Web Video / Saberspark

Saberspark's typical reaction to a bad, ugly-looking animated movie.^note This avatar was retired on January 10, 2024, and was replaced by an updated avatar on the same date drawn by his friend Rishi.

Saberspark is an online YouTube review series where the titular Saberspark, real name Stephen Carver (born October 11, 1988), looks over cartoon shows and animated films, either obscure or famous, good or terrible.

Carver, who takes on the form of a still cartoon avatar (with differing poses) in his videos, first became known as a diehard fan of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic called a Brony, making a college thesis "Ballad of the Brony", and later ran a Kickstarter for a series called "The Brony Chronicles". He became a major part of Bronies React before going solo.

Recurring series on Saberspark's channel include:

• What the HELL is...?: His flagship series, reviewing works of animation that are obscure, notorious, or both.
• What RUINED...?: Tracing the history and downfall of animation companies, creators, and individual cartoons.
• Weird Episode: Covering/reviewing episodes of animated series that contain unusually scary or suggestive content.
• Quick Vid: 10-minute videos, usually reviews of recent movies or series.
• Drunk Recap: A video series that recaps different animated movies whilst being drunk.

His channel can be found here. He also has a secondary channel, Saberspark 64, where he and his editor discuss video gaming here.

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Tropes related to Saberspark:

