The Nostalgia Critic S 12 E 33 / YMMV

Alternative Character Interpretation: Corey Taylor — Shallow Parody stand-in for the film version of Pink Floyd, or the Only Sane Man and/or a Pinball Protagonist?
Awesome Art: The animated segments, especially those produced by Sam Fennah, are widely seen as the only worthwhile part of the review.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: For people who aren't familiar with the Satellite City characters, the segment Sam Fennah provided for "The Trial" is rather jarring to see with Doug randomly dropped into a beautifully animated CGI landscape with bizarre anthropomorphic monsters.
Bile Fascination: Some people have sought this out specifically because word of mouth got out about just how bad it was. A repeated mention is because of how much effort Doug Walker put into such an ill designed review. Were it just Doug having a bunch of bad takes and missing the point of The Wall it probably wouldn't have drawn as much attention. But this being made into a musical, with a companion album that Doug sold on the side for real money, with Corey Taylor, and Fennah's animation makes the project utterly bizarre as it highlights how much importance the project had for Doug which only further contrasts how weak his criticism of the film is.
Broken Base:
- Is "The Trial" segment, which features a crossover with Satellite City, a beautifully animated addition and the best part (if not, according to some, the only good part) of the review, or is it a complete mess that comes out of nowhere and only makes things more confusing? To many, this comes down to their familiarity with Fennah's work and whether or not they find the character designs appealing, though some fans of him do fall into the latter category and vice-versa.
- Some Take a Third Option by saying that they like the characters and animation in of themselves, but find the Satellite City cast to be an inappropriate choice for the segment.
Continuity Lockout: In a crossover-related sense, the appearance of the Satellite City cast at the climax drew a lot of confused "wut" reactions from people wondering why Doug was suddenly plunged into a surreal landscape with bizarre CGI creatures. It’s more fun to watch Lucy Lacemaker grope Critic while he looks grossed out when you know she’s a Psycho Lesbian who likes to behead then snuggle.
He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: While the Critic/Doug liked the movie overall, many (especially fans of the original album) absolutely hated this review. On the video as well as the subreddits, many find the review unfunny and to be totally missing the point of the album as well as insulting to Roger Waters's autobiographical aspects. Not made better by the fact that many don't feel that it's actually being reviewed until a few seconds towards the very end^note. The outrage from fans of the movie/album, combined with confusion from non-fans, resulted in a staggering amount of dislikes on the video, negative for even his most divisive reviews^note. This backlash was so immense that some of his most vocal critics continue to use it as their main argument against the entire Nostalgia Critic series, if not the "angry reviewer" video sub-genre as a whole, and the review caused one critic to abandon his original brand in favor of his real name since that branding had been inspired by Walker.
Misaimed Fandom: The most common accusations towards this review were that people felt like Doug Walker was missing the point entirely with the movie depicting Roger Waters's life, he was intentionally insulting Waters, and he made a mockery of the movie itself and didn't like it. According to Doug Walker when he was interviewed on Double Toasted Interviews it was that he wanted his review to be experimental just like the movie itself was. He explained that his idea for the review was to be comparing from the perspective of how he saw the film as a young man and the perspective of watching it again as a cynical adult, and he openly admitted that people not getting what his intentions were with the review was his fault since he basically pulled a Gambit Roulette on the review and didn't really do a good job with getting his point across. And he also stated that he does like the movie.
One-Scene Wonder: While the review as a whole was almost universally excoriated by the internet, it's generally agreed, even (or especially) by people who hated the rest that Sam Fennah's segment for "The Trial" (featuring the cast of Satellite City) stole the show.
Shallow Parody: A big part of why this episode garnered the backlash it did was because it often comes off as ignorant, causing many of the jokes and criticisms to fall flat.
- He accuses "Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2" of just pandering to rebellious high schoolers who resent being made into productive members of society and want to feel victimized by their teachers. Pink Floyd's depiction of a school where students are abused and brainwashed into uniform clones devoid of individuality is startlingly accurate of UK boarding schools of the time (in fact, the teacher in charge of the children's choir in the song had to keep the recording a secret for fear of the head teacher shutting it down), and the film includes a scene where a teacher physically beats the young Pink for writing poetry (which was based on an actual event in Waters' youth). He also declares that the film is saying that all teachers are sadist teachers, despite "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" only claiming this to be the case for "certain teachers" and surmising that the Schoolmaster is who he is because of his decaying, abusive marriage. Roger Waters clarified that he's actually for education; what he's against is the kind of education shown in the film, steeped in rote memorization, squelching creativity, and allowing or even encouraging teachers to mistreat their students. Walker essentially tries to say "my secondary school education in 1980s/1990s America wasn't this bad" as a refutation to Waters recounting his school experience... in primary school... in the 1940s/1950s... in England.
