YMMV / Folding Ideas

• Awesome Music: "Charlie Tango", the song made from strange lines from the Fifty Shades books and sung by Dan's friend and singer Crystal. Now there's even a music video.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • As pointed out in the video's comment section, Dan's insults towards Bruce Willis's flat performance and seeming lack of effort in Glass are a lot less funny since Willis's aphasia diagnosis was made public, with insiders confirming that he was already suffering from the disorder when filming and had to be fed many of his lines through an earpiece as he was incapable of remembering them.
  • In his episode on cooking shows on the internet, he comments that it's unlikely the Bon Appétit crew will pay people to hold up anti-Semitic signs or find a dead body, referencing scandals involving prominent Youtube personalities. While neither of those have happened, Bon Appétit did come under fire a month after Dan's video came out for significantly and systematically underpaying its POC contributors compared to their white counterparts, with the editor in chief accused of having dressed in blackface, and one of the prominent hosts of the Bon Appétit crew (Chris Morocco) having used his pull in the organization to encourage the systemic underpaying of other contributors and then acting friendly with them.
  • The latter half of In Search Of A Flat Earth is him essentially predicting the January 6 riots to a disturbingly accurate degree.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Back in 2012 during the episode on 300, Dan and Foldy converse about having to trim the video down and cut out a lot of potential talking points since it would otherwise be "too much for a 15-minute episode". Considering nowadays many videos on the channel can range from 20 minutes to over two hours and cover multiple topics, this concern seems especially quaint.
  • In the "End of Eva Follow Up" originally released in 2013, Dan speculates the nature of The End of Evangelion based on its relation to Rebuild of Evangelion, which he laments will remain inconclusive "until like... 2015 or so when the final movie in the series actually comes out in Japan." Yeah... about that 2015 release date...
  • Or Harsher in Hindsight depending on your take on Vidme; Dan's video on the site describing its failings and underlying problems seemed to accurately predict many of the reasons it would close down 6 months later.
  • In The Thermian Argument video, Dan gave an example of fictitious anime titled "Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs" while discussing a problematic circular titular argument. That said fictitious anime came true when Goblin Slayer became infamous for the rape scene in the first episode, and its fans using the exact same defense "the angry gamemasher" has made. Around the same time, Dan clarified the original inspiration for the "Women Getting Ripped Apart By Orcs" was Claymore.
    Dan: Goblin Slayer is the real-world version of my rhetorical "Women Getting Ripped Apart By Orcs" fake anime from the Thermian Argument video.
  • Dan's video about the hypothetical Snyder Cut, "The Snyder Cut Does (Not) Exist", turned out to be near right-on the money with the announcement of Zack Snyder's Justice League coming to HBO Max, from involving extensive reshoots and additions of material missing from the original film, all the way down to releasing on HBO Max as some much needed content. He was even close to the original budget given for the reshoots and effects to get it completed, and was only proven wrong because that original number ballooned to almost twice his original estimate. He also predicted several other elements, from it being full of cameos of various DC character and plot hooks for future movies that did not exist in the original cut, to it being of a runtime that would've made a theatrical release impractical. His theorizing that originally Warner Bros didn't want to make it out of embarrassment and not wanting to look like they caved to popular demand turned out prescient. Later news report confirmed it's exactly what happened, with Warner Bros Execs regretting releasing the cut as it was perceived as them caving in to demand and has only made online pressure worse.
  • "Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs"
    • The video was almost immediately followed by a large crash of major cryptocurrencies value, and in the months that followed NFTs faded into irrelevance. Dan mentions that while he can't claim credit, this isn't entirely accidental either. Crypto currencies always experienced a crash in January, where he aimed to release the video^note People using money they receive over the holidays to buy Crypto injects money into the ecosystem which lets a bunch of people cash out which makes Crypto value drop especially as the cash flow stops following the end of the holidays, it just happened that this combined with 2022's existing economic issues, several crypto exchanges going either bankrupt or collapsing as they turned out to be frauds, and the growing negative press surrounding NFTs made it far more pronounced and basically served as the death knell for the latter.
    • Dan later revealed that the video netted him a sizeable financial windfall from crypto companies thanks to how aggressively they were advertising at the time and how the YouTube advertising algorithm works^note Crypto companies were paying huge amounts to flood advertisements on any video that mentioned cryptocurrencies/NFTs. And "Line Goes Up" was all about cryptocurrencies/NFTs. This means crypto companies ended up paying a content creator who's become synonymous with the end of the crypto boom.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • From his review of The Book of Henry: "HE SCATTERS HENRY'S ASHES OVER THE CROWD."^Explanation It's really fake snow from a snow machine, but the audience knowing it's snow and giving it a standing ovation makes no sense considering they have no idea that there was a snow machine in context to Henry.
  • "GODDAMNIT, JANICE!" ^Explanation From the second video essay on The Book of Henry, and to a lesser extent, Double Toasted and Midnight Screenings' respective video reviews of the film. The line is said by Henry to his principal. Throughout the review, Olson continues to refer to her solely as "Goddammit Janice", which only highlights the absurdity of the line from an eleven year old.
  • "Cringe. There’s no other word for it. This makes me cringe. It's embarrassing."^Explanation A quote from "The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall" describing the characters from Satellite City. This scene, clipped out from the larger review, has had a long life as a reaction video due to his absolutely stone-faced delivery.
  • "I'm sick of people bashing the obvious utility of NFTs. The ease with which I can look at a person's profile, see their involvement with NFTs, and then identify them as a blood sucking sociopath is revolutionary." ^Explanation A quoted comment posted on "Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs" which quickly went viral.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • "Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs" became, as of February 2022, the most viewed video on his channel less than four weeks with 4.4 million views. Before that, "The Art of Editing and Suicide Squad" garnered 3.2 million views during the 5 years before "Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs".
  • "The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall" managed to garner more views than Doug Walker's video in less than a year.
• Tear Jerker: Dan's video "I Can't Stop Watching Contagion" is gutwrenching given that it released right around the time major social distancing measures of the COVID-19 Pandemic began to take place, and the dry, professional way he describes the movie, its themes, how eerily it mirrored much of reality — even catching him offguard on his repeat watches for how the internet played into how information, and more importantly, misinformation was spread in the movie — and how it's affected his life even if he's an agoraphobic shut-in, and how he uses it to believe, even against the reality before him, that people can choose better. All over a still shot of him collapsed onto a pillow on his sofa, with a defeated Thousand-Yard Stare. The comments are littered not only with people agreeing with him, but noting how hard he hit the nail on the head about the general anxiety of the pandemic.

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