Web Video / Chroma

Chroma is a French Web Video series hosted by Karim Debbache acting as the Spiritual Sequel of Crossed, during which Karim once again talks about movies and cinema in general. The first season was made between January 2016 and May 2017, each episode focusing on a different movie and delivering a particular message or food for thought about cinema.

Funded popularly on Ulule, Chroma got a budget of a whopping 200,000€, allowing the show to have more special effects, a completely redesigned setting for the show, and creating an overarching plot besides the movies each episode is focused on.

Since the plot involves parallel universes, here are the characters for the sake of clarity:

• Karim Debbache, the host of the show in universe 1.
• Jérémy Morvan, the sound engineer in universe 1.
• Gilles Stella, the camera operator in universe 1.
• Kamel Debbiche, Karim's counterpart in universe 2 who travels to universe 1.
• Jérémy Morvain, Morvan's counterpart in universe 2 who follows Kamel.
• Gilles Stello, Stella's counterpart in universe 2 who doesn't follow Kamel and Morvain.
• The Loony Mustached Operator, also from universe 2, who does follow them.

The series is complete with 12 episodes:

• Troll 2, an apparently Genre-Busting movie about a family stumbling into a village full of hostile goblins.
  What is a (bad/good) film?
• Rollerball (the 2002 remake), an action movie featuring a Dystopia in which an ordinary hero participates in the eponymous sport.
  All figurative films are political on two different levels.
• Highlander II: The Quickening: the much-reviled sequel of Highlander.
  A fictional film has a diegesis.
• Signs: the science-fiction movie from M. Night Shyamalan featuring a family living an apparent alien invasion.
  Films are screens. And we are the projectors.
• Paranormal Activity: a found footage movie featuring a couple harassed by a malicious spirit.
  A good film is a film that effectively uses the tools specific to the moving pictures medium.
• Mac and Me: a ripoff of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
  The meaning of a film shouldn't be altered by [censored] pecuniary considerations.
• Vidocq: a French Detective Drama featuring the famous inspector.
  Just because a film is unpleasant to look at doesn't mean it's a failure.
• Knock Off: a convoluted action movie by Hong-Kong star director Tsui Hark starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.
  The movies we love say a lot about who we are.
• Silent Night, Deadly Night: a 1984 Slasher Movie where the killer is dressed as Santa.
  In a film, it's very hard to tell the difference between what's descriptive and what's prescriptive.
• Gremlins: The famous movie from Joe Dante where the eponymous creature wreak havoc on a suburban town.
  Cinema is a collective art.
• Goodfellas: The iconic gangster film from Martin Scorsese.
  All films are linked together.
• Carnosaur: A B-horror film about a Mad Scientist who recreates dinosaurs from chickens.
  Cinema has no birth date.

After years of speculation and anticipation, Gilles unfortunately confirmed in 2024 that there wouldn't be a second season, primarily because he, Karim and Jérémy no longer live in the same cities and because Karim is no longer comfortable with appearing on camera.

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Tropes found in Chroma

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Karim saw Knock Off so many times on DVD that he describes the DVD as "sharp as a fucking razor". When thrown, it can slice through someone's cheek and get stuck in their head.
• Accidental Murder: Played for Laughs in Episode 8 when the aforementioned DVD ends up stuck in the skull of an unfortunate man in a pastis bottle costume who just happened to be standing next to Gilles when Karim tried to throw the DVD at him to prevent the Loony Mustached Operator from stealing it and missed (then again, if he hadn't missed, the DVD would presumably have killed Gilles instead). Unlike the ending of Episode 12 where Morvain kills Morvan, forcing the team to get rid of his body and disappear, this is merely a short gag which is irrelevant to the plot and never mentioned again.
• Agent Scully: Karim acknowledges that this trope can be used to help the audience accept the supernatural explanation by making the down to Earth explanation increasingly unlikely, but he criticizes its use in Signs (where the policewoman is just being a dick about it) and Paranormal Activity (where Micah does believe there is something supernatural going on, but doesn't trust demonologists and does his best to antagonize the demon).
• Alan Smithee: Invoked, Kamel explains this pseudonym's meaning^note Directors could use it to disguise their work on a rejected or bad movie. in the third episode.
