Already reeling from the Change the Channel protests, Doug Walker renders his reputation completely unrecoverable with this episode of the long-running Nostalgia Critic series. This is the story of a man who's love for movies was transformed into a cynical scam by paranoid copyright holders, until he was turned into a shadow of himself, having lost his friends, his personality, and any sense of credibility.
As you may be aware, YouTube's freedom of speech is under constant attack by a bunch of insecure Hollywood goons. So Doug had a better idea: gather up his crew to reenact scenes from the movie and work from there. The result is that it's all gotten very... impersonal. It became less about critique and more about just making parodies for parody's sake. The idea came to a head with this hideous, misguided, ill-thought-out, poorly-edited parody of a pinnacle of British pop culture.
For reference, Pink Floyd's The Wall deals with subjects like the needless deaths of World War II, the draconian education system of 1950s Britain, Thatcherism, and drug abuse, all causing a rock star to isolate himself from the world, building the titular Wall around him. Here, the Nostalgia Critic brushes all that under the rug and tacks it down to sheer pretentiousness. He himself says "Many saw it as too pretentious and full of itself," which is a thought that only a handful of people share.
Schools were abhorrently cruel to children at the time; Thatcher's Tories were abhorrently cruel to the common people at the time - and he makes a mockery of it all! Why else would someone say "LOL, so school sucks; grow a damn pair of balls"? Society has evolved from the days of corporal punishment in schools, but still man, have some respect for the people who had to suffer in those days!
From beginning to end, it's just PAINFUL to watch, and it baffles me that the show survived even this. If neglecting your own cast and crew doesn't kill your show, if this doesn't kill your show... what will?
