Broken Base: While you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't like the Nerd Crew videos, there's a considerable divide between fans who are clamoring for more and fans who believe they have diminishing returns.
Crack Pairing: Rich Evans and Julia Roberts is the closest thing that RLM has to a popular shipping following an appearance Roberts made on Ellen in which the infamous "Dick the Birthday Boy" picture from Rich's childhood was put on display during the interview. Roberts had worked at a Showbiz Pizza Place as a teenager, having even worn the same bear costume seen in the photo.
Fans of RLM like to make comparisons between the material made by them and Channel Awesome. Jay Bauman doesn't care the least bit about it. Ironically during the height of the "rivalry," Channel Awesome was much more popular, but today RLM has more subscribers and gets more monthly views on their YouTube channel. note CA still has more total video views than RLM, but they also have nearly five times as many videos. Reviewers and online historians frequently contrast the two, as they rose to prominence at about the same time and have both been extremely influential on what came after. For his part, though he has never acknowledged the "rivalry," Doug Walker has commented that he watches RedLetterMedia videos. Many former CA contributors have been even more open in their fandom of RLM.
During the The Wolverine review, Mike informs Jay that fans think he's biased against DC Comics because he only likes Marvel Comics-licensed movies. Jay asks if Wolverine is a Marvel character, stating he has no interest in comics fandom.
They have one with Star Wars fans as well, particularly with prequel fans who disagree with the infamous reviews and are annoyed by all the attention they get.note Some fans came to believe that many flaws of the sequel trilogy were the result of the filmmakers trying to appease RLM's talking points, especially regarding JJ Abrams. This was only worsened by their very negative Rogue One review, which notably featured a lengthy Take That! to the fans in general at the beginning. Predictably, fans didn't take kindly to this, which led to their Nerd Crew series mocking them even more and boiling into a full on rivalry with the series. Not helping matters is the crew's general dismissive attitude towards the fans outside of the Nerd Crew and Star Wars videos.
Similarly, RLM's less-than-glowing coverage of Star Trek: Picard has resulted in many Star Trek fans (or at the very least a Vocal Minority) turning against them. Trekkies claim that RLM has sharply declined in quality since the Prequel Trilogy reviews, and that their current output is little more than mean-spirited "outrage porn" that holds little value. RLM's proponents have fired back by claiming that Star Trek fans are little more than sychophantic fanboys who are unwilling (or unable) to acknowledge the franchise's flaws. It's gotten so ugly that all posts relating to RLM are now automatically blacklisted and/or deleted from the Star Trek subreddit due to inciting too much drama.
A rivalry has exploded between fans of Nerd Crew and people who enjoy pop culture sites like Screen Junkies, Collider, and Nerdist, since they're all the primary targets of Nerd Crew's biting satire. RLM more or less "won" this one as most of the pop culture sites have ceased producing the material that RLM was satirizing.
There was a short-lived rivalry between AV Club and RLM due to the latter mocking the former's article regarding the prequels, followed by their passive-aggressive coverage of The Force Awakens video and author Jesse Hassenger's lengthy spatsagainst RLM fans.
The entire crew (mainly Mike, Jay, and Rich Evans) are affectionately referred to as "hack frauds," which stems from one of the Couch Gags of the show.
Plinkett: Mike and Jay are frauds!
Jay got called Susan in a promo, and the fandom seems to have grown attached to calling him that.
Fanon: Since the "Plinkett reviews" Harry Plinkett is from a different continuity than Plinkett in Half in the Bag, fans have assumed one version is the manga, while the other is the anime adaptation of the manga story, and the stories may eventually "catch up" to each other.
Rich Evans, both within the fandom and (surprisingly) without:
When the photo research department on Ellen learned that Julia Roberts had worked as the Showbiz Pizza Bear in her youth, the photo they found - and chose to use - was Rich's infamous "Dick the Birthday Boy" photo, which (when it was displayed during the interview) Roberts immediately pointed out.
Another photo of Rich taken from one of his "Rich Evans reacts to..." videos was used in a spam ad about how "this 54-year-old won the lottery and still lives in his parents' basement."
Yet another still image of Rich from The Rich Evans Anthology (featuring a double exposure of Rich drinking and looking despondent on a couch) is frequently used in memes.
Jay has mentioned his own brother encountering a Rich Evans meme "in the wild" and sharing it with Jay, having no idea who it was in the meme before Jay pointed it out to him.
The website SFMLab uses an image of Mike in a Hawaiian shirt as its default user avatar, so its comment sections are pretty much wall-to-wall Mike.
There's also the 'Rich Evans is Defeatable' meme used whenever he gets humiliated and/or killed/assaulted.
While they aren't on Rich's level in this regard, Mike and Jay have still spawned plenty of memes themselves.
