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I personally try not to think about it. Of course if the channel would do something criminal than I could not watch them anymore in good conscience but from what I have heard most of the complaints are not really valid because its stuff like "doug wanted to do movie X his way" which yea it is his video so why not. The other stuff about the alleged sexual harrasment i cant comment on but It sounds to me more like a lot of misunderstandings

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Has anyone here heard about what's happening with Channel Awesome? All the drama and disturbing stuff that's been happening? It's got me kind of shook up personally.

I heard about it and it shocked me way more than you could imagine

 

Right now the number of producers on that godforsaken website went from 40 to 3 within a week and a half

 

That trashfire of a company won't survive with just the Nostalgia Critic

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I personally try not to think about it. Of course if the channel would do something criminal than I could not watch them anymore in good conscience but from what I have heard most of the complaints are not really valid because its stuff like "doug wanted to do movie X his way" which yea it is his video so why not. The other stuff about the alleged sexual harrasment i cant comment on but It sounds to me more like a lot of misunderstandings

Dude, there's more general complaints than just about Doug's directing style & misunderstandings, which are, really, only small parts of it. In the Google Doc, there's legit complaint described about the management of the company & website by Mike Michaud, Rob Walker, & Doug. By the way, it's more of a sexist attitude from Michaud that some of them complained about than sexual harassment, which you can actually see in the "Response" posted on the Channel Awesome website from how it's written.

 

For example, Mike & Doug wanted to talk to Obscurus Lupa about something one day back in 2015 when she was still on the site. Now, she wanted to put off the conversation because she was flustered & angry about a situation that happened involving them prior to the call, which she told them about. They decided to call her anyway on Skype. Now, she was filming a video of hers at the time & was away from her computer when they called her, leaving them on hold for 15 minutes. When she finally got to her computer & answered, they just decided she was off the site because Michaud had to wait on Skype for 15 minutes. Really petty.

 

Another one, which might be referenced in the document, but the man himself didn't contribute to it. Phelous was contracted to do the special effects work for To Boldly Flee. They greatly overestimated what he was able to do at the time, but when he told them what he could do for them, they kept him on & got other animators to do what else they needed, not a big problem, but what is the problem is what happened after he started. He sent some of the work to Doug for him to review. Doug told him he liked the work, but after, he contacted another person affiliated with CA in Canada to go & make sure Phelous wasn't half-assing the work. He didn't even have enough confidence in Phelous to deliver good work on a low budget indie film he was personally involved in & rather than tell him he thought he could do better, or replace him, he lied to his face & then went behind his back & had someone try to spy on him. Yeah, really mature, Doug. I get that he's the director of the film, but a director is supposed to lead the development of a movie they're involved with to the best of their ability, not suspect their special effects artists are purposefully not doing work to the best of their abilities.

 

Seriously, actually read the Google Doc. Your generalization of it is far from what's on there in its entirety.

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Dude, there's more general complaints than just about Doug's directing style & misunderstandings, which are, really, only small parts of it. In the Google Doc, there's legit complaint described about the management of the company & website by Mike Michaud, Rob Walker, & Doug. By the way, it's more of a sexist attitude from Michaud that some of them complained about than sexual harassment, which you can actually see in the "Response" posted on the Channel Awesome website from how it's written.

 

For example, Mike & Doug wanted to talk to Obscurus Lupa about something one day back in 2015 when she was still on the site. Now, she wanted to put off the conversation because she was flustered & angry about a situation that happened involving them prior to the call, which she told them about. They decided to call her anyway on Skype. Now, she was filming a video of hers at the time & was away from her computer when they called her, leaving them on hold for 15 minutes. When she finally got to her computer & answered, they just decided she was off the site because Michaud had to wait on Skype for 15 minutes. Really petty.

 

Another one, which might be referenced in the document, but the man himself didn't contribute to it. Phelous was contracted to do the special effects work for To Boldly Flee. They greatly overestimated what he was able to do at the time, but when he told them what he could do for them, they kept him on & got other animators to do what else they needed, not a big problem, but what is the problem is what happened after he started. He sent some of the work to Doug for him to review. Doug told him he liked the work, but after, he contacted another person affiliated with CA in Canada to go & make sure Phelous wasn't half-assing the work. He didn't even have enough confidence in Phelous to deliver good work on a low budget indie film he was personally involved in & rather than tell him he thought he could do better, or replace him, he lied to his face & then went behind his back & had someone try to spy on him. Yeah, really mature, Doug. I get that he's the director of the film, but a director is supposed to lead the development of a movie they're involved with to the best of their ability, not suspect their special effects artists are purposefully not doing work to the best of their abilities.

