Trivia / TomSka

• Acting for Two: Mr. Monopoly Man and God are both played by Thom Robin in the sketch The Blame Game.
• Creator Backlash: In I Am Not An Animator, Tom stated he would rather forget that he made 2 Canadians On A Plane.
• Creator Breakdown: He has not had a good number of years since 2012 thanks to one big reason: Losing his best friend and muse Edd Gould to leukaemia. In the years following his death, Tom had struggled with balancing the Eddsworld: Legacy campaign with his own content, resulting in him gaining weight, losing friendships (in particular Chris "Bing" Bingham) and having a depressive spieal. Despite finishing up the campaign in 2016 and even leaving the show and giving it back to Gould's family, Ridgewell still struggles with Gould's passing, his own parents's divorce, excessive alcoholism, and the death of his dog (to the point of leaving the Eddsworld fandom due to entitled fans giving him hell). One has to wonder how he even still is able to make funny content despite being the epitome of Sad Clown. Thankfully, he's been steadily recovering from around 2018 onward, having (mostly) cut alcohol out of his life and beginning to attend therapy.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Horse, which according to Tom is because it was note-for-note from conception to final product, with no changes in between.
• Crossdressing Voices: JaidenAnimations voicing Mr. Tibbles in Imaginary Friend.
• The Danza: H.Bomberguy as a potter named Harry in Wizzo The Wizard.
• Distanced from Current Events:
  • The sketch Shoot Your Problems Away, depicting several cases of Axes at School and Going Postal played for Crosses the Line Twice was planned to release way earlier than it actually was. However, everytime it was scheduled to release, "America happened." Tom eventually added a new punchline and made it into a Take That! against America's lack of gun safety.
  • Baby With A Gun 2 features a tower building explodeing at the end, but it's represented with a very simplistic, superimposed, obviously fake stock explosion. Tom initially went for a much more realistic explosion and destruction sequence, but the video released very close (as in, less than three days close) to the very real Manchester Arena bombing), so it was heavily toned down at the last minute into a Special Effects Failure.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Tom has stated that he's quite allergic to the materials used for the horse mask he wears for several sketches. He specifically mentioned becoming short of breath after shooting the ending scene for The Fallen.
• Executive Meddling:
  • In the now unavailable comedy sketch Takeout Robbery (more on that below and in this video), the original script had the villain holding a knife, but the marketing campaign that was doing the brand deal with Tom for that video deemed it too violent and suggested replacing it with a glass of water. They finally settled on a pizza cutter.
  • TOMSKA VS OREO was originally titled "Banned Oreo Advert", but the brand informed Tom that he cannot name his video like this, only a few minutes before going live, forcing Tom to quickly rename the video.
  • Tom's original script for Time Trouble was rejected and pretty much everything that was planned for it was changed the evening before the shooting was set to take place, forcing him and his co-writer Eddie to rewrite the entire skit on the go in only a few hours.
  • Completely averted with any of his Surfshark sponsorship videos, as Tom discusses in a video helpfully titled "Dear Surfshark, Please Fire Me". All of the scripts Tom writes for them get sent back approved with no edits, to Tom's dismay, as he's deliberately trying to find where they draw the line.
• Incestuous Casting: The married cops in Juice That Makes Your Head Explode are played by twins Jacob and Mike Trueman.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The mobile game KatataK was removed from stores due to the studio that developed it going bankrupt, making it virtually impossible to be played today, unless you own a phone that still has the game installed.
• Missing Episode:
  • In 2014, he made a comedy sketch called Takeout Robbery as part of a brand deal with Oreo, unfortunately, a few months after its release, Tom legally had to take the video down after a lawsuit claiming Oreo's sponsorship campaign and the content creators involved haven't made it clear enough to their audiences that they were doing a paid advertisement; he later made a Scrap'd Week about it, and the video in question has since been reuploaded on another channel however.
  • He began to actually do these recently in his "Unlisted" videos, where he unlisted several videos either due to professional or personal reasons. Arguably the biggest ones he unlisted are the ones regarding the Binghams (due to no longer being with Jenny Bingham, sister of his friend Bing) and any video where he discussed Edd Gould, due to both his desire to fully move on from his passing and, as he explained, the myriad of comments still discussing him and how, to put it mildly, Innocently Insensitive they were.
• The Other Darrin: Tom's girlfriend in HOLY SHIT CATS is played by Jenny Bingham in the original, but by Paula Kay in the sequel, due to the (at the time) issues between Tom and Jenny. The two don't look remotely alike.
  Girlfriend (Paula Kay): I thought you were dead! Also I'm black now.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: One of the married male cops in "Juice That Makes Your Head Explode" is played by Jacob Trueman, who's gay.
• Recycled Set: "The Blame Game" uses the set and costumes from Tom's banned SurfShark advert.
• Screwed by the Lawyers:
  • In 2014, Tom made a cartoon short titled JUSTIN TIME, but he received a cease and desist by the creators of the cartoon kids show Justin Time (2011), forcing him to rename it STUPID JUSTIN BIEBER PARODY.
