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(3) WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE (USA 2014)

“A friendly desert community, where the Sun is hot, the Moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.”

Surreal horror and humor podcast from 2012 (uploaded to Youtube from 2014) styled as a community radio broadcaster in an American desert town – although my familiarity with it is more from the novels, which served as my introduction to the Night Vale setting, a desert town where all conspiracy theories are real, as well as other urban myths and other surreal fantasies.

In other words, a fantasy and conspiracy kitchen sink setting, where the laws of time and space and nature in general don’t apply, or apply only spasmodically. The citizens of Night Value simply roll with it, accepting surreal fantasy side by side with mundane reality.

“The news from Lake Wobegon as seen through the eyes of Stephen King”. Alternatively, the Illuminatus Trilogy filtered through H.P. Lovecraft (well, more so than the Illuminatus Trilogy itself) and crammed into one desert town. Or the surreal dream logic of David Lynch on crack or acid flashback (or both).

The Sheriff’s Secret Police along with all the other government surveillance agencies and spy satellites, Old Woman Josie surrounded by angelic beings all named Erika, the Glow Cloud (all hail the Glow Cloud!), and plastic pink flamingos that warp time and space.

And then you have the really dangerous entities and eldritch abominations – the car salesman loping like wolves through their yards, the mysterious hooded figures in the town’s forbidden dog park, the City Council (in the council building draped nightly in black velvet) and worst of all, the Library and its most dangerous part, the fiction section filled with lies…

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Youtube channel banner as at 17 April 2024

(2) CINEMA SINS & TV SINS (USA 2012 & 2018)

“No movie is without sin.” Ding!

With over 9 million subscribers, Cinema Sins is the most popular (and prolific) film review or commentary channel in my top tens or special mentions by a long shot (probably among film channels in general for that matter) – and not coincidentally, the most contested. People seem to love or hate them online.

Haters tend to see it as nitpicking and to a clickbait formula at that – with some fairness to both claims, although as my top-tier ranked special mention would indicate, I think that’s taking the whole sin schtick too seriously.

I see their video content more as playing a drinking game while watching a film, even (or perhaps especially) films they like or enjoy, and calling out ‘sins’ for shots – with only a minority of sins as actual flaws in the film and the majority mostly running gags or just plain snark:

“Sins include continuity errors, research errors, anything that breaks willing suspension of disbelief, editing mistakes, instances of  “Dude, Not Funny!”,  instances of idiot ball or idiot plot, plot holes, deus ex machinas, logical fallacies, continuity lockouts, overused and misused tropes, or just anything the guys can make a snarky joke or reference to.”

I mean how seriously can you take such running gags as “Roll credits” (for title drops or where the title of the film is used in the film itself), or my personal favorite “Scene does not contain a lap dance” (for exactly what you think – an actress the narrator finds attractive is onscreen, usually in a titillating way).

I’m also a fan of their recurring gag for “the Prometheus school of running away from things” for the infamous scene in the film Prometheus for running away from the crashing ship in a straight line (and failing), as opposed to taking a few steps to the side. Also their sin “they survive this”, for scenes in which the characters should have died.

And speaking of “they survive this”, you know their takedowns of the Fast and Furious franchise as cinematic trash is absolutely right, even if I have seen (and will continue to see) every film instalment in that franchise.

They do remove sins from time to time for things they like about a film or that it does well (like having Natalie Portman curtseying in kinky outfit in V for Vendetta).

They’ve had several spin-off channels, but the most enduring (and one I like the most) is TV Sins, which adapts the Cinema Sins formula to episodes of TV series.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Youtube channel banner as at 16 April 2024

(1) DOVAHHATTY (BRAZIL 2013)

“There once was a dream…a dream to purge this rotten world from the barbarians who infest it. A dream called Rome.”

