- 80'sDavid wrote:
- Weirdly I actually found the Big Rigs episode to be the funniest thing he's done in a while. It's certainly noticeable that the AVGN is less of a character now and more a slight exaggeration of James actual personality (classic AVGN would have responded to the "You're Winner" screen with actual rage or disbelief rather than what seemed to be sincere laughter) but I feel it's pretty much just down to James maturing as a writer/performer. I mean I think he IS tired of the character and probably jaded by being made to feel like a one trick pony with the nerd (he seems much more motivated when it comes to stuff like Monster Madness) but he seems to have been going through a kind of metamorphosis of late. His last few episodes have been pretty uninspired and lacklustre but I thought this one really distilled elements of old school AVGN and his actual critical personality into something genuinely funny and entertaining.
The problem I had with 'Big Rigs' was that most of the video was gameplay footage and the Nerd's commentary was primarily just pointing out the game's flaws rather than making jokes about it. Sometimes a game's flaws can be funny by itself (e.g. the "Plumbers Don't Wear Ties" review), but 'Big Rigs' is such a well-known bad game that the Nerd didn't add anything new to it.
It'd be like if someone were to review 'The Room' in 2014: they'd need to have a fresh new way of tackling it because it's already been done to death. 'Big Rigs' has been notorious for years and that "You're Winner!" screen is infamous to gamers; simply laughing at it and thus expecting its inherent absurdity to solely provide the humor just didn't work. Compare it to 'Ghostbusters': the "Conglaturation!" screen is equally infamous, yet the Nerd accompanied it with a funny "grading" sketch ("'A great game'? Well, that's just simply wrong, -20 points for that statement.") 'Big Rigs' just didn't have that same kind of effort put into it.
I never thought I'd be so analytical about an 'AVGN' video. O_o
- wildhoney66 wrote:
- i dunno some of them have been good some have been bad. i liked the latest one. and the Lloyd Kaufman one is funny as hell. i think it has more to do with the fact that he's said that now that he'd one over 100 episodes he's having trouble not repeating himself. saying the same jokes over and over i think to him just got tiring. so he's trying different ways to keep the show still good. and the low special fx that he has quit doing really doesn't bother me at all to be honest. they are fun to watch yes this is true, but if it is causing him to release episodes even further and further from when i want them to which is at lest once a month. than i can live without them. plus they no doubt can be pretty time consuming.
i think the same thing can be said about Brad as well when it comes to the snob. he loves to play him there is no question about that. but instead of repeating himself he does different things such as the i spit on your grave episodes for example. where it's out of character and in character and it i think keeps him interested in the character in doing so. James is think doing that as well. writing the scripts for the nerd is no doubt time consuming, i dunno how long it takes brad to write an episode of the snob but the same can be said there.
but he doesn't have kids either. James now does. and that's prolly why he is trying ad libbing it maybe? so it is prolly easier for brad to do all these shows than it is for James now. i think it's smart they both do various shows cause you will get tired playing the same character if you don't. that's why you see actors during the hiatus in tv shows do movies cause it's their vacation from this tv series they are on. they may love working on it but they need to take a break from it for at least a little while.
so it makes sense for internet reviewers like Brad or James or spoony to do various characters into their show.
or have different shows. like i said it's smart i think. so i dunno if James is tired of the character. the film i have no doubt he's tired of working on it. i'm sure he just wants to finish the damn thing and than maybe going back to focus on his family 1st. there's no question in that. than his site doing whatever show, and hopefully posting a new Nerd episode once a month. so him experimenting with the show after 100 episodes doesn't bother me.
also one thing i've noticed is that when someone goes a long time without writing it can go a bit stale. James doesn't do the show as often as he used to. and during the making of the film it also maybe that he got out of practice. kinda like if your favorite band last did an album 30 years ago and than they come out with a new album, sometimes the new album is bad cause they stopped writing for 30 years. some of the stuff stephen king wrote after he had his accident for awhle wasn't very good cause he was out of practice. than it slowly got better. and there ya go. this is my few cents anyways. i dunno i may be wrong about all this or i may be right.
take your pick i guess.
It really depends on the reviewer...there are so many factors that no one can definitively judge how one can produce content over an extended period of time.
Honestly, though I do enjoy his videos, I've never thought James Rolfe to be that strong of a comedy
writer. His humor is usually pretty juvenile (in ways both good and bad), his comedy sketches usually have a pretty shaky structure and/or weak endings, and even when it comes to AVGN, I remember "moments" (i.e. effects shots, fight scenes, characters, etc.) more than I do specific jokes, one-liners or dialogue. Most of what he's best remembered for in the latter are his long scatological rants ("I'd rather ___ a ___ while a ___ takes a ___ on my ___!", etc.), and there's really only so far that can go because vulgarity isn't inherently funny.
A lot of James' videos have a very frank and straightforward tone. Take 'Monster Madness', for example: those aren't comedy reviews, they're legitimate movie reviews. He seems to be more within his comfort zone when he's being properly critical rather than trying to be funny. Make of that what you will, because I can't really draw any conclusions from it. I can only speculate, and my main speculation is that he hopes the AVGN movie will serve as a springboard to other projects, and then he'd have to inevitably retire the Nerd. He's already in his mid-30s and has a family; I don't see how he can sustain something like AVGN for much longer, and until his movie is completed, he seems to be mostly producing AVGN videos out of fan and contractual obligation. I don't think anyone can claim it's his main passion anymore.
Brad, on the other hand, is an excellent comedy writer who excels in verbal humor. Even in vlogs, humor comes natural to him, right off the cuff. In my opinion, he's never gotten stale, and he's done the same thing in evolving from an overt, detached character into incorporating more of his own personality and opinions in the Snob reviews. He just has a completely different creative mind and method...after all, keep in mind that Brad also wrote and produced his own movie based on his internet character (albeit on a much smaller scale, and note that Brad doesn't have the same Hollywood ambitions as James) with barely any change.
With James, I can only see a character when he does AVGN videos now, and always get the sense that he wants to move onto other, bigger projects...some day soon, he'll undoubtedly retire AVGN. Conversely, I see so much of Brad in his Snob videos and it's clear he puts lots of effort into the content of his site: he's quite content with where he is and will likely keep the site going as long as possible. They're just two completely different people in the same field.