• Alien Blood: People possessed by the Pseudonyms have yellow transparent blood (implied to be urine) instead of red blood.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
  • Invoked for Signs, where Karim and Kamel are identical in everything... except their opinion about the film. Karim thinks the film fails because he forcefully passes plot devices as "divine signals", which can fool the characters but not the viewers. Kamel points out that nothing in the film actually proves that the aliens are hostile, and that the characters who perceive divine signals might just as well be completely wrong; but the viewer is still led into adopting their point of view.
  • Mocked in the review for Mac And Me. When Jeremy starts doing the same thing with the aliens from the movie, theorizing they were evil, Karim openly calls it bullshit and somewhat racist.
  • Discussed in Episodes 9 and 10, in which Kamel explains why he believes Halloween and Gremlins are misinterpreted as perverted for the former and racist for the latter by some analyses.
• Alternate Universe: Different parallel universes are featured, and Karim and Kamel are alternate versions of each other. The differences between their respective universes are sometimes small (for instance, in Kamel's world, people apparently count in Esperanto), sometimes important and relevant to the plot (the Pseudonyms are found in Karim's world but not in Kamel's).
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • In-universe, in Episode 3, Kamel criticizes Highlander 2 for going for the cliché "Corrupt Corporate Executive trying to monopolize a vital resource" plot and says it never happens in real life. Well this kind of people do exist, as the California electricity crisis proves it, to Kamel's shock.
  • In Episode 12, Karim reacts with disbelief when Gilles and Kamel explain to him that the method featured in Carnosaur for recreating dinosaurs by genetically engineering chickens is actually being tried out by geneticists with some success.
• Arc Welding: Each episode not only focuses on a movie, but also presents an overarching plot in which the greatest movies ever made are disappearing from existence and similar movies of far worse quality have become notorious in their place.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • Karim point out that in Knock Off, Van Damme's character, a simple jeans salesman, is able to hold his own against the Russian mafia, the Hong Kong triad, the CIA and even fruit sellers.
  • In the final episode, we can see that Jérémy Morvain is wanted for murder, extraction-injection of piss for blood in a body, and theft of a book in a library.
• Bad Future: In Episode 7, a portrait of Orson Welles shows Karim a future where good movies have disappeared, resulting in everyone having bad taste, wearing ridiculous outfits or cracking bad jokes.
• Badge Gag: The fake passport Morvain obtains in the last episode to flee the police is an obvious forgery, the picture is a photo of Danny Trejo.
• Bait-and-Switch: The seventh review starts with Orson Welles telling Karim in a dream to review a film that revolutionized cinematic techniques, where the titular character dies early on and where we learn what happened through flashbacks recounted by people who knew him. Karim proceeds to review Vidocq.
• Berserk Button:
  • Many of Morvan's jokes have this effect on Karim and prompt a Big "SHUT UP!", he's so fed up with them he even headbutts him in the opening of Episode 1.
  • Karim also loses it when Kamel says he wishes Vidocq never existed, even though they both just panned it, because he believes every movie has a reason to exist.
  • Kamel does not tolerate parodies of Goodfellas and when Morvain shows him one he made, he kicks the screen.
• Beware the Silly Ones:
  • Morvan is shown to be a surprisingly good kung-fu fighter in Episode 1, he even has the upper hand against Karim even though the latter is armed with a nunchaku.
  • He and the Loony Mustached Operator are also scarily effective at deleting good movies from existence after being possessed by the Pseudonyms.
  • Morvain shoots Morvan dead in Episode 12 as payback after the latter tried to possess him too in Episode 5.
• Big "WHAT?!": Karim has this reaction after a Double Take when he learns that Jérémy of all people is a fan of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness.
• Brick Joke: In the first episode, Morvan mentions the "Pseudonyms", undefined monsters that "drink your blood and replace it with pee". A few episodes later, the Pseudonym-possessed Loony Mustached Operator and Morvan are shown to bleed urine.^note It's a pun on the French expression "pisser le sang" ("to piss blood" i.e to bleed heavily), inverted in "saigner de la pisse" ("to bleed piss").