• Aborted Arc:
  • The demonic head in Joshua and the Promised Land Reanimated. We see the head appear and follow Joshua to the present, but the Post-Climax Confrontation is cut.
  • Saberspark originally introduced another side series for his channel back in early 2020 known as Bargain Binge which covered The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Golden Films). To date, he has never made another episode past that one and it appears to have been abruptly discontinued.
• Accentuate the Negative: Saberspark is mostly famous for reviewing bad animated films and shows, and is often the reference for describing how bad a cartoon is. That being said, he will give credit to films he's actually enjoyed, and will give suggestions on what he'd do to "fix" what he thinks of as a less-than-stellar movie.
• Accidental Innuendo: invoked
  • He and his friends' reaction to Chris saying "Listen, Joshua. A 'no' is sometimes a 'maybe'." in Joshua and the Promised Land.
  • Lampshaded with the reaction video to the North Korean Christmas movie, when Santa awkwardly tells the young main character that he can make any wish he wants come true while rather affectionately (more like creepily...) holding his arm and hand.
    Saberspark: [coughs and sputters from the water he was drinking]
    Paleosteno: WOAH! Uh, that was kind of... kind of a weird touch...
• Accidental Misnaming: Since he was drunk during his recap of Shrek, he misnamed some characters. Throughout the video, he refers to Lord Farquaad as Markiplier, which is funny because both of them are associated with the "E" meme.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • There was one joke in Stripperella that he said made him laugh, but he couldn't put it in the video.
  • During his review of The Red Ape Family's second episode, he says that he finds their attempt at making fun of him by calling him Saberfart pretty amusing.
• Americans Hate Tingle: He emphasizes that The Donkey King "was very successful... in [its home country] Pakistan". As an American, he felt Hype Backlash above all else, and prefaced before the review proper that he may overlook themes that would be relevant to Pakistani residents, but go over the heads of anyone unfamiliar with its political scene.^note According to the pinned comment in the video from a Pakistani viewer, its popularity came largely from the Catharsis Factor of it satirizing the government issues they were going through at the time, as well as the music being much better in Urdu than in the dub - naturally, these things would appeal much more to its home country than anywhere else.
• Anvilicious: His primary criticism of The Donkey King was that it was so adamant to be a political commentary that it bungled its own message and failed to provide a captivating, structured story on top of it.
• Art Evolution: His earlier avatar is shown to be more gruff looking and less stylized than his modern one.
• Author Avatar: The bearded glasses-wearing cartoon guy, as well as a sabertooth tiger avatar he uses on Twitch sometimes.
• Awesome McCoolname: Saberspark's Distaff Counterpart settles on "Sabie" for her name because she found out it means "fearsome river" in Afrikaans.
• Bait-and-Switch: In the opening of "What the HELL Are Genderswap Episodes?" Saberspark seemingly undergoes a Gender Bender himself, becoming "Sabiespark". Then, in the last segment of the episode, Saberspark pops up to remind Sabie to promote their new tee-shirt design (revealing that she is actually his Distaff Counterpart, who took his place for the episode).
• Ban on Politics: Self-imposed for his review of The Queen's Corgi, which contains a rather unflattering portrayal of then-president Donald Trump.
• Berserk Button: NFTs, as shown in his review for The Red Ape Family where he complains about how the quality of the cartoon doesn't justify its crypto price tag of $1.8 million.
• Big "NO!": Moses' Dull Surprise "No! Nooooo!" from Joshua has become a series-long Running Gag anytime someone yells "No!" unconvincingly.
• Brain Bleach: He claims to have stopped in the middle of an episode of Peepoodo & the Super Fuck Friends because it had way too much Toilet Humor for him to handle. Those who watch the show can more than likely agree with him.
• The Cameo: Cameo'd in an Inanimate Insanity episode.
• Cat Girl: In the video about Transformation Fiction, Saber gives Sabie a cat-ear headband to wear in order to promote his Sabie plush, and the scene cuts to Sabie reluctantly dancing as a catgirl for fanservice.
• Caustic Critic: Zigzagged. While he's generally very unkind to the worse things he has to deal with, he's not above praising works that he thinks are good, such as Animalympics, Beastars, Lilo & Stitch (and surprisingly its anime spin-off, too), and even The Queen's Corgi. He'll also note when an otherwise bad movie or show does something right.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: He drops one during the review of Judas and Jesus while summarizing the plot, with any potentially questionable words being censored by a Wacky Sound Effect. Impressively, the section never uses the same sound effect twice.
• Corpsing: Invoked in his review of Wolf Tracer's Dinosaur Island, where he admits to not being able to get through the line "Jack's off in the sky" with a straight face after cracking up a couple of times attempting to do so.
• Critic Breakdown:
  • He starts his review of Finding Jesus 2 by just losing it, completely bewildered that one of the worst movie rip-offs ever made got a sequel in less than a year, goes on a lengthy rant and blaming the audience for making him watch it before starting the review proper. During the review, he acts somewhat angrier than usual when pointing out the defaults, and is immensely irritated by the fact that, not only are the fish Christians on a quest to find Jesus, but in the film's universe, Jesus isn't a fish, but a living human. By the end of the video, he showed that he broke the DVD after he finished watching.
  • He's basically in the middle of an extended one toward WowNow Entertainment (the makers of the Finding Jesus movies, Bibletown, and Dia of the Dead, becoming notably much angrier at them than he has toward any animation studio he's previously covered, to the point of swearing to drag them through the mud and dredge up whatever information on them he can for a dedicated video on them.
