YMMV / The Pop Arena

• Accidental Innuendo: During his Megamorphs #2. In the Time of the Dinosaurs review, Greg points out in a Shout-Out to The Magic School Bus that Phoebe's line "I like being erupted!" after getting blown out of a volcano along with her friends could be interpreted in a different way...
• Alternate Character Interpretation: The review of Stay Out of the Basement muses on the possibility of Dr. Brewer being either gay or bisexual, and the plant monster personifying the heterosexual facade he believes he needs in order to be a good father.^note This interpretation disregards the story's final scare, in which a Suddenly Speaking "dad-fodill" calls himself the real Dr. Brewer.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Noted in his review of Megamorphs #1. The Andalite's Gift when the crazy cabin lady comes out of nowhere, traps an amnesiac Rachel, sets the shack on fire, and exits the story without explanation.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Attempted. It's no secret Greg considers Cassie to be the weakest link on the Animorphs team, which is fine, but his Freudian Slip during his Alternamorphs review, when Cassie was killed and he had to stop himself from cheering out loud, was a bit too much even though it was being Played for Laughs.
  • The opening of his review of Megamorphs #3: Elfangor's Secret did this as an homage to the book's jarring opening in an Alternate Universe in which the Animorphs are militaristic, racist slaveowners. An alternate version of Greg uses racist and homophobic slurs and speaks approvingly of the government's execution of alternate versions of K. A. Applegate and Michael Grant for allegedly supporting socialism. He complains that the narration of the Animorphs books contains only personal thoughts not devoted to the Empire and casually talks about vacationing in Brazil following a genocide. This goes on for three minutes before a portal is shown returning Greg to his normal self and he explains what he is doing. Seeing Greg adopt this over-the-top hateful persona is comedy gold.
• Deader than Dead: In his review of Animorphs Episode 1.07 The Escape, after Tobias is shot by a Dracon beam and left for dead, Greg quips that "there's no way around it, Tobias is as dead as disco."
• Epileptic Trees: After finding almost nothing on the ghostwriter for Animorphs #40. The Other Greg developed a theory that the writing credit was a typo and it was actually a similarly named children's book author whose agent once listed Animorphs among her credits.
• Fair for Its Day:
  • This concept is viciously eviscerated in the pilot episode to Greg's Doctor Who book series when discussing the Epic of Gilgamesh and how, despite the Doctor's preaching that unwanted sexual touching should be respected simply due to the primitive time period, that in the actual era the tale comes from a stone tablet has the citizens of Gilgamesh's kingdom praying for a companion to come to their king so that he would stop molesting them. And it is glorious to see.
  • Played a bit straighter with the Lassie episode involving a Japanese exchange student. He's still quite miffed at the hackneyed culture shock jokes and the villains being magically cured of their bigotry at the end, but grudgingly admits that just seeing the boy portrayed as a fully sympathetic character is quite impressive for something made just a decade after World War II.
  • Ultimately his view of My Three Sons. It had its share of uncomfortable racist and sexist humor, but they tended to be confined to just poor choices in the occasional script rather than anything endemic to the show itself. It was also quite ahead of its time in allowing its child characters to age along with the actors, and having a man doing traditionally feminine things while never being the butt of the joke because of it.
  • Greg is not very forgiving of the various ethnic stereotypes in Danger Mouse, and is one of the reasons he considers the recent reboot to be a better show. Thankfully, while the same studio's Count Duckula also inevitably has its share of this, there's much less than he was worried about and he ends up giving it a firm recommendation outside one especially nasty episode.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Greg chooses to show a clip from a sketch on Not Necessarily the News featuring Jay North as rage-filled and Ax-Crazy about being typecast as his role on Dennis the Menace. It is very hard to watch in light of the earlier revelations in the episode of the abuse North suffered from while filming that series and subsequent dark thoughts he had as a result.
  • The Looney Tunes episode of Nick Knacks laments in the last chapter that after Time Warner refused to renew any non-Warner channels' contracts to show Looney Tunes, the shorts became harder to access; Greg displays the Looney Tunes section of HBO Max as a "walled garden" blocking off cartoons from people who can't afford a subscription. HBO Max later removed all of the section's 1951-2004 shorts, making it even harder to revisit the franchise's Golden Age. Max reposted 130 of these cartoons in March 2024, but removed 130 others as well.
  • Lampshaded in his review of Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp, which featured an episode where a pair of Yellow Peril villains release a flu bug as part of their evil scheme, which becomes akward after the Corona virus, specifically a) the fact it first cropped up in China, and b) accusations and conspiracy theories from hate groups claiming the virus was intentionally released.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • His fans don't seem to agree with him on a few issues but very few have gotten angry at him for stating his opinion.
  • Though he has gotten chewed out a bit for his supposed "anti-Christian" jokes. He responded to this by mocking a Noah's Ark T-shirt in Alex Mack Episode 1.07 "False Alarms."
  • Needless to say, big time Goosebumps fans don't like his Goosebumps Monthly series due to the fact that he has openly admitted on more than one occasion that he outright hates Goosebumps in general (which raises the question of why he would even do an entire series of reviews on it in the first place) and has openly insulted R.L. Stein on more than one occasion. One big problem is how he give non linear ratings for the books (ex; "a bag of chips out of 10" for The Haunted Mask and "an empty pizza box out of 10" for The Girl Who Cried Monster.