• Bullying a Dragon: Karim mocks the tendency of Micah in Paranormal Activity to deliberately antagonize the supernatural presence in his house in a sketch where Jeremy is playing a threatening demon who is being bullied by Gilles like he's a little kid.
• By "No", I Mean "Yes": In Episode 8, Karim says that Jean-Claude Van Damme and Tsui Hark "almost" enjoyed working with each other. He then clarifies that by "almost", he means "not at all".
• Call-Back:
  • The stoic cop saying "papers, please" was already a recurring character in Crossed.
  • In episode 5, Morvain mentions that he has a "commerce qualification, option small pets", also a joke from Crossed, where Morvan claimed to have the same qualification when asked what his job even is. This gag undergoes a Cerebus Retcon in the final episode, where Morvain kills Morvan: since Chroma is set before Crossed, this means Morvain impersonated Morvan after killing him and is actually the one who answers the question in Crossed.
  • Like in Crossed, Karim loves (badly) drawing sphinxes for no reason.
  • Charles from Crossed also reappears and serves once again as a living censor bar in Episode 6.
• Calling Shotgun: Kamel immediately does it when Arturo offers him to travel to the other universes in Episode 3.
• The Cameo:
  • Several of Karim's friends appear in episode 6, notably the Joueur du Grenier, whose own episodes Karim was co-writing at the time.
  • Episode 3 features a vocal one from famous French voice actor Daniel Beretta (better known as the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger).
• Censored for Comedy: The film's countless product placements and Karim's Precision F Strikes are censored by a melodica note and a blurring machine in the Mac And Me review. Of course, by the end the blurring machine breaks and Karim asks the melodica man to stop it already.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Downplayed as comedy remains prominent, but after Episode 3 the plot thickens from pure gags to an overarching story which influences the video themselves.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • A literal example, Morvain is shown to own a gun in Episode 8, then shoots Morvan dead with it in Episode 12.
  • Discussed and defined in Episode 4, in which Karim regards the instances of this trope in Signs as lazy writing, while Kamel points out that they may instead be interpreted as coincidences misconstrued by the main characters as divine signs.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Jérémy Morvan. In Episode 5, he shows glimpses of his appartment and day to day life, with emphasis on his hippopotamus and tiger slippers. His Alternate Self Jérémy Morvain shares this trait, for instance in Episode 12, we see him sleep and eat simultaneously.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The show uses blue lighting in Karim's universe and red lighting in Kamel's. The title sequence is also colored differently depending on who reviews the movie.
• Conflict Ball: Everyone in the crew picks it in the first episode where Karim headbutting Morvan out of frustration at his lack of seriousness leads to a lengthy gratuitous fight among the crew plus another man named Professor Kung-Fu. This is contrasted in episode 10, which is episode 1 as it happened in universe 2 (the review being about Gremlins instead of Troll 2): released on schedule with everyone getting along.
• Damned by Faint Praise:
  • Karim just says Paranormal Activity was "interesting". When Kamel asks him whether he means "good", Karim replies "interesting" again.
  • The least insulting word Karim comes up with to describe Rob Schneider's filmography is "existent".
• Dark Reprise: In the 8th episode's opening, a slowed-down, disturbingly ominous version of Allô, allô, monsieur l'ordinateur plays.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Karim always refers to the demon in the Paranormal Activity review as some variant of "the devilish demon from infernal hell".
• Disposing of a Body: In the last episode, the corrupted Morvan is shot in the head by Morvain, leading to an epilogue where the crew goes to a farm to cut up the body and throw the pieces in a river.
• Distracted by My Own Sexy: Karim finds his identical alternate self Kamel very attractive and calls him a "sublime ephebe with a perfect skin" within seconds of meeting him.
• The Ditz: Jérémy Morvan (later Morvain), the microphone holder, is the self-proclaimed "joke guy" of the show and some rather… bizarre shticks.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Discussed. François Truffaut's famous quote about how anti-war movies all end up being pro-war is mentionned in the Goodfellas review to point out that the film is very fast paced and yet, contrary to Scarface (1983), does not end with an epic battle and an iconic death, but with the protagonist leading the kind of mundane and boring life he didn't want, thus avoiding that pitfall to an extent.