Or at least a dream called the Unbiased History of Rome. I’m calling it now – despite being self-proclaimed satire and “a channel not for learning history…but to indulge in the sheer madness of it”, it is still the best introduction to the history of Rome from its legendary founding to the fall of the western empire.

And certainly the most entertaining – I never knew I needed Roman history as depicted by memetic chads, wojaks and virgins but there you have it. I desperately needed it and you do too. Note that it evolved over the course of its videos – all nineteen of them, from The Roman “Mythology” in Unbiased History of Rome I to The Fall of Rome in Unbiased History XIX – from simpler and shorter videos to more sophisticated and longer videos. For all his historical parody, Dovahhatty has an eye for attention to detail and his content appears comprehensively researched.

Narrator (no, not Dovahhatty as narrator appearing in his own videos as an horned overlord in purple but my own rhetorical narrator): “It is in fact not unbiased”.

Indeed, it is history as the Romans themselves might have told it, but even the most luridly over-the-top self-mythologizing Romans – looking at you, Virgil – might have blushed at it as “blatantly biased towards particular factions, sometimes even reinterpreting entire events in their favor”.

And by particular factions, I mean the Romans – but not all Romans, just the good ones, not the plebs. And by the good Romans, it means selected emperors, leaders and military commanders or other heroic figures, typically those who the Romans themselves saw as exemplary or heroic. Usually of the patrician class – with the occasional equestrian or even low-born figure risen through the ranks of the army thrown in.

Not so much the senatorial class or senators with occasional exceptions – after the Senate turned bad that is, conspiring against the emperors, usually in the same room each time as a running gag. Also not so much the Praetorian Guard – after they turned bad, which was almost immediately. And of course not so much Roman women – or foreign women for that matter – who constantly recur in something of a running gag theme as the eternal femme fatale for Rome, particularly the empire, although there are noble exceptions.

The good Roman men are of course usually portrayed as absolute chads – or the occasional good wojak. The bad Roman men are usually portrayed as memetic virgins – or the occasional bad wojak. Although Dovahhatty often has his tongue firmly in his cheek, portraying emperors notorious for their legendary cruelty and depravity as the divine chads they no doubt saw themselves as – Caligula, Nero, Caracalla and Elagabalus for example.

And that’s the Romans – you can imagine how hilariously biased it is against the various peoples Rome saw as their barbarian enemies. By Jupiter – it’s scathing of their “civilized” opponents like the Greeks, let alone when you get to the Persians or Germans, both of whom it literally demonizes.

Its portrayal of Germans or “Germs” is a particularly amusing highlight for me – typically horned and fanged with yellow or red demon eyes (except when they’re slightly more human wojaks with slasher smiles). And of course they’re mindlessly destructive, hating the barest hint of civilization or construction of anything less rudimentary than their wretched mudhuts, with a persistent desire to spread chaos and burn the world as they constantly clamor in (modern) German, albeit often as only single-word expressions of their chaotic evil – “toten”, “mord”, “zerstoren”.

Indeed – the only reason that Dovahhatty is my top special mention and not first in my actual top ten is that, sadly, he seems now to be dormant. That is despite continuing his Roman history with his Byzantine Empire Unbiased History (until the dawn of the Arab conquests) as well as a couple of other historical topics and media reviews – including one of Game of Thrones – all of similar high quality.

One simply doesn’t listen to a Dovahhatty video in the background (unless you’ve already seen it) – it’s important to actively watch for the in-video captions, usually the dialog of the historical characters and source of much of the humor, albeit often misspelt.

Speaking of captions, I’ll let Dovahhatty’s disclaimer which appears at the start of his videos speak for itself:

“Unbiased history is a work of historical parody…It seeks nothing, but to provide a severely distorted, and outright false rendition of historical events, producing heavily biased narratives for light-hearted critical reflection, and with luck, comedic effect…It portrays acts of sexual, vulgar, violent, and highly offensive nature. The topics it discusses are those of political intrigue, historical importance, and humanitarian tragedies”.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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