Nostalgia Critic
A man in a black cap and glasses screams at the movies of your childhood. Doug Walker started posting Nostalgia Critic reviews to YouTube on July 3, 2007, got thrown off the site over copyright, built his own, and became the loudest critic of the Flash-era internet.
Doug Walker's Nostalgia Critic is a character: a short-tempered reviewer who revisits the films and shows of his childhood and discovers, with mounting hysteria, that they were not as good as he remembered. Walker's own explanation: "When we look at movies and shows from our youth, they're rarely as good as we remember them, and oftentimes it's quite humorous to compare what you liked then to what you like now." The first episode, a review of Transformers, went up on YouTube on July 3, 2007. YouTube kept removing the episodes over copyright complaints about the clips, so the show moved to a site of its own.
That site was That Guy with the Glasses, launched in April 2008 by three men laid off from Circuit City the year before, Mike Michaud, Mike Ellis and Bhargav Dronamraju, who built their company, Channel Awesome of Lombard, Illinois, around Walker's shows, with his brother Rob co-writing. The episodes mixed plot recaps with sketches, "Top 11" countdowns and "Old vs. New" comparisons, and a 2008 contest produced a companion show, The Nostalgia Chick, which went to Lindsay Ellis. Blip hosted the videos, and a 2009 deal let them back onto YouTube. By mid-2009 the Critic was drawing 100,000 to 300,000 viewers a week and the site a million page views a month, with Walker's shows earning $53,000 in a single quarter, $32,000 of it from the Critic alone.
In 2012 Walker retired the character, killing him off in the anniversary movie To Boldly Flee, to try a scripted series, Demo Reel. That lasted one short season; on January 22, 2013, a video titled The Review Must Go On announced the Critic's return, and the sixth season began on February 5, 2013, with The Odd Life of Timothy Green. The revived show leaned harder on sketches and a repertory cast and, from 2015, "clipless" reviews of films still in theaters, re-enacted by Walker and friends to avoid copyright claims. Channel Awesome's reputation took a lasting hit in 2018, when more than twenty former producers published a document of grievances against its management and most of the site's other creators left. The Critic kept going: as of October 2026 the show has run 821 episodes across nineteen seasons.
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