• Dream Intro: Episode 7 begins with Karim dreaming of a portrait of Orson Welles goading him into talking about a good movie for change. Karim proceeds to talk about Vidocq while we were led into thinking he'd talk about Citizen Kane.
• Dude, Not Funny!:
  • Morvan keeps acting like a clown on the inaugural episode of Chroma, and Karim berates him for that, eventually headbutting him.
  • Morvan farting onscreen in Episode 5 shocks and offends everyone so much they receive a letter from the government asking to censor it.
• Dull Surprise: Discussed in the Signs review, which seems to be a contest of who can act the least. Not the worst, just... the least.
  Karim: "...Yes? Ah, sorry, it seems Mel Gibson has crashed. Can someone reboot him? Quick, he's starting to have flashbacks!"
• Eldritch Abomination: The Pseudonyms are tentacled monsters that can possess people by drinking their blood and replacing it with urine, and erase good movies from existence, we have no idea where they come from or even why they even do any of these things.
• The Ending Changes Everything: A lot of twists happens near the end of each episode, changing the perspective of what's been happening during it. The most notable is at the end of Episode 3, where it's revealed that the episode was hosted by Kamel all along and is actually set in his universe rather than Karim's.
• Evil Plan: The Pseudonyms want to replace good movies with bad ones until every good movie is gone from existence, the team calls this plan the Great Substitution. In Episode 12, it turns out that this plan is doomed to fail because bad movies can't exist without good ones and conversely.
• Executive Meddling: Discussed by Karim in Episode 2, 6 and 8. It has a tendency to ruin the movies of competent film directors, ruining the original intention and alienating said directors from the producer in the first place. Karim theorizes that Knock Off is a mockery of Hollywood.
• Fanboy:
  • Karim doesn't even try to hide he's a huge one for Jean-Claude Van Damme, and spends a long sequence gushing about his badassery in Knock Off.
  • He's also apparently a fan of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, but he denies it very unconvincingly.
• Finishing Each Other's Sentences: When Gilles and Karim overcome the Pseudonyms' brain-washing and finally remember Jurassic Park (1993) in Episode 12, they keep finishing Kamel's sentences about it, to his annoyance.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Horrible monsters able to replace someone' blood with piss are lurking around. Their names? Pseudonyms. Downplayed as he word isn't cute sounding but doesn't sound threatening either.
• Foreshadowing: Episode 3, which places an emphasis on canon, features Jérémy and Gilles acting out of character. It foreshadows the fact that they are merely alternate selves of the original crew belonging to a parallel universe.
• Found Footage: Part of Episode 5 is narrated that way, fitting the review's theme.
• Genius Ditz: Morvan and Morvain both show shades of this trope several times, for instance Morvain manages to perfectly remember and narrate the entire review of Gremlins in Episode 10.
• Get Out!: When Jérémy does a fart joke in Episode 5, Karim orders him to leave the set. In Episode 6, Jérémy has to swear he won't do it again before being allowed to return.
• Greater-Scope Paragon:
  • While he only briefly appears, Arturo is implied to be one, as he appears to know more about parallel universes than any other character and sends Kamel's team to Karim's world to help defeat the Pseudonyms without fighting the latter directly.
  • Archimed Kebab also qualifies, as he doesn't fight the Pseudonyms directly either but leaves riddles to help find the key to defeating them.
• Homemade Sweater from Hell: Karim and Kamel both like wearing them.
• I'm Not Doing That Again: In the Troll 2 review, he notes that the only way to be scared by the film would be "to watch it on a smartphone, chased by twenty hungry wolves". Before adding "And that's something I'll never do again".
• Impaled Palm: In Episode 10, the Cerberus shoots a bullet through Karim's hand the second he misunderstands his riddle and shows his ID.
• Intentional Engrish for Funny: The video Jérémy directs in Episode 11 has ridiculously bad English subtitles, most notably when he says "Hasta la vista... baby", which is subtitled "Until the view... little children".
• It's a Long Story: Jérémy holds the Loony Mustached Operator at gunpoint. Karim asks how he got a Beretta, and when Jérémy says the stock phrase, Karim just tells him to continue. Jérémy proceeds to recite his whole colorful life, getting sidetracked for so long the Loony Mustached Operator escapes when they were distracted by Jérémy's speech.