Friendly Fandoms: Bizarrely, fans of the DC Extended Universe seem to generally like RedLetterMedia content, particularly the Nerd Crew series due to it mocking Disney, which happens to own Marvel. This is in spite of the fact that Mike stated in the past that he only likes Marvel Comics-licensed movies (to the point of having received complaints that he's biased against DC Comics), and that outside of Wonder Woman, Shazam, and Zack Snyder's Justice League, all of the DCEU films have been granted negative reviews, which the fans themselves even mocked on occasion.
During the re:View of the original Ghostbusters, the subject of the contentious remake comes up, which, at the time, hadn't come out. Mike offers up a spirited defense against Rich saying it's a pointless film by countering that if it makes him laugh, it has a purpose, seeming at least guardedly hopeful about it. When the remake was actually released, perhaps because of his disappointment, Mike seemed to be the most personally upset at how bad and almost aggressively unfunny it turned out to be. In fact, he hated it so much, he subjected it to a full-force Plinkett review.
Oh god, re-watching the Half In The Bag of Star Trek Beyond now can be downright painful. Unlike the previous two reboot films, Mike actually likedStar Trek: Beyond, and he spoke optimistically about the future of the franchise. This included Star Trek: Discovery, which was still in early development with Bryan Fuller attached, and he speculated about a potential TNG revival series. Fast-forward three years, Star Trek: Beyond under-performed at the box office and future sequels were put on ice, and Star Trek: Discovery went through an infamously Troubled Production that resulted in Bryan Fuller exiting and the series getting a revamp to a more traditional show that he wound up greatly disliking. Star Trek: Picard elicited even more derision when it released, and the only way Mike could fully articulate his disgust was by bringing back Mr. Plinkett for an in-depth autopsy.
In one early video, an unflattering photo of Macaulay Culkin is used as the punchline of a joke at the actor's expense. Culkin would later befriend the gang and make occasional guest appearances on their videos, making this mean crack a little awkward to watch.
Early in 2023, the boys started bleeping out their cursing due to Youtube's bots, and the fandom mostly treated it with a wink and a laugh. However, the algorithm would get increasingly zealous that May, flagging their videos as age-restricted simply for having titles like "Mars Attacks!" — a movie which you can rent on Youtube — leading to vicious mockery from the boys in their videos and a satirical video of a sleeping cat getting age-restricted.
He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: The Nerd Crew got a lot of flack for their negative Rogue One review on the basis it was primarily nitpicking and involved a five-minute long Take That! towards the Star Wars fanbase. The fact their vitriol towards said fanbase only increased from there on didn't help.
Rich Evans often affects Bad "Bad Acting" in his RLM roles, but he's parlayed his infamy into a pretty decent side career in voice acting, cast as the lead character in Edmund McMillen's The End Is Nigh and as Logan in the DreamWorks Animation webseries Too Loud! (where, inevitably, Mike was later cast to play Logan's father). Ollie & Scoops (where he is again paired with Mike) and PG: Psycho Goreman (where he lets out a "patented Rich Evans 'OH MY GOD!'") would follow.
Mike himself got a lot of acclaim for bringing his patented Plinkett deadpan to the character of Desmond in Smiling Friends.
Jay's performances also almost always result in Bad "Bad Acting". However, several fans have noted the occasional moments where he doesn't go down that route, he's actually pretty good. The "Ben-Hurt" video in particularly got this reaction thanks to his palpable rage, showing far more real emotion than you'll ever find in a RLM skit.
As they have pointed out, their film The Recovered has a villain who is strikingly similar to Slender Man, long before Slender Man had achieved his internet infamy.
In June of 2017, RedLetterMediaoffered their predictions of the plot of Solo based solely on their knowledge of cookie-cutter Hollywood screenwriting tropes. If you've seen the film, take a listen and see how many of their predictions were spot on....
In a very early Best of the Worst, Rich ran out to the discussion table with a list of weirdly-named films so the others could laugh at the titles. A decade later, starting with "Our Least Viewed Episode Ever", "Mike pulls out a list and recites stupidly-funny names of things to get Rich to laugh" would become its own little mini-genre of RLM content.
Ho Yay: Mike shares quite a bit of this with both Jay and Rich. At one point he even snuggles with the latter.
Hype Backlash: They have begun to experience this over the past few years, partially from those who find their cynical views on the film industry tiring, and partially as a result of the fanbase's Reviews Are the Gospel mentality.
LGBT Fanbase: Due to his famous glow up and the many Ambiguously Gay jokes made about him, Jay has amassed something of one.
Rich Evans. This peaked when Rich's "Dick the Birthday Boy" picture was featured on Ellen DeGeneres' talk show, which led to the ironic perception of him being an internet superstar and celebrity. The only thing that can overpower this reputation is his famous status as a Memetic Loser.
