Home
Artists
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register
Partychan Telegram Find&Fuck Waifus ThePornDude
Home Artists Posts Import Register

Patron Milestone Bonus Video - Let's Talk About Doug Walker's The Wall (Patreon)

Published:
2021-04-10 22:54:06
Imported:
2022-01

Content

Tell your patrons what you're working on

I've been chipping away at the Scientism video, still, when I decided to pivot to this, thinking it would be "easy" to turn out. Clearly it took a hot mo all on its own, as I really found myself getting pretty deeply invested into the subject.

I'm maybe a little more passionate and raw than normal for my channel, but, um, well, I hope it all makes sense why.

Files

Let's Talk About Doug Walker's The Wall - Patreon Bonus

Clickbait Title: I remember it so you don't have to "Pink Floyd - The Wall" deals with mature subject matter and contains intense imagery some viewers may find distressing. As the full-tory disclosure, I was briefly a contributor to Channel Awesome for about six months in 2014/15. Channel Awesome CEO Mike Michaud severed the relationship after I published an off-site exposé of 8chan and refused to take it down and commit to not doing "anything else like that." Written and performed by Dan Olson Crowdfunding: https://www.patreon.com/foldablehuman Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman

Comments

Jamin Shih

Oh yes, I am READY for this.

Anonymous

39:12 "Constantly ad-libbing and lazy." It's impossible because nothing scans correctly.

Anonymous

As someone who has seen neither The Wall NOR DW’s The Wall, this was such a journey. Now I’m going to watch one of those and *not* watch the other one! I’ll let you guess which is which

Basu Gasu Bakuhatsu Bakumatsu

An amazing take down of Doug’s terrible video. I would like to mention... that I appreciate the effort you took to synchronize the gunshot sounds to your gun hand motions.

Anonymous

Oh fuck yeah! Hat Dan’s back!

Anonymous

YES. YES. YEEES. Great video, Dan. I'm now far, far more interested in the movie, and the analysis of the shallowness of the response was insightful - I'm not sure it counts as mean when it's true. (I also choked on my drink at the extended end joke. That brings back old memories. If only someone else had remembered them instead.) At the end of this, I'm left wondering - why do The Wall? Like, the idea of this really seemed to be 'let's do a parody of a movie with songs and crossovers and everything', and the actual choice seemed to have basically nothing to do with the actual film chosen. So, why not pick lower hanging fruit? If you did something Disney, the criticism would have been at least easier to make up and the song parodies easier. And the actual goal seems to be the album and selling it, and that is easier to market based on Disney. Clearly copyright isn't the issue. Baffling. Absolutely baffling.

Anonymous

This is the best video you've ever done. The Wall is my favorite... everything, really, and Doug's abomination is REALLY insulting and I'm glad you talked about it and understood it. Ngl Doug's abomination cut my soul because of how mean spirited and wrong it was

Anonymous
>>57495671

The Wall is hands down the best thing ever made, I highly recommend it

Robert

I was wondering when Hat Dan would finally come back from his multi-episode arc mission! Also I have no way of proving it, but I get the feeling that the script for DW's The Wall was more or less written as he was watching the movie with a bunch of seinfeld-esque "what's the deal with -" thrown in during interesting/memorable scenes but never going back and editing after watching later scenes that would've helped interpret or recontextualize the previous scene. In other words, he made a long-form Cinema Sins video.

Anonymous

Part one: Oh cool, an essay on The Wall. I feel I don't know enough about this, despite it being a big deal when I was a little kid (late 70s). Hmm. Interesting facts. Nice Part two: Ah, it's about some internet things I've not heard of, that appears to be fucking awful. Oh god, Dan's just going on about how awful it is. This could be tiresome. Part three: OK, this is kinda fun.

Anonymous

hahaha 35:12 that strategic glass adjustment

Anonymous

This was a really good video and honestly I'd love if at some point you'd do a larger look at well the criticism scene genre Doung helped create in the late two thousands who all have become comfortably dumb. Also, I laughed so hard at the end of the video.