• Jerkass to One: While Karim and Kamel aren't exactly nice in the comedy moments, what with being prolific Deadpan Snarkers, the serious parts of their analysis have them somewhat respectful of the movies they review, even those they found bad. The two exceptions, one for each, are Mac and Me, with Karim delivering the usual end-of-episode cinematographic aesop with genuine anger, and Silent Night Deadly Night 2, which Kamel explicitly paints as an example of the worst fate cinema could suffer.
• Kill and Replace: Heavily implied in the last episode since Jérémy Morvain kills Jérémy Morvan even though Chroma is set before Crossed, in which a man calling himself Jérémy Morvan who looks exactly like Chroma's Morvan and Morvain does appear.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In Episode 12, when Morvain asks how long it took him to find the reel projector (needed to watch the reel they found in episode 10), Karim answers "four months". Four months is the actual time it took for the episode to come out due to technical issues.
• Like Reality, Unless Noted: While it's generally assumed that Karim's universe is ours (aside from the Pseudonyms), as the films in it are the same as in reality (whereas in Kamel's universe, at least one real movie, Highlander 2, doesn't exist until Arturo sends it to the team), it's somewhat implied that it might actually be a slightly different parallel universe since according to Episode 1, Gilles is the one who created You Can Leave Your Hat On in this universe rather than Randy Newman. However, according to the same episode, Karim's team has been traveling to other universes before the show started, so another possibility is that Karim's team was originally from another universe and ended up living in ours.
• Living Photo: Episode 7 starts with Karim dreaming about a talking portrait of Orson Welles who shows him what the world will become if the Pseudonyms win.
• Look Behind You: The Loony Mustached Operator shouts "watch out, a pastis man!" to distract Karim and try to steal the DVD of Knock Off in Episode 8. As it turns out, there's actually a man in a pastis bottle costume in the room for no reason at all.
• Magic A Is Magic A: In Episode 3, Kamel criticizes Highlander 2 for not obeying the clear established rules of the previous movie, saying that it takes the spectator away from the movie, and is a sign of disrespect.
• Mistaken for Racist: In episode 10, Karim faces the Cerberus, who’s dressed as a policeman, only for the latter to ask "papers, please". Karim is pissed, apparently thinking the policeman is ask him that because he looks Arabic^note face-based identity checks are an actual and serious problem in France, while it was actually a riddle. As Kamel figures out, the policeman was asking to see not his "papiers" (papers) but his "pas-pieds" (not-feet), meaning his hands.
• Motor Mouth: As a successor of Crossed, Karim Debbache's fast elocution is par for the course.
• Multiple Endings: Discussed, Highlander 2 has two endings, making Kamel realize that the movie had a chaotic production, lifting some of the blame he's had for it.
• Namesake Gag: Archimed Kebab, the host of Chromatographe, invented kebabs and named them after himself.
• Police Brutality: Even though the Cerberus's legitimacy as a policeman is questionable, the trope is invoked when he coldly asks "Papers, please" and then shoots through Karim's hand.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Karim and Kamel are alternate selves, but both movie buffs. However when Kamel mentions stuff like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Karim doesn't even know who Steven Spielberg is. Turns out the possessed Jérémy and Loony Mustached Operator are somehow erasing good movies from existence, leading to Karim and the whole world not remember that they even existed.
• Punny Name: A translator named France Lassion^note This sounds roughly like "translation" spoken with a French accent. appears in a gag in Episode 5.
• Red Filter of Doom: In Episode 8, the introduction features the possessed Jérémy erasing many movies from existence in a room, the whole scene being filtered in red.
• Retcon: While Crossed treated Kamel as Karim's second personality, Chroma reveals they're different individuals, which contradicts a few gags. Another contradiction is that in Chroma, Karim and Kamel deliberately wear slightly different outfits to help everyone tell them apart, but in Crossed, they wear the same outfit.
• Ret-Gone: Under the Pseudonyms' control, Morvan and the Loony Mustached Operator make good movies vanish from existence in Karim's universe, so the crew and supposedly everyone forgets about their existence.
• Retraux: Episode 12 starts with a short episode of Chromatographe, a spiritual ancestor of Chroma which is Deliberately Monochrome and digitally aged.
