Coming to you from beautiful Downtown Fortitude Valley, it's The Harry Gold Show! With your host, Harry Gold!
"Now, I loathe the word "trope". It feels grubby and pretentious, and just just oozing with the smug, self-satisfaction of academia."
— Harry Gold
The Harry Gold Show is a self-described "z-list" YouTube series created and hosted by Australian artist, animator, and former MAD Austrailia writer/illustrator Harry Gold.
Presented in a faux-retro black-and-white style, the majority of the show's episodes tend to revolve around Harry showing off his artistic skills in a variety of ways, whether they be fixing someone else's substandard artwork/photos, designing original concepts based on various frameworks, or designing new logos for existing brands/people. The show's style is characterized by Harry's signature dry-witted observational humour, which often comes at the expense of somebody's physical appearance or life choices.
Channel link here
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This show provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptational Species Change: In "Nickelodeon Posted More TERRIBLE Art (So I Fixed It)", when Harry gets to Lincoln Loud in the SpongeBob SquarePants art style, he notes that there are no examples of human children in said style. He still draws it, but only to demonstrate how much of a tough sell it is compared to reimagining Lincoln as a sea critter, specifically drawing him as an octopus, a sea sponge, a generic background fish, and (as he believes is the obvious species for Lincoln) a crab. However, in the next of this series, "Bluey AND Gumball Tweeted HORRIBLE Art (So I Fixed It)", after drawing Darwin as a human in four styles, he clarifies that a species swap should really be a last resort for the sake of character recognizability; and thus redoes the four styles with Darwin as a fish.
- Audience Participation: At the end of each week's episode, Harry will draw a caricature of a famous person, taking his time to describe the intricacies of that person's particular facial structure, and the first three commenters to correctly identify the person receive a shout-out in the next episode. This was later updated so that the winners are determined by a randomly selected stipulation from "The Wheel of Winners".
- Deliberately Monochrome: Shots of Harry are always in black-and-white.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The channel's first upload, The Moronic Morality of Undertale ft. The Pope, is the only non-music video on the entire channel that doesn’t revolve around artwork in some way.
- N-Word Privileges: When Harry expresses the desire to alter the name of the Washington Football Team (as it was then known) to something that would be equally as offensive as its previous incarnation, he brings up the unfortunate fact that modern audiences no longer grasp the concept of nuance and can no longer distinguish comedy from actual hate speech. But then he reveals that since he's Jewish, he can get away with it.
- In the Style of: Given Harry's admirable propensity for uncannily accurate artstyle recreation, several of his videos focus on this trope:
- "Homer's Career Before The Simpsons | Documentary" has Homer Simpson In the Style of pretty much every animated era before The Simpsons debuted.
- "What Is a Super Smash Bros. PR Image?" has Super Smash Bros. characters reimagined as Among Us costumes.
- "How To Make A Totally Original Sonic Character!" and its sequel "How To Make ASTOUNDINGLY Original Sonic Characters!" involve drawing various examples of Species Surname in the style of Sonic Adventure's promo art.
- "Nickelodeon Tweets AWFUL SpongeBob Art (So I Fixed It)" is a video of him redrawing an official Nickelodeon tweet that supposedly redraws SpongeBob SquarePants in 9 other Nicktoons' art styles, with Harry thoroughly covering how much the image falls flat while making his own version. In the sequel, "Nickelodeon Posted More TERRIBLE Art (So I Fixed It)", Harry discusses more generally the techniques for pulling off a successful In the Style of while redoing a similar official promo of Lincoln Loud in 9 shows' styles. In the third, "Bluey AND Gumball Tweeted HORRIBLE Art (So I Fixed It)", he redoes one of Darwin Watterson in 9 styles and Bluey in 6 styles.
- "What If Mario Characters looked Like Their Original Sprites?" features the Mario cast's original pixel sprites drawn akin to the promo artwork for both the respective debut game of each character and a handful of later games they appear in.
- Pastiche:
- His four Pokémon videos revolve around him creating original Pokémon generations, obeying the art style for the official Pokémon stills.
- In "I Forged A Famous Artist for My Dad's Birthday", Harry draws his dad in the style of Al Hirschfeld.
- Running Gag:
- Barack Obama is consistently referred to and portrayed as "Barry O'Balmer, The First Irish President."
- Harry occasionally refers to himself as "We at The Harry Gold Show Creative Design Agency" when tackling projects for prominent businesses.
- Snibble, the fake AI-Generated cheese-type Pokemon, has become not only a recurring figure in the channel, but pretty much the channel's official mascot.
- Take That!: Given that a great many episodes stem from some degree of artistic ineptitude, this should come as no surprise.
Until next time, stay safe and God bless.
