The Nostalgia Critic
Image taken from ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com
He Remembers It, So You Don’t Have to.
By Thomas Mates
If you still pine for the days when Saved by the Bell was still on the air and it was worth it to wake up early for Saturday morning cartoons then you have probably heard of the Nostalgia Critic, on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com. Every Wednesday, the Nostalgia Critic updates his site with reviews of movies and television shows most twenty-somethings grew up with. The Nostalgia Critic in real life is Chicago native Douglas Walker, 27.
Walker was a film major at NIU, Northern Illinois University. “I was actually going to go into film for a living, but the more I grew up the more I realized that I’d probably have to deal with Hollywood and I’m not really a huge fan of Hollywood,” said Walker.
After college Walker made a living doing illustration and design. He then started his career on the internet through YouTube. “I started posting these five second movies; they were like famous movies reduced down to five seconds… those seemed to catch on really big time on the YouTube community.”
From there Walker went on to create a character called the Nostalgia Critic, an angry reviewer of all things nostalgic who, “remembers it so you don’t have to.” After the Critic took off Walker was approached by Mike Michaud, who Walker knew through a friend in college. “Really the reason the site exists is because of him [Michaud].”
“He said you know if you give me time I can actually turn this into a business, like a legit business that you can actually make money off of,” recalled Walker. Though skeptical at first, Walker gave Michaud the go ahead. Michaud put together a team and built the site. He then brought Walker on and “[I’ve] been doing it ever since. I’m getting paid for it and doing pretty much what I love.”
Walker handles all of his own editing and most of the writing for his segments, though his brother Rob does help with writing for the Nostalgia Critic. In addition to the Nostalgia Critic, Walker has other characters he portrays like That Guy with The Glasses, and Chester A. Bum. Both of these characters’ sketches are mostly adlibbed by Walker.
Despite the amount of content that Walker deals with, his computer set up is relatively low tech. “I’m not a very big technical person, especially when it comes to cameras and computers, ironically.”
He uses a commercial PC with Adobe Premier to edit and Pinnacle Studio to import clips from other films, and occasionally using After Effects for very specific effects. “It does get clunky, you know, considering the amount of editing I do but for the most part it works.”
Since Walker’s reviews tend to use a lot of copyrighted material, i.e. clips from movies, the site has to keep a lawyer on standby just in case. The only real legal problems Walkers run into so far were on YouTube. “I’ve been kicked off of YouTube several times. I think the final number was about three or four.”
Walker believes his work to be covered under Fair Use and Parody/ Satire laws, but some Hollywood studios seem to disagree, though Walker’s legal problems have been limited to YouTube so far. “We do keep a lawyer on standby just in case… if anything were to come of it we’d probably, definitely make our point.”
Though Walker would be considered the star of thatguywiththeglasses.com, there are many other contributors to the site’s content such as, Lindsay Ellis; the Nostalgia Chick, Kaylyn Dicksion; Marz Girl, and Daniel Rizzo; That Aussie Guy just to name a few. “It’s not always so focused on me… I like getting more people in there.”
The sites expenses are taken care of through user donations and advertisement revenue through a partnership with Blip.tv. Blip.tv is a video hosting and distribution site for video bloggers. They encourage their users to create episodic material, like the Nostalgia Critic, as opposed to viral videos, single videos that gain widespread internet popularity.
Users of Blip can opt for advertisers to be run concurrent with the users’ videos and the revenue is split down the middle. “We’re one of their [Blip’s] number one customers. We work very well with Blip,” commented Walker on his site’s relationship with blip.tv.
For all the other people out there that would like to become an internet phenomena, Walker’s first word of advice is, “don’t.” “I’m really kind of a rare case, and a lot of it had to do with luck and having a lot of really good people behind me.” Walker then went on to advise that people should, “hone in on things that people are always going to be googling and looking up… it’s like the four p’s, patience, persistence, perseverance, and pretty much a big shit-load of luck.”
Thomas Mates can be reached at mates.thomas@gmail.com, at myspace.com/freelance_journalist215, twitter.com/tmates, and on FaceBook.
Glad to see you got an article up
good stuff.. seems like an interesting guy lol