• Damned by Faint Praise: He notes that Homeward's animation is better than The Asylum's previous movie Trolland. But given that Trolland has eye-searing animation, it's still garbage.
  Saberspark: Compared to Trolland, it's art. It's so much better than Trolland. But that's not saying much. That's like saying, that's the least painful explosive diarrhea I've ever had.
• Deadpan Snarker: He tends to devolve into this when giving critiques.
• Distaff Counterpart: "Sabie", Saberspark's female alter-ego (voiced by Elsie Lovelock), appears as a guest commentator in videos about genderswaps (Gender Flip, Gender Bender, Rule 63), The Smurfette Principle, and Transformation Fiction.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: On his main channel, there is one video that isn't about animation: What RUINED Sega?. Notably, he made this video years before creating his video game-themed channel Saberspark 64.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: After his sponsor message in his review of Animal Wars, Saberspark briefly turns into his fursona just before the video Smashes to Black for the next segment.
• Fun with Homophones: At the end of his review for the Balto trilogy, Saber praises the original movie for its sincerity and quality. He says the same for "The Land Before Time, too! (Beat) I mean, uh, The Land Before Time also, not "Number Two"^note The Great Valley Adventure, which he complained for being the product of invoked Sequelitis!"
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • Watching Christmas in New York is so bombastic and chaotic that it drives Saber completely mad. He completely loses his sanity in the (literal) fever dream of an ending.
    Saberspark: "That's the movie. That's the movie! THAT'S THE MOVIE! THAT'S THE MOVIE!! THAT'S THE MOVIE!!! THAT'S THE ENTIRE MOVIE!!!! WHAT'S GOING ON?!?!" (hellish screech) (The audio becomes ear-piercingly distorted past his second "That's the movie")
  • In the video about Transformation Fiction, Sabie mentions Gender Bending as one example of transformation, which Saber did a previous video on the topic. Saber then tells her that that's how "[she] was born", giving her a Thousand-Yard Stare.
• Hypocritical Humor: In his review of The Emoji Movie, he complains about the Candy Crush Saga scene being a "bonafide ad" for the game in the middle of the movie, but right after that, he cuts to the sponsor message.
• I'm Going to Hell for This: Repeatedly stated throughout his review of Judas and Jesus (all the way up to including it in the title of the video), partly due to the sacrilegious humor and partly due to the very NSFW content. He then claims this again when he makes a joke about Jesus not being able to hear the Roman guards sneaking up on him due to wearing Raycon earbuds while doing the obligatory shout-out to his sponsor.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: At the end of his review for Eight Crazy Nights, Saber declares that he needs to do a lot of drinking to forget it. Quick cut to him demanding an eggnog from the bartender because he needs it for his next Christmas Crap review: Santa Inc..
• Insistent Terminology: He's an "admirer of anthropomorphic designs", but he's not a "furry". It's something of a Running Gag in his videos.
• Insult Backfire: He loved Saber Fart, an unflattering caricature of him in the second episode of The Red Ape Family. He even made him canon.
• Insult to Rocks: When reviewing Son of Alladin (sic, it's one of those movies) and deeming it the new worst film on Netflix, Saberspark states that at least Leo the Lion (his previous pick for "worst film on Netflix") was maybe cartoony enough to get kids' attention while Son of Alladin's animation doesn't even have that going for it. He lampshades this immediately after.
  Saberspark: Oh my God, I'm using Leo the Lion as a positive example.
• It Is Beyond Saving: As bad as some of the movies he watches are, he at least tries to offer some constructive criticism, or suggest ways they could have been improved. There are few times, however, where a movie is so bad he concludes that it should never have been made, like Alibaba and the Gold Raiders.
• Limited Animation: His cartoon avatar doesn't really move as much as it goes from one pose to the other without transition (which is typical for online video presentations/vlogs). Averted in the Drunk recap of Shrek where his avatar is animated. The Space Jam recap is in a more story-board style, but with a fully animated intro..
• The Mockbuster: He dedicated several videos to ripoffs of Finding Nemo and Kung Fu Panda, as well as individual reviews like Homeward (Onward), Spider's Web: A Pig's Tale (Charlotte's Web), etc.
  • Regarding Finding Nemo, he made honorable mention like Shark Tale (which he agrees that the movie tries to take attention away from Finding Nemo back when Dreamworks and Pixar were bitter rivals) and Padak (which he doesn't as despite sharing a similar premise, it is anything but).
• Nosebleed: The thumbnail in his review for Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt has him getting a nosebleed over Panty and Stocking lusting over him.
• Pixellation: Since his videos are on Youtube, he has to blur some explicit footage to avoid demonetization. While this is played straight for some R-rated movies, such as both Fritz the Cat movies, the Judas and Jesus, Peepoodo, and Furry Force reviews take this up to eleven because of how utterly raunchy they are. Almost all of the clips are blurred out as a result.
• Please Subscribe to Our Channel: Saber awkwardly asks his viewers to subscribe to his channel starting in his review of Unicorn Wars.
• Precision F-Strike: While he generally stays away from hard swears in his videos, he's not above dropping them if he's sufficiently worked up, as seen in his rant on NFT cartoons when he segues into Cryptoland:
  "[...] Cryptoland's like, 'Don't you talk about our island and say it's a scam, we'll do a DMCA in your channel.' So, um, bring it. If you wanna take down my video, fuckin' bring it."