Luis

Wow those finger guns are one of the strongest indictment of Doug’s garbage visual sensibilities I’ve seen. Also, thanks for digging into the ideological grossness of the Stencil Man section

Anonymous

This video was fantastic. Really, really good work!

Adam Greene

This was brilliantly done, and didn't take any cheap shots, particularly you didn't go after the cast, which is the right thing to do. The longer I'm stewing on this, the more angry I get about either his deep misunderstanding of the most basic history from the second world war, or his callous dismissal for the topics being addressed (particularly calling out the roots of Nazi ideology found in right-wing politics). I'm likely being one of those mean old, whiny Twitter folk, but it's galling to have someone equate what was being shown in that rally scene with Twitter trolls. There is a message he's sending there, and for people that lost loved ones during the AIDS crisis, him equating our gay friends and family that were shouting for some kind of help, or just simple acknowledgment, with Twitter anger, that message is that they should be ashamed and go back to silence. That's probably me reading far too much into it, but fucking hell, seeing him miss the entire point of that scene was literally jaw-dropping. My jaw dropped open. That might be the biggest miss for a critic that I've ever seen. And I've read a lot of Armond White reviews.

Anonymous

Good video! Question though: how is Honey a scam? Not disagreeing, just curious since it still has been getting promotion on other videos and podcasts.

Jamin Shih

Okay, I loved this. Haven't thought this comment through so it's likely two different half-baked topics my brain is attaching together right now. There's something so interesting to me about how frequently shallow critiques of media boil down to an anti-intellectual lack of curiosity. It's the "the curtains are just blue!" meme on a larger scale where thinking about anything in a way that makes you vulnerable (by opening yourself up to criticism, or revealing your anxieties/things that make you tick) is bad specifically because it makes you vulnerable. So DW can't even end the review with "I think the movie is ineffective for these reasons," because that's taking a stand, it's opening yourself up to someone criticizing your worldview or your assumptions/what you read into the text. It's telling that so many of these kinds of takes end up circling around to weird condemnations of people getting angry online and shallow critiques of social media (not, like, any of the actual critiques of social media, just... phones live in a society). Seems like what the actual complaint is is thinking or talking about something. The only possible conclusion if you're married to a literal reading is "This is good/this is bad/this is fine." Anything else is pretentious and self-indulgent.

Anonymous

I feel like Walker's parodies/recreations are an attempt to do what his spoken summaries do, rob artistic works of greater meaning and value by sloppily reconstructing them through his own lens, and then mistaking his criticisms of the totem he's created as analogous to criticism of the work itself. Edit: I guess in a way that's an accurate portrayal of all criticism, but when you have the emotional and intellectual depth of Doug Walker the limitations of interpretation become more noticeable than the work it's ostensibly criticizing.

Anonymous

ok, i really liked the video. my only thing would be at the end when your doing the finger gun thing, you looped the same 5 second clip of it happening. then if would make less sense, it would seem cheaper, be more confusing AND id hate it more

Anonymous

Good video. My reaction to the end scene was just like the end to Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. "Thank God you had an effect in there. I thought it was a Canadian thing... ...like somehow you guys could do that. Sorry."

Anonymous

Doug Walker: high-effort CinemaSins

Alistair Struck

I don't think that I will ever understand the blinding, confident doublethink that makes Doug criticize a work's vapidity and shallowness, when their own critique is... this.

Anonymous

As usual, I gain brain cells watching your content. Thanks Dan.

Anonymous

Glad you brought Hat Dan back. I've been wondering where he's been.