- He refers to "Goodbye Blue Sky" as an "Oscar bait song" when it was one of the tracks on the original album and thus wouldn't have qualified for an Oscar when it was made. It also is not Oscar Bait in more metaphorical way as "Goodbye Blue Sky" is a very sincere song. He also accuses the song's placement as insensitive due to being a song about World War II coming right after "Another Brick in the Wall", a song about high school (claiming it's arguing high school is as bad as the Holocaust). In all versions, there's at least one song separating the parts of "Another Brick in the Wall" from "Goodbye Blue Skies"—on the album, it's "Mother", in the film, it's "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "When the Tigers Broke Free" (these do both deal with school and World War II, but again, it's a film about a British boy born in the early 40s whose father died in the war; those two topics would overlap a lot).
- The "In the Flesh" parody bizarrely claims that the song was meant to be an attack on Margaret Thatcher and her government, even though Thatcher had only been Prime Minister for five months at the time the album came out and was nowhere near as controversial as she would later become. It goes on to claim that the whole bit is vague enough that it could be about anyone or anything the viewer dislikes; while it can certainly be applied to a number of different things, both the album and the movie make it very clear that the song/scene is meant to be about neo-Nazis (along with a far-right political party called the National Front, which was enjoying a degree of electoral success around the time the album was written). In fact, the symbols the movie used for the neo-Nazis in the movie wound up IRL being co-opted by actual Neo-Nazis.
- When discussing "The Trial", Fennah accuses the monsters of being underdeveloped and existing only for spectacle. In the film, none of the monsters in "The Trial" are actually meant to exist beyond being personifications of Pink's self-loathing, meaning that accusing them of not being well-developed is rather baffling when they're not meant to be characters at all—indeed, three of the five are pretty clearly just preexisting developed characters from the film run through a monstrous filter (the puppet is Pink's schoolmaster, the scorpion is his wife, and the bomber is his mother); the original song doesn't even try to hide this, as the line right before the second verse is "Call the schoolmaster!"
- Broadly speaking, the entire review completely misses the running societal commentary the movie tries to make. Discussing the aftereffects of World War II and how the systems that arose in countries who patted themselves on the back for beating the Nazis only for themselves to turn towards authoritarianism and Fascism, as well as the commodification of people.
Special Effects Failure: Another reason the review got so disparaged: while no one's going to say the Nostalgia Critic ever had the best effects — and even some of the harshest critics of the review have admitted that the stuff done by Fennah for this is pretty good despite the crappy greenscreening and obvious CGI version of Doug in a few shots — the episode's attempts to imitate the still impressive animation of The Wall with some very subpar CGI and poorly done green screen effects just serves to highlight how cheap and amateurish it all is.
So Bad, It's Good: Some such as the crew of Every Frame a Pause pointed out that while the review suffers from terrible singing, mediocre special effects and the lack of actual critique, they ironically enjoy the review for those very aspects. They also point out that Doug Walker seems to be putting in genuine effort in the project, flawed as it is.
Uncertain Audience: Part of the reason why this review was received so poorly, both by fans of The Wall and those unfamiliar with the movie or the album it was based on. Those who fall into the former likely find the whole thing insulting due to how little Doug and his team seem to understand the movie/album. Meanwhile, those who fall in the latter category likely find it confusing due to the lack of any proper reviewing (and therefore context for the musical segment) being given for the movie.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- Some viewers have questioned what the purpose of Corey Taylor appearing in a musical-themed video was if the only song he ended up singing was a cover of the SpongeBob SquarePants theme at the very end of the video. The episode even lampshades this, as if to say that it was an elaborate joke to have a professional singer barely do any singing.
- While even some of the harsher critics of this review have admitted that the scene for The Trial is the best part of the review, it's been argued that it should have featured other characters who are actually in Critic's other reviews (i.e. Chester A. Bum, Devil Boner, Hyper Fangirl, etc.) to make it more personal and thematically similar to what's being parodied instead of using a cast of characters that come out of nowhere and have nothing to do with the Critic's work.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Some have argued that this episode could've been at least somewhat better if it was used to have Nostalgia Critic reflect on his own ego throughout the review and get a bit of Character Development from it much like how Pink realized what he had become towards the film's climax.
- Towards the beginning there's a video within the video which starts like Critic's usual reviews before it cuts back to Corey Taylor and the first parody song, which makes one wonder if maybe most if not all of the backlash could've been avoided and this could've been an overall better review if they had kept with the usual Nostalgia Critic review format while actually including and discussing accurate research of the film, album, and Roger Waters' life instead.
Took the Bad Film Seriously: The review has been near-unanimously panned by almost everyone who've come across it, but everyone who worked on it: Rob Scallon (for the soundtrack), Satellite City, the production designers, and, yes, even Doug himself really did work hard on it. As shown in the comment section of the episode's Behind the Scenes video, even several detractors at least commend the crew for working as hard as they can on the project.

YMMV / The Nostalgia Critic S 12 E 33

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