Jay gets this due to how he underwent a major glow up a few years into the channel, with many fans being very quick to point him out as hot, especially compared to his costars.
Mike's work on the Plinkett reviews has earned him many admirers who treat his reviews as gospel. His infamously trolling nature has also resulted in this, just because he's so damn good at dishing it out.
Rich's designation as a loser achieved memetic status when a gambling site unironically posted a pic of Rich Evans (in the Star Wars reaction video), and said he was a 54 year old man living in his parent's basement. (Rich at the time was 38.)
"I'm Rich Evans and I was once forcibly kicked out of an all-you-can-eat buffet."
While it's downplayed his famously praised looks, Jay gets this due to being short.
Mike also gets this due to the general consensus that he's aged poorly, which overlaps with the idea that he's an alcoholic.
ClassicLegoCinema: I think this [show] was all just an excuse for Mike to make Rich a sociopathic rapist fourcrippledhorses: Why would he need to get Rich Evans to play himself?
Jay's comment in the Nerd Crew, "Don't ask questions, just consume product and get excited for next products," became a popular reaction image◊ to post in response to anyone perceived to be blatantly shilling and/or demonstrating blind loyalty to a product/work/company/etc. and dismissing all criticism of it.
This shot◊ from the short "Rich Evans: Laid Off Unemployment Office Worker" has become a popular reaction image. There is a variant with Mike◊, too.
During the month of January, RLM fans like to ring in the new year with a clip of Jay and/or Mike yelling "Fuck yout, it's January!"
The clip of Mike shouting "ENDLESS TRASH!" has become a popular response to when Cash Cow Franchises spam announcements of new installments.
During the discussion of their opinions about (and disappointment over) Star Trek: Discovery Rich asks Mike "How does it feel to have lived long enough to see all your favorite franchises go down in flames?" have since been referenced in online discussions whenever fan disillusionment is abound.
After an old photo of Rich was featured on The Ellen Show, people began referencing him as "Hollywood superstar Rich Evans." Whenever a famous person is on Best Of The Worst, it's common to find bait-and-switch comments where people wonder how RedLetterMedia managed to get someone as famous as Rich on.
Is X replacing Y?Explanation On the debut episode of Re:View, Mike and Jay lament the inevitable surge of YouTube commenters asking if their new show would replace Half in the Bag. The fanbase ran with it, asking if anyone or anything would be replaced by anything else. The RLM crew quickly grew sick of it.
"WILL YOU CLOSE THE FUCKIN' DOORS?!"Explanation A particularly memorable line said by Cameron Mitchell's character in Terror in Beverly Hills. The meme started on Best of the Worst, but has since spread to their other shows, especially when talking about Mitchell and/or the opening or closing of doors.
Overlapping with his troll status, Mike is often seen as one of these for dishing out quite a bit of suffering at times, whether it's forcing Rich to watch Star Trek episodes he hates or making everyone view horrible black spine tapes.
Jay's unabashed love of violence and gore has also caused him to get this treatment. The time Mike drunkenly accused him of killing cats didn't help.
Mike's gleeful torment of Rich Evans year after year has earned him this reputation.
Mike also gets this with Jay due to their editing, particularly their continual humiliation of Rich (and occasionally other hosts/panelists/guests) mispronouncing words among other things. Nowhere was this trope more prominent than in the famous "Tums Festival" argument where Jay proved Rich wrong literally every time he smugly claimed that line isn't in the movie they just watched.
For those who don't see him as a clueless old man, William Shatner's actions during his "feud" with Mike and the entire channel has caused many to call him a grade A troll.
Most Wonderful Sound: What Rich Evans' laugh turns into once you get used to it.
So Bad, It's Good: Frequently Invoked, with the crew rarely trying to turn in good performances in their skits, which come complete with many Overly Long Gags and blunt, intentionally stupid humor.
Broken Base: The comment section for The Care Boars Save Christmas seems to be divided over whether or not it was funny. Though fortunately, unlike most examples, not many people care enough to have arguments about it.
The Grawboskis is a Black ComedyDom Com parody that makes jokes out of such touchy subjects like baby neglect and Attempted Rape. It is probably one of the more famous RLM comedies that isn't a review and it certainly has a larger fanbase than the rest of them.
While a lot of people disliked it and found it unfunny, some liked The Care Boars Save Christmas. Given that it's a parody from RedLetterMedia done in the style of South Park, it has the type of humor you'd expect.
Obsidian Jones explaining the rules of the showdown in The Western Ore Musical.
So Bad, It's Good: The song "Pyrite is Alright (With Me)" in The Western Ore Musical, Rich Evans' singing skills are so nonexistent, it's hilarious.
due to inciting too much drama.