Anonymous

Great video!

alexis

"a little more passionate and raw" I disagree. it's just as factual and focused as all your other work. but I know my friend will speak calmly to asshole clients treating her like garbage, and when she relays the story to somebody else she'll shout the things she said calmly to the client because she remembers being really angry, and she'll genuinely think she was shouting lmao. so I don't think it's unusual to review your own work with your own emotions and passions attached to it and feel that they're more strongly emphasized than they really come across all this to say, if I didn't know your history with the "artist" in question, I would never have thought there was anything personal here aside from the same frustration and disappointment with a crap work that devalues serious things. and I think your personal history is important, but if you're worried about it negatively affecting the piece - it doesn't, at all

Anonymous

Oof that hurts. I am the odd one who found Doug when i was an actual adult and liked his style, and laughed less and less as he went through the years, and then Change the channel document hit, and I couldn’t in good conscience continue supporting him with my views, and started to look for other creators, thats how i found you and a lot of others. I always feel judged when people say that “only stupid kids like Doug’s stuff” yet here I stand an actual adult who watched almost every review of his and unironically enjoyed a lot of them. Maybe that was because of the context - i do not live in the us or canada and my native corner of the internet is pretty different. Thank you for this video, it is very enlightening. Loved that the vinyl was turning the whole time. If you make a video about Doug and his culture and Channel awesome it would be very interesting, you have a great point of view and i feel like you are a perfect person to do that.

Anonymous
>>57513804

I remember watching a lot of his stuff in college and enjoying it. In those early days, when he was just doing fluff stuff like "Pokemon: the First Movie" and things like that, his videos just felt like what happens when you reach adulthood and you start revisited your old childhood favorites. You've gotten older, wiser, and you look at what shaped your childhood and think, "Wow, that's weird." I think that's why a lot of people connected with his older stuff. And then, instead of just revisiting old properties through a nostalgic lens, he started "analyzing"... and it didn't turn out good. I remember when I started actively disliking Doug's work, and it was getting more and more over-the-top and screaming about things that literally didn't matter. It wasn't a nostalgic revisit of old properties and cracking jokes. It was screaming. And then he started those editorials, which were just awful. Anyway, you're not alone. A lot of us liked the idea at the beginning, and then we grew apart from it.

Anonymous

Yes, exactly! Also some of the stuff he reviewed I didn't even watch, but the reviews invited me to watch it (that's how I found out about He-man and She-ra, and My little pony) and laugh and kinda get into it, including all the stupid stuff. I think that it's pretty revealing that my favorite videos of his were the old commercials reviews, because these reviews were kinder, in a way. There was some fondness for the material, that gradually disappeared, as the years went on and the productions had gotten bigger and bigger. I guess that's what happens when burnout and bitterness sets in. The kindness disappears.

Anonymous

This absolutely fucking rocked

Anonymous

Thank you for context about "Teacher! Leave those kids alone!" I grew up thinking that was a satirical dig at the counter-culture. Kind of like The Beastie Boys' "You gotta fight for your right to party." I realize now, this probably reflects my own schooling. I spent my last two years of high school in public school, where the teachers were supportive and turned my life around for the better. Get this, though. Up until then, I was raised in awful repressive fundamentalist church private schooling and home schooling. The Moral Majority of the eighties, and the accompanying movement of private schools fun by fundamentalist churches, were an anti-institutional counter-culture, when you think about it. It's just that it's a counter-culture in opposition to the competing counter-culture-- that of the hippies.

Anonymous

While this video as a whole is bad, the animation of Hat Dan's finger guns was really impressive and probably took a lot of work. Props to the animator on this one!

Anonymous

this is a really, really, really good video! the best analysis of Doug's The Wall by far.

Anonymous

Watching the clips in this and...oof. I'm not saying that your average YouTuber needs to have a professional sense of composition, or lighting, or that you should seem like you put...effort into learning how acting works. But if you have the resources Doug does it looks really really bad if you don't A lot of it reminds me of the level that video creators were at circa 2008-2010 and there’s just no excuse to be *unaware* of how much better you can be if you put in effort at this point. The knowledge threshold has moved on, you should be constrained by resources at this point, not a dearth of ambition to make a quality work

Adam Greene

Because I am a clearly unwell person, I woke up today thinking about this video, and wondering if maybe it wasn't a bit harsh. So I watched The Wall for the first time in a long while. Then fired up Doug's review for the first time. You didn't go hard *enough*

Anonymous

Could still be bluer.

