Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This? / YMMV

Archive Panic: Ran for ten seasons and 300 episodes over the course of four years and that's not counting specials.
Base-Breaking Character: Even after his popularity increased when the gang dropped Season 5's interrupted pre-microwaved segments, Riley remained a contentuous presence amongst the fanbase. He's either just as funny as Jory and Jon, or too energetic to not be annoying.
Crosses the Line Twice: The outtake footage from Episode #192, "Bottle of Gin".
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Summer, the microwave killed in the first airbag experiment. She only functioned for two seconds before the airbag deployed and tore her completely apart. Her detached door hung in the laboratory until the end of Season 7 when she was auctioned off on eBay.
- Zelda became a big fan favorite for being the unusual color of red, but much to the viewers' grief was killed after only four episodes in Riley's first hosting.
- At the start of her run, Margaret II was little more than a lazily-named replacement for the short-lived Margaret. Then the Wii experiment happened, and she exploded in popularity when she came back from the dead - a feat she managed to perform another two times.
Fan Myopia: If you've created or are a fan of another microwave show (generally speaking, with at least a couple hundred subscribers), you've probably had at least one encounter with these. They will accuse them of copying Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This?, even if the experiment is not one they did, the show format is entirely different, or in dOvetastic's case, your show is much older than theirs. As a result, there have been false flag wars between the fans of other microwave shows, leading to wrongly age-restricted videos. These fans also completely ignore the fact that not only are creators Jonathan Paula and Jory Caron often friends with the creators of other microwave shows, but also watch and support their shows. The most frequent channels to be a victim of this trope are dOvetastic, Garret Claridge (poopooGarret), BLHProductions, and MicrowaveMeShow. However, the fanboys oddly enough leave alone actual copycat shows which steal the name, the jokes, and even the format.
- In what doubles as a Moment of Awesome, Jon called out these fans for being dumbasses (his own word) on BLHProductions's blasting caps video.
Fun for Some: Thanks to YouTube killing video upload limits in 2011 Jonathan was able to do a two-hour 1.5 GB video which was just a shot of his screen as he completely edited Episode #288 ("Gasoline") for upload in Adobe Premiere. The day after it was put up 20,000 people did watch parts or all of it, and many found it fascinating as a great demo of both what goes into creating one 5-10 minute episode and of Premiere's features. Prior to this, he did a good number of livestreams in which he edited episodes of the show from start to finish on UStream.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- On Jon's blog he discussed a fan who did his own microwave series, leading to a separate incident where his mother died in a house fire he started. Normally, the Don't Try This at Home clips used to introduce the episodes since Season 7 are meant to be humorous but...
Jon: When we say 'Do not try this at home'... we mean it.
- One April Fool's episode begins with Riley telling the audience that due to changes in YouTube's Community Guidelines, they can't show fire. Back in 2009, this would have seemed completely ridiculous. A decade later, and it seems like it's pretty much an inevitability.
- The boys had a bad habit of tempting fate with the destructive capabilities of experiments or the mortality of the current microwave, only for shit to hit the fan very soon afterwards:
  - When Sandra shut off midway through Episode #62, Jory joked that it was the result of Diane's spirit killing her from the inside out. As they discovered minutes later when they went back inside to survey the outcome, he couldn't have been any more accurate and the unexpected death of a microwave forced them into a month-long hiatus.
  - Episode #77 has a pyramid-shaped firework exploding inside Helga, turning her off. Referring to the whistle it created (which disturbingly enough sounded like screaming in the slowed-down instant replay), Jon says, "It sounds like someone just died in there." The experiment killed Helga, and the guys didn't notice this until they discovered the microwave wouldn't work with the following experiment. Jory acknowledges the irony of the situation in the following episode's intro.
  - Before she microwaved a slot machine, Jon called Jackie the "queen of the sluts" because of the dildo episode. She actually died after the slot machine experiment.
  - Jory and Riley spent most of the second lava lamp experiment discussing and mocking the plausability of a 1000 Ways to Die segment about someone killing themselves when a microwave cooking a lava lamp blew up in their face since their own first lava lamp experiment was nowhere as destructive...only to be proven very wrong when this lava lamp (which Jory had reinforced the seals on) creates a much more violent explosion than the one before and sends shrapnel throughout the laboratory.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- In episode #60, Jory mentions that they thought about using other microwave brands such as G.E. and Emerson. They were on their third microwave at that point, and each one had been a Sharp. They would go onto use nine G.E. microwaves starting with Lacey in Season 4. They also had two Emerson microwaves: Saint Margaret II in Season 8 and Emily in Season 10.
- Near the end of episode 124 (the E.T. Atari game), Jory mentions The Angry Video Game Nerd review of the game... while the video annotation states that said review doesn't (at the time of 2009) exist. Now, in 2014, there's a Angry Video Game Nerd movie concerning a review of the game.
- Episode #143. At the time (released in 2009), the episode was hilarious because they nuked a Pinkie Pie toy (G3 version). Barely a year later, it became a hell of a lot more funny.
Ho Yay: Jory and Riley invoke it for laughs.
More Popular Spin-Off: Although not the most famous, "Is It A Good Idea To Microwave This?", which began in July 2007, is not the first microwaving show on the web, that would be "dOvetastic Microwave Theater", which began in 1991 and whose modern incarnation began in March 2006, when dOvetastic posted a video of him microwaving a light bulb. Unfortunately, that does not stop some fans from annoying dOvetastic by claiming that he's ripping these guys off. Initially the two shows' creators were friends until they had a falling out in 2010.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Riley wasn't particularly popular during Season 5 for not really doing much of anything outside of his routine interruptions of Jory's safety speeches, which a number of people felt were plain annoying. Come Season 6, he started partaking in the intros and his dynamic with Jory quickly improved, especially with the pair ditching the interruptions in favor of working together in delivering the spiels.
Squick:
- Anything that starts off as a liquid or melts into one doesn't tend to look very pleasant once it's pulled out of the microwave - and if they come in a variety of colors like the paintballs, the end result usually resembles sloppy vomit.
- The safety spiel during the Play-Doh experiment. Riley takes a bite out of Jory's Play-Doh pizza and spits it back on the plate.
- The time they microwaved pig's eyes^note for a 2012 Halloween Episode—And Jory even touched his tongue on one after the experiment.
Tear Jerker: Whenever a microwave dies, a funeral montage of its tenure plays accompanied by a somber piano and violin tune. Helga and Lacey's montages were the first of the lot, and didn't include the original audio of their footage alongside the dirge.
Unintentional Period Piece: Having run from 2007-2011 with specials produced until 2015, this series has friendly reminders of late 2000s/early 2010s trends, technology and culture. Some of the experiments reflect what was popular during the time, and later episodes mock the popularity of The Twilight Saga and Justin Bieber.

YMMV / Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This?

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