• Questioning Title?: A staple of his show, the "What the HELL is [Movie]?" series. Many of his videos have either this as the official title, or it's on the thumbnail with big yellow clickbaity letters.
• A Rare Sentence: During his review of Star Balls, a terrible anime porn parody, he says, "and then Mystique turns into Kid Rock". He lampshades it by saying "How is that a sentence?".
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl: Sabie, the curvy Distaff Counterpart of Saber, isn't impressed with him inviting her to host his videos about Gender Bending, The Smurfette Principle, and Transformation Fiction "just for views". At the end of the last episode in the aforementioned list, she vows to "literally kill [him]" for that and turning her into a Cat Girl just to promote his Sabie plush.
• Review Ironic Echo: Played for Laughs in his review of the Elf Bowling movie, where an animate moai says "This is like a chick flick, except instead of smoking babes, dude, it's a munchkin and a fat guy" and Saberspark declares that he's going to post that line as a review on Amazon. Which he actually did, by the way.
• Running Gag:
  • Struggling to read a creator's surname or studio name when it sounds even a bit foreign.
  • Insisting that he's not a furry, despite also being a self-proclaimed "fan of anthro designs".
  • Certain lines from works he reviews become recurring reaction clips in future videos, with Monkey Moses' "No... NOOOOOO!" being the most notable.
  • He's noted that a disproportionately large number of his reviews (particularly the more notable ones) involve lions.
  • Any time he highlights a film's awkward walking cycles, he will generally do so via a montage set to "Genius of Love". Increasingly done with other montages, as well.
  • "Bob will remember that." in his Veggietales video when a Chekhov's Gun comes up.
  • Referring to Jon Heder only as "the guy who played Napoleon Dynamite" whenever he appears in a movie's cast.
  • Later reviews have Saber segueing into the sponsor message and then telling the viewer that he "got 'em" with it.
• Scenery Censor: In his review of Full English, Saber raises his hands as he shrugs, with his right hand conveniently covering a sex scene between two squirrels.
• Sequel Hook: At the end of his video focusing on Lilo & Stitch, he also remembers that there was also Lilo & Stitch: The Series, which is tonally different from the original film. After showing a clip from the episode "Poxy" where Stitch pulls out a chainsaw to seemingly operate on Pleakley with, he plays a seemingly Gory Discretion Shot from the episode and uncomfortably says, "Let's just save the show for a future video." This is more or less subverted in that he hasn't gotten around to the show in the years since. Plus, when he and Rishicoyote/Rishidraws live-streamed their tier ranking of Disney Villains (both film and TV), he ranked Gantu solely based on his original film appearance (giving him a D), and when they got to Hämsterviel, they quickly dismissively put him in IDK ("I Don't Know", for villains who he's not familiar with), spending the least about of time out of all the villains talking about him (to the point that they don't even mention his name), thus implying that Saberspark doesn't care about the show enough to ever watch it in the present. He eventually did a review of Stitch!, however.
• Something Something Leonard Bernstein: Saberspark's attempt to recite "All Star" in the drunk recap of Shrek eventually degenerates into "Something and then something the shed..." As the comments pointed out, he'd have to be pretty drunk to not remember the words to that verse.
• Tempting Fate:
  • He frequently deems a movie "the worst movie of all time" only for it to be outdone by the subject of a future review. It started with Leo the Lion, then passed to Joshua and the Promised Land, and so on. The current record holder is The Adventures Of Acela.
  • Saberspark called Trolland the ugliest movie ever and thought nothing would be able to topple it. And then he watched Gaither's Pond.
  • During the intro for the "Genderswap" episode, Saberspark discusses the episode's theme with his editor, remarking that it's mostly used as a cheap, fanservice-y way to attract viewers and that he's glad his show hasn't sunk that low. Cue Saber being magically replaced by Sabie.
    Sabie: Oh, no.
• invoked Unintentional Uncanny Valley: A common flaw he finds in CGI-animated movies that attempt realistic human proportions and/or faces. Notable examples involve Animal Kingdom: Let's Go Ape and Delgo. Really, you could make a drinking game out of all the times he says "uncanny valley".
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: In-Universe. It's a Running Gag whenever Saber struggles to pronounce a foreign name right.
  • In his review of Elcano & Magellan, he mispronounces Lapu-Lapu's name as "luh-POOH luh-POOH" instead of "LAH-pooh LAH-pooh", something he only found out while editing the video. He includes a disclaimer near the beginning to point this out.
  • In his review of Mystery of the Kingdom of God, he compares Jesus pronouncing Andrew's name as "AHN-drew" to his own struggles with pronouncing foreign names. Saber also makes a Call-Back to his Owl House review, where he mispronounced Luz's name as "LUHZ" instead of "LOOZ".
• Visual Pun: In his review of the Balto trilogy, Saber talks about how the first movie's soundtrack gives him the goosebumps. Quick cut to Stella's seductive song for Boris in Balto III: Wings of Change, where Saber quickly clarifies that he's not talking about those goosebumps.
• Virtual YouTuber: He's of a variant called a "PNGTuber" since he uses a 2D PNG avatar that changes poses. However, Carver occasionally appears on-screen as himself in some videos.
  • His video on VTubers had him using an actual model.
• Yiff: In a deleted scene from his The Donkey King review he shared on Twitter, when talking about the Vizier Fitna (who is a fox girl) he then brings up how he wants to "Fitna dick in her ass", before apologizing. (In the actual video, the offending words are bleeped out while Saber claims that the line is not going to make it into the video.)

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