  • Prior to his review of ''The Ellimist Chronicles," Greg took many shots at the book, and fans complained a lot about this. As a result, at the beginning of his review of the book, Greg repeatedly stated that he doesn't hate this book.
• He Really Can Act: In his "Batman & Robin Retrospective," Greg talks about how Mr. Freeze was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's better performances, which isn't typically said about his films.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In Nick Knacks Episode #004, Greg comments that Shining Time Station's "pre-WWII aesthetic" would have made it a perfect fit for Nickelodeon in 1979, even though it premiered on PBS instead of Nick. Greg learned after posting the episode that Nick Jr. reran Shining Time Station, during the early 2000's. (This discovery also resulted in Greg announcing that the show would receive its own Nick Knacks video.)
  • The Nick Knacks episode about children's pop culture in 1983 compared the original Disney Channel to Disney+, hiding a bunch of old Disney content and only a few original shows behind a paywall. Disney+ hadn't launched yet, but seemed to have enough original programming in the works to downplay this issue. However, a few months after launch, customers still ended up lamenting Disney+'s small amount of worthwhile exclusive programming^note especially since several of the shows announced earlier either still seemed far from done, or got rejected from Disney+ for not seeming "family-friendly".
• Memetic Badass: He talks about the cape buffalo in terms worthy of Badass of the Week.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The mortally wounded Taxxon chomping up its own guts in #25 The Extreme was one of the images from Animorphs that stuck in his head the most even after he forgot which book it was from.
  • Brought up in #39. The Hidden on how much of a living horror it was to have an ant, from its collective Hive Mind, morphing into Cassie and achieving individual identity.
  • He gives one of his own in the Alternamorphs reviews, with a picture of a little girl chowing down on a tarantula the size of her head.
  • The very real, specific kind of horror inherent in April's situation, that at any moment her counterpart in Everworld could be getting violently raped with those memories catching up with the real April to be dumped into her head in the middle of class, was brought up in #2. Land of Loss.
• Older Than They Think: "The Questionable Legacy of Disney's Snow White" seems to treat Walt Disney's underdog story as a fabrication to keep Snow White noteworthy even after aspects of it aged poorly, or objectively pale to the Disney Animated Canon's subsequent movies^note Greg notes that even the second one, Pinocchio, at least boasts a title character with more development and agency than Snow White. However, even when Snow White just came out, Hollywood treated Walt as an underdog.
• Retroactive Recognition: In #075, Greg makes the case that Count Duckula is for all intents and purposes the first of the Nicktoons, as it fits the brand by most definitions (it was commissioned, co-produced and premiered on Nickelodeon), and that it's only not considered such because of legal and branding semantics and Geraldine Laybourne's personal dislike of the show.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Nick Knacks can fall guilty of this if the viewer ever thinks that Greg spends too much time setting up the subject's historical context:
  • #001 QUBE focuses mainly on the cable package that Warner-Amex bundled Nickelodeon's predecessor with, beginning Nick Knacks as a whole at a slow pace.
  • #033 Lassie heavily focuses on the history of the franchise as a whole going back to the original novel and even examples predating it, with the actual history of the series on Nickelodeon not coming until about 22 minutes in with it periodically going over each individual era of the show wether it related to Nickelodeon's broadcast or not. This is justified as to explain that Lassie was one of the big franchises to help carry Nickelodeon and how it was aired and distributed around the network throughout its 12 years.
  • #047 Nick at Nite spends almost 14 minutes exploring the origins of TV and Baby Boomers; Greg lampshaded the length by showing a card reading, "And now, the Nickelodeon stuff" afterwards.
  • #073 Looney Tunes's history on Nickelodeon suffers from this only because the history of Looney Tunes's television distribution is composed of a complicated series of sales and rights issues that leads into how and why it eventually it aired on Nickelodeon when it did. The channel doesn't come into the picture until around the 30:00 minute mark, though it is justified as to explain why the cartoons offered on Nickelodeon changed periodically while the shorts also aired at the same time on Cartoon Network, TNT, and network syndication for a while.
  • #094 Nickelodeon Studios: A Complete History spends the first 18 minutes explaining the founding of both Universal Pictures and how the Universal Studios attraction evolved since its creation in 1915. Considering the videos length (roughly an hour and 46 minutes) it is justified to give the entire picture of the rise and fall of Nickelodeon Studios and how history repeats itself on that having a functional studio lot combined with a tourist attraction would lead to its downfall.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • One of the main reasons Greg offers re-writes for the Goosebumps books, and dislikes the series in general, is that he feels they often have good ideas that are not executed to their fullest.
  • He ended the Goosebumps Monthly without going through all the episodes of the show to compare them to the books. This is disappointing, as many episodes fixed problems present in the original stories, altering elements that he didn't like about the books, and it would have been nice to hear his thoughts on the changes.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Goosebumps Monthly calls a lot of the protagonists too selfish or inconsiderate for Greg's investment.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Anytime there's an overtly racist thing that appears in an older work, Greg tends to cry out, "Oh, no! The past was a mistake!" A prime example is showing The Beano's old Black Face Little Peanut character at the top of the comic's header in the Bananaman episode.
  • This is especially notable in his Goosebumps Monthly on Say Cheese and Die — Again! where he flat-out REFUSES to keep going, his disgust being very real with how far the book goes into body shaming the main character and others as much as possible as a horror trope. This is also the shortest of the Goosebumps Monthlies by far, barely cracking 12 minutes.