", and at the end of the teaser, attacks "Fake Plinkett" with Force lightning in an attempt to kill him.
  • Lampshaded in the Half in the Bag review of The Dark Knight Rises, where Mike is forced to do an impression of Mr. Plinkett. Jay tells him that's the worst Plinkett impression he'd ever heard, and no one would believe it's the real Plinkett.
  • And then there's this.
  • The difference between Stoklasa's Plinkett and Evans's Plinkett was finally "canonized" on "Wheel of the Worst #23": Stoklasa's Plinkett is Harry S. Plinkett, while Evans's Plinkett is Harry G. Plinkett.
• Production Posse: Mike, Jay, and Rich are the three official members of RLM. Their friends Jack, Josh and Tim appear frequently, as do the Canadians, Colin and Jim. Before disappearing abruptly, Jessi appeared as frequently as the other regulars, and a smattering of other friends have also made multiple appearances.
• Promoted Fanboy: A fan who created a number of animations about Plinkett (using sound collage from various sources for the voice work) was officially invited to create further episodes under the Red Letter Media banner, complete with newly-recorded Plinkett dialogue specifically for the cartoons.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • "I Squeeze Gats" by Charlie Brown Beatz.
  • Mike & Jay get a lot of their samples from the Garageband library, since they edit their content on Macs. One such song is "Fifth Avenue Stroll", a jazz standard which plays over Establishing Shots of Plinkett's home and Lightning Fact VCR Repair. "West Precinct" plays out each Half in the Bag review.
  • Mike (or rather Plinkett) is also fond of "Oranges," usually played when examining flaws in a script.
  • George Lucas' and Disney's theme song appears to be "We're in the Money."
• Reclusive Artist: For online-oriented content creators, the RLM gang are unusual for their active disinterest in interacting with their fanbase. This is something that has only become more pronounced with time. In the early 2010s, they maintained a public forum, granted interviews, appeared at conventions, and collaborated with other content creators. Gradually, however, they've become more and more insular. They closed their forum to new members and stopped appearing at conventions and now engage with other content creators only to the extent that they're willing to parody or satirize their behavior. They no longer advertise their P.O. Box on their site to invite fan mail (although it remains open), and with the end of Previously Recorded, no longer have a channel for answering fan questions on a consistent basis. Both Mike (who runs the RLM Twitter directly, though he will sometimes pretend to be Rich for the sake of a joke) and Jay (who has his own Twitter) do technically have a social media presence and will occasionally respond to questions and mentions by fans or (more likely) celebrities, but this is infrequent and is often cherished by said fans when it does happen. They do read the comments on their YouTube videos, as they frequently complain about their unoriginality and repetition on the videos themselves.
• Throw It In!: Occasionally invoked.
  • In Half in the Bag Episode 45 Mike suddenly bursts out laughing, which was kept because it's so unexpected.
  • A sudden loud and hard sneeze by Mike that caught everyone in the discussion off guard was apparently too good to leave out of "Wheel of the Worst #3".
  • The entirety of the second part of "Wheel of the Worst #6". The second video discussion, "The Osteoporosis Dance", is twelve minutes, and consists of everyone trying desperately not to burst out laughing and failing horribly.
• Trolling Creator: The guys will occasionally reference a work that the fans are obviously calling on them to review, but then instead review something else.
  • In their Enemy Mine and Midnight Mass videos, both hosts mention having seen Dune before spending the rest of the video talking about something else.
  • The guys have amassed a huge collection of the film Nukie tapes but seem steadfast in their refusal to review it on Best of the Worst. In their 100th Best of the Worst episode, they fill the entire board of Plinketto with Nukie tapes, making it look like they'll finally review it, but after the Pinketto ball lands on one of the tapes, Rich places the Neil Breen film Fateful Findings over it, and they watch that instead.
• What Could Have Been: According to "How Not to Make a Movie", shortly after The Phantom Menace review went viral, Mike received an offer from Paramount Pictures to be part of an initiative to make a micro-budgeted movie in the hope to recapture the success of Paranormal Activity. Mike submitted a script to a remake of his old film "Gorilla Interrupted" only for the studio to reject the project.

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