Anonymous

Hat Dan is by far the best Dan in the Dan Cinematic Universe

Anonymous

"Protective layers of irony" is so right. It takes a lot of guts to put out honest art that displays your experiences, worldview and ideas. It's also, in my opinion, the only way you can really grow through art. When someone makes something like The Wall, they're able to work through their own emotions and trauma, to a certain extent. What has Doug gained from his version?

Anonymous

I say this from the bottom of my heart, Mr. Folding Ideas, but I had fully forgotten I was a patron until I saw this in my e-mail inbox. Great work as usual, of course - your passionate, wry analysis sucked me in. ^__^

Anonymous

In general I'm usually not really comfortable judging others' opinions as disingenuous unless I have something really concrete to put behind it. But my brain screams to do it, in this case. I have such a hard time believing that Doug heard/watched Goodbye Blue Sky, an only-barely-metaphorical depiction of the Blitzkrieg raining destruction on England, and genuinely interpreted it as a self-pitying whinge by Roger Waters that "my problems are more important than "Other People's Problems". That's a lot more than a simple "uncharitable reading"; there had to be a conscious and deliberate creative process and decision behind it.

Anonymous

Something surreal about Doug complaining a movie is too long and too pretentious when he made Too Boldly Flee. Good video Dan. I liked your insight on the film.

Anonymous

Those clips from Doug's Fury Road video made me shudder I watched him regularly for longer than I'd like to admit, but that was where his bad faith, reductive readings really started to be too much for me. (I could also tangent about how that video's a microcosm of Doug's obnoxiously insulting centrist views on gender politics, but that's a topic for another time.) I didn't think the clipless reviews could get worse until I heard about The Wall review and morbid curiosity got me to check it out. This video's among the best dissection of the problems with Doug's whole approach to filmmaking I've seen and makes a great companion piece to "The Failure of Demo Reel" by Lady Emily on youtube.

Anonymous

This is the video that convinced me to become a patron because I just *couldn't wait* once you announced it. I've watched my share of Youtube "takedowns" of this mess, but they mostly just point out how Cringe it is on a surface level. I'm so glad you took the time for a deeper analysis - actually talking about The Wall and exactly how shallow and incurious Doug's parody/criticism/fanfic/"love letter" is. Also THANK YOU for explaining those "horny edgelord steampunk furry OCs" (lol) I always assumed they were designed by that animator for this video or something - it somehow makes it *worse* they were supposed to be fully-realized existing characters doing a crossover bit.

Katrina Jagelski

I took an edible before this and it hit right as HatDan appeared and holy shit lmao

Anonymous

I think the comment of DOug as "Youtube's Tommy Wiseau" is one I haven't heard before, but feels apptly appropiate. This video really made me realize that, I feel, a lot of Doug's projects, and this one in particular. feel less about whatever he is talking about. Less about a work with it's core in some way inspired by the parent work. And honestly simply DOug wanting to "show off" what he can do. Regardless of his feelings on the movie and his uncuriosity to the message and topics at hand. I think Doug is under the impression he is making something impressive and noteworthy "despite the limitations" and his flaws come simply as a lack of resources for his vision, rather than a lack of skill. In that sense, I almost feel Doug is Jealous of the wall. jealous of a work that he doesn't get got to touch the strings of people. and thus concluded that it only got notoriety because it had money behind of it. rather than it having skill.