  • As mentioned above, his Oreo Lick Race video as well as Takeout Robbery were taken down due to a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority for not clearly enough making it clear that they were sponsored. Legally, he is not allowed to reupload.
  • The Surfshark ad in "Thomas The Tank Engine Was Darker than You Think" was removed from the video after another complaint from the Advertising Standards Authority, due to the implied violence and torture.
  • He claims to have a fun fact about Beard, but he is legally forbidden from publicly revealing what it is. The only people who know besides him are the other production members and one man who bought him a drink once.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: His very first video, TomSka's Day Out was originally a 15 minutes vlog, but because YouTube only allowed videos shorter than 10 minutes back in 2007 when it was published, he had to cut out about 6 minutes of this video.
• Surprisingly Lenient Censor: Tom was astonished by how lenient Surfshark's ad agency was, especially in comparison to other brands he'd worked with, and actively tried to get fired. So far, the only Surfshark ad to be removed was not done on the request of the ad agency, but by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority.
• Troubled Production: "First Date" was legally obligated to be filmed on the morning of March 26th, 2012. Unfortunately, Edd Gould’s death fell on the previous day, and it was too late for Tom to change plans. While the final product itself turned out well and they got all the footage they needed on time, nearly everyone on the set knew Edd and were understandably incredibly heartbroken from the immediately preceding tragedy, yet had to film through the devastation and do their best to hide it on camera. Tom recalls it as one of the toughest days working on a video of his.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Russian Roulette was originally intended to be a live-action 80s-horror-style sketch with practical effects, but was finally turned into a cartoon due to the lockdown from the COVID-19 Pandemic preventing any shooting from taking place. It also had a different ending where Tom would've paid his debt to an obscure figure that would've been revealed to be Death itself, who would have then let Tom die.
  • The Justin Bieber parodies were supposed to be a trilogy, all based around puns on Justin, with JUSTIN CASE and THIS JUSTIN following JUST IN TIME, but had to be scrapped. See Screwed by the Lawyers above.
  • Many are explored in "Fun Facts and F**k-Ups":
    • MEANWHILE was originally supposed to be a recurring asdfmovie gag, but Tom refitted it into its own sketch after he came up with ten different parallel universes while writing its script.
    • Christmas Demolition was supposed to be the first part of a trilogy, but Tom gained too much weight and didn't better his mental health in time, and the parts never got made. Tom's ideas for the missing parts eventually made it into Sam Kills Christmas.
    • Guitar Warfare has Tom learn the song on guitar but all of Tom's close-up shots were lost, and so were never used. There was also meant to be a Special Guest, but the studio involved screwed up.
    • "The Fallen" is a Shot-for-Shot Remake of a cut sketch called "Colonial Morons", which was meant to be a tie-in for Aliens: Colonial Marines. Said tie-in got cancelled, and left the original sketch shelved due to the Porting Disaster of the game.
    • Literal Drinks is also a Shot-for-Shot Remake, but contained too many puns that it adversly affected the script, so it was cut down, and re-filmed the following day.
    • There is a song made by RoomieOfficial called "Muffin Time" privated on Tom's channel that was made to cross-promote with asdfmovie 8 that has yet to be released because of voice rights issues with Sam Levigno (the child actor of Muffin) and "not wanting to pay an obscenely high fee" for their use in a song.
    • Crash Zoom - Fingered was originally a sponsored video for The Amazing Spiderman 2, but it was changed mid-development to feature wholly unique characters.
    • Shoot All Your Problems Away, depicts several cases of Axes at School and Going Postal as some Crosses the Line Twice Dark Humor, and was was planned to release way earlier than it actually did. However, every single time it was scheduled to be released, real life would surprise him and a mass shooting would take place that correlated to the lyrics they wrote, or in Tom's words "America happened". After too many instances of such shootings taking place, Tom eventually gave up, retooled it into a satire, and added a new punchline that made it into a Take That! against America's lack of gun safety.
    • For The Confession 3, a CPR Dummy of a baby was obtained as a prop, as a contingency just in case their baby actor couldn't make it to set.
    • Robot Wars was subject to Executive Meddling by The BBC, where Sir Killalot was made to be mute mere moments before filming, and the dialog was rewritten on-set to compensate for this change.
    • First Contact was originally a brand deal with intended Product Placement, but the deal fell through. While those parts were left of the editing room floor, the sketch itself was created in such a way that the product placement was superfluous to the sketch itself, and so was uploaded largely unchanged.
    • Imaginary Friend originally ended with Mr. Tibbles holding a bomb at school.
    • Big Fat Monster was originally envisioned as a kitschy B-Movie, but was re-edited to be in color to better appeal to Tom's viewers.
    • Bible Time has many of its ideas Refitted for Sequel from Time Trouble, which had the crew redo the entire sketch in one drunken night.

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