• The Reveal: Episode 3 reveals the existence of parallel universes, allowing Karim Debbache to converse with an alter-ego, Kamel Debbiche.
• Rewatch Bonus: For all its silliness, the show’s plotline actually contains quite a bit of foreshadowing, referencing and subtle details that becomes more obvious on second watch:
  • In episode 1, Morvan off-handedly mentions that Pseudonyms "drink your blood and replace it by urine" (which sounds like just a throwaway joke but becomes a plot point later on).
  • Kamel Debbiche doesn't say his name at the start of the third episode and the background is red this time, hinting that he's not Karim Debbache and the episode is set in a different universe.
  • In episode 6, Morvan has a bandage on his right hand, after being wounded in his fight against Morvain in the found-footage section of episode 5.
  • In episode 11, you can see the movie posters in the background gradually disappearing as the Loony Mustached Operator and Morvan keep erasing good films from existence (and since "all films are linked together", some films disappearing means that others never get made). In episode 12, as Karim and Gilles start remembering good movies, the posters also start reappearing.
• Riddle for the Ages: Many. What are the Pseudonyms and why do they want to erase good movies from existence? Why did Arturo choose to send Kamel's team to Karim's universe? Why can Archimed Kebab's reel undo the Pseudonyms' Great Substitution and why did he make it? Why did he leave riddles to find it? It's hard to tell whether these questions were meant to be answered in future seasons.
• Running Gag: Morvan, the Loony Mustached Operator and Karim all get their right hands wounded at some point (by a flag-shaped cup, a razor-sharp DVD and a gunshot respectively).
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Jérémy Morvan quits in Episode 6 after Karim rudely rejects his theory about Mac and Me, and is replaced with Jérémy Morvain.
• Sequel Hook: The last scene of the final episode features the Loony Mustached Operator appearing in the frame.
• Serious Business: Gilles tells Karim he's going too far when he compares M. Night Shyamalan's failing career to the French singer Loïs Andréa's in Episode 4. When Karim says "as finished as Loïs Andréa's career" in Episode 6, Gilles is offended again.
• Shout-Out:
  • The storyline involving parallel universes is a parody of Sliders, a character is even named Arturo.
  • Episode 3 starts with Kamel Debbiche and Jérémy Morvain playing chess on a beach in a homage to The Seventh Seal.
  • In Episode 5, Karim's alarm clock rings at 9:28, a subtle reference to The Room (2003).
  • The way Pseudonyms possess people is reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and the ending of Episode 5 is a homage to the film's Twist Ending.
  • The opening of Episode 9 is a parody of the blood test scene in The Thing (1982).
  • In Episode 11, Jérémy keeps asking what's in the mysterious box Kamel found in the previous episode, and Kamel has to remind him he's not David Mills from Se7en.
• Show Within a Show: Episode 12 starts with the team watching a brief episode of Chromatographe, the show Archimed Kebab hosted in the early 20th century, in which he analyzes the 1900 silent film Grandma's Reading Glass.
• Shown Their Work: The show is very well researched, Karim quotes and recommends a variety of books and articles throughout the reviews.
• Significant Anagram: Chromatographe is hosted by Archimed Kebab, whose name is an anagram of Karim Debbache.
• Similarly Named Works: Invoked. The Troll 2 review starts with a mention of House 5, from the same director, and a long and confusing list of films that have similar names and serial numbers without being related to each other. He later notes that Troll 2 isn't a sequel to Troll either. And then the list continues.
  • In the Carnosaur review, he makes another comically long list of films titled some variation of "Dead/Alive".
  "Peter Jackson’s Braindead had to be renamed Dead Alive for its release, not to be confused with Dead or Alive, Dead or Alive, Dead or Alive 2, Dead or Alive Final, Wanted Dead or Alive − the film not the series −, Wanted - Dead or Alive, Hell’s Fury: Wanted Dead or Alive, Dinosaurs Dead or Alive, Hitler: Dead or Alive, Alive or Dead, More Dead than Alive, The Dead are Alive, or Dead or Alive. They called it that lest people get it wrong."
• So Bad, It's Good: Discussed at length in Episode 1, as Karim analyzes why exactly Troll 2 is considered a bad movie even though it's very enjoyable thanks to how hilariously poorly made it is.