Anonymous
>>57526265

Did you even notice Hat Dan wasn't even in the room? I know. seemless. I only noticed from reading so many BTS tweets of it. you almost BELIEVE Hat Dan was in that room

Anonymous
>>57564753

Really just replying to myself, I know. But, I've solved this problem of mine. Doug doesn't understand the purpose of Goodbye Blue Sky because he has approached the whole film of The Wall as if it had been made just a few years ago by a 20-something Millennial. There's no point in his "review" in which Doug makes it clear that he is aware or understands on an intellectual level that Roger Waters was actually born during World War II and that the immediate aftermath and recovery from that war defined the formative years of Waters' childhood; he seems to assume Waters is using WWII and its aftermath as an allegory (or "reference", as he puts it), and then reacts to that misreading with faux indignation, treating it as Waters being presumptuous.

Hedrigal

I called Doug a half drawn sketch of a complete person, so it makes sense he thinks what he seems to about the wall.

Adam Greene

I really like the addition of some more info on who Doug is that you added to the YouTube version. Good call.

Anonymous

Just coming back to say again that this rocks and that the Hat Dan bit absolutely kills me.

Anonymous

I really love your work!

Anonymous

I always cringe so hard when I see anything Doug Walker related because I used to be a fan of his in the olden days. I honestly can't quite believe a guy who calls himself a filmmaker has so little film literacy and couldn't accurately identify symbolism if his life depended on it. Great video, Dan, and a bit of a catharsis.

Anonymous

I enjoyed this so much! I hope Hat Dan makes future appearances

Anonymous

I'm childish, the big thing I noticed is how you scratched your nose. (35:12)

Anonymous

Never was a NC fan. Ever. Only knew of that whole channel third hand and none of what I knew was good… Regardless. this is my favorite thing on YouTube in a long time. As delicious as this calm savagery taking down content and creator that I never gave a shit about is, I honestly have a newfound understanding and appreciation of the Wall and the historical/sociological frame around it. For a random class in uni, I had to listen to Dark Side of the Moon and the Wall the Album as well as watch the Wall the Movie. The Wall the Album and Movie were not my favorite of either of those kinds of things, but I did appreciate the movie as much as I could understand it. To be honest, that was not much, but I definitely respected it. Gaining a better understanding of the story and symbolism of the Wall and of Waters' motivations and intentions is something I'll keep with me. Neither the album nor movie are still my favorites (though Comfortably Numb has one of my favorite guitar solos of all time and I'm more of a David Gilmour fan than a Waters's fan), but I definitely am able to see it more clearly and like it quite a bit more with this understanding. It's also been cool to read through folks' YouTube comments about how their grandparents, parents, or they went through that kind of industrialized schooling in the UK (and less cool to hear about the all too common child abuse) and read their reflections on their personal and cultural baggage from all that happened and talk about how and why they resonated with the Wall. As a dumb American of NC's age group, I learned a ton. Super appreciate it. PS: I saw the Hat Dan tweet BEFORE watching the video. And I think that made Hat Dan even more hilarious.

Snakeinthegarden

Your thoughtful essays are why I sub to your channel. Haven't done so since subbing despite watching all your videos but just wanted to say thank you from Ireland! You made me laugh today when I was filling crappy while I have flu and dealing with anesthesia after a dental visit looking at a leaky ceiling!

Anonymous

I love this video. I’ve watched it an embarrassing number of times. I just bought a copy of The Wall to watch tonight. Thanks for another great analysis.

Anonymous

After the third time I watched this, I was like wait, why am I not a patron

Anonymous

This is a super solid deconstruction of the persona of Doug that is put on display in the Wall video, but I would reccomend to anyone for extra credit to check out the movies he's made as part of Channel Awesome, specifically Kickassia and Suburban Knights. Doug has been trying to make longform content for a good while, and if you want to truly understand the man's intense egomania and lack of genuine critical perspective despite intense earnestness, those movies are invaluable to that end. Just don't watch To Boldly Flee, it's over 200 minutes long and not worth it.

Anonymous

Rewatching this for a second time tipped me into supporting. We are collectively better off for your thoughtful views on all subjects you’ve touched on. As another commenter said: you are a grown up of the internet. Please stay that way.