• So Bad, It's Horrible: Also discussed in several episodes, especially in Episode 6, in which Karim explains that he considers that unlike Troll 2, Mac and Me is just atrocious and not worth watching because it completely distorts the meaning of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the film it plagiarizes, with constant Product Placement and the entire removal of the Coming of Age Story elements of E.T..
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Joy To The World plays in Episode 1 while Karim, Gilles, Jérémy and Professor Kung-Fu beat the shit out of each other.
• Speak in Unison: Karim and his alternate self Kamel do that occasionally, even quoting Gogeta together to bond.
• Starting a New Life: The final episode ends with the team having to change their identities and flee to another country because Morvain is wanted by the police for the murder of Morvan.
• Stealth Prequel: While Chroma poses as the Spiritual Sequel of Crossed with more budget (although the movies reviewed in Chroma aren't about video games, unlike in Crossed), it's gradually revealed that it's actually set before Crossed, that Karim and Kamel first met in their review of Signs and that the Jérémy Morvan in Crossed is actually Jérémy Morvain, while the real Morvan is Dead All Along.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • The segments where Gilles and Jérémy tell how movies would end if their plots made sense are made with crude Hand Puppets.
  • Karim and Gilles are both shown to be terrible at drawing, and some segments use their badly-drawn illustrations.
  • Episode 4 shows part of a Dragon Ball Z fan film Kamel claims Karim directed featuring Gilles and Jérémy in ridiculous costumes poorly imitating martial arts.
  • In Episode 11, Morvain shows Kamel an awful video he made blending quotes from Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the Bullet Time from The Matrix with awful English subtitles and My Heart Will Go On playing in the background. When he asks for feedback, Kamel answers by kicking the screen.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: In the last episode, after all the great movies reappeared, Karim makes a lengthy speech about the roots of cinematography but when he says that as long as there are people to go watch movies and talk about them, whatever the film, cinema will continue to exist from the most disgusting crap to the ultimate masterpiece and...
  Kamel: And everyone wins.
  Karim: But if everyone wins, no one loses!
  Kamel: Bingo!
  Karim: Then, we won!
  Kamel: Tringo!
  Karim: Cool! Let's party! (cue everyone partying)
• Take That!:
  • Episode 4 mocks the French actor Samuel Le Bihan's wooden acting with a barely animated deepfake of him.
  • In the same episode, when Karim asks Kamel whether he likes Live Free or Die Hard and A Good Day to Die Hard, Kamel answers "no" to the former question and "I don't give a shit" to the latter.
  • Still in the same episode, Karim compares M. Night Shyamalan's failing career to the French singer Loïs Andréa's and alludes to the latter again in Episode 6. Both times, Gilles is the only person offended.
• Thinking the Same Thought: Happens several times to Karim and Kamel, especially when they first meet in Episode 4, they even play Street Fighter II together, both pick Ryu, use the exact same moves against each other and eventually knock each other out.
• Toilet Humor: Jérémy tells Karim to say "truck", only for him to fart. This is so bad it offends someone who posts on Twitter.
• Visual Pun: Many, they're generally untranslatable. For instance, in Episode 2, while Karim mentions "Hollywood's upper crust", we briefly see a gratin^note This works better in French because Karim says le gratin, an expression meaning "the elite". with "Hollywood" written on it.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: Happens twice to Gilles, first when he sees the hideous aliens in Mac and Me in Episode 6, then when he learns that Karim likes Knock Off in Episode 8.
• Who's on First?: When Karim asks Jérémy to write an opening about Pellicano in Episode 2, Jérémy writes one about pelicans in Spanish.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Episode 10 mostly consists of Jérémy Morvain remembering the first episode of his universe's Chroma, which was a review of Gremlins instead of Troll 2.
• X Meets Y: Discussed in Episode 9, where Kamel mentions that Silent Rage, a Slasher Movie starring Chuck Norris, somehow got made presumably because of the belief that mixing 2 popular things will result in a hit. Then played for laughs when he then mentions he stopped believing this after his films Ninja Cheeseburger, Jay-Z Matrix and Star Wars Sardou^note Michel Sardou is a French singer. all bombed.

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