 

Seriously, actually read the Google Doc. Your generalization of it is far from what's on there in its entirety.

 

hmmm okay that sounds a bit more serious ,  than I better should do´some reading  that thanks for the info

Edited by Dustin Lübbers

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hmmm okay that sounds a bit more serious ,  than I better should do´some reading  that thanks for the info

Here's the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WZFkR__B3Mk9EYQglvislMUx9HWvWhOaBP820UBa4dA/preview#

I admit that there are some things that do seem petty, but I don't think the majority of things in the doc are lies from the people who wrote them.

Then there's the response: http://channelawesome.com/our-response/, which seemingly confirms things in it, given there's not a lot of proof, even though they tried to disprove some of the things. There are some things that they tried to disprove, but only a few things get any evidence on their part. The rest of it seems rather petty & harsh. I'm not sure who exactly to believe, but I don't think that people would be joining together to hate on CA if they didn't have good enough reasons. I mean, what would they have to gain by lying?

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I read the Google DOc like 3 times. I just couldn't believe that a site and company Id come to love and respect so much was actually such a poorly run place. And then there were Channel Awesome's responses. "We sincerely regret you felt that way." Are you freaking kidding me??? No wonder they've lost 40 000 subscribers in two weeks.

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Trust me, their second response is just bad. Only 1 thing in it is something that you can say that they actually refuted,...but did it poorly. That was who owns the Nostalgia Critic IP, which is divided amongst 4, soon to be 5, people, whom we can assume 3 of which are Michaud & the Walker brothers, but Mike still owns the majority share of CA & is still their CEO, so he owns the majority of the IP. Everything else was just poorly done.

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The second response was the final nail in the coffin. It said all the statements in the document were lies, then took a few of them that they felt were the most vindictive in nature (these few being only from women, save for one guy) and provided chat logs to prove that they were false. Unfortunately, the chat logs didn't prove they were lies (just the opposite, in fact) and instead for the most part confirmed that the issues the producers faced were all true, not to mention revealing the identity of a certain individual who was abusing another producer. It is by far the absolute worst response they could possibly have come up with.

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Yep. No truth, vitriolic, & full of misinformation. Just like Donald Trump's Twitter account.

Exactly. A perfect comparison. And saying that makes me so sad, and so frustrated. I really hope Doug and Rob cut ties soon.

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Well, here's the problem with that. Doug & Rob are committed to the Nostalgia Critic, as everything else they've tried to do in terms of web shows either wasn't as popular, fell by the wayside eventually, or ended in an abysmal failure. If they tried to cut ties, they'd be leaving the Nostalgia Critic IP in the hands of Michaud, as it's owned by Channel Awesome Inc. & Michaud, on top of being CEO of the company, is also the majority shareholder of it, which means he holds the most control over the IP. If they tried to cut ties, they'd be back to square 1 with trying to produce anything else, on top of their damaged images. The NC is also still a big draw for the company's revenue earning. Looking at the Jack & Jill review, it's only been not even 3 days since it went up & it still has almost as many average views as most past episodes of the series. Clearly people still like to watch the show, even if the parent company that owns & distributes it is in hot water with others. Their sub count has taken a hit, but their viewer numbers are still about the same. I imagine that it'll continue like this until all of the people who are going to unsub from them have done so, leaving the people who either don't care about the situation, or the people who like watching the Nostalgia Critic. We'll see, though. There is a small minority who either don't believe the other creators' stories, or write them off as drama whores as well however, so those people are going to stick around.

 

I mean, personally, I hope that Mike's forced to go on a leave of absence to get help while they hire a PR team to help smoothen things out & rebuild trust with disgruntled ex-fans, but I don't think that's what's going to happen, at least for the most part. They did say in their response that they're enforcing company-wide mandatory sensitivity training & are working to better their company in other ways, which is evident from the fact that they were late uploading last week's NC to YouTube & haven't uploaded anything else since a week ago, which is odd because they usually keep to tight schedules on their shows, but unless Mike Michaud sees what he's done as bad & offers a sincere apology, or just straight-up leaves the company, I doubt a lot of people will be so forgiving. There's also the fact that Doug, Rob, Tamara, Malcolm, & other people who either run or work directly for the company haven't experienced any bad things in their years working for them, which makes sense since they're not the content creators who simply signed up with the company to get enough views to live on for their content. I mean, Tamara retweeted the tweet from CA's twitter account with the link to the response, then when someone tried to tell her it was a bad response, her response to that person was "Read," meaning that either she didn't read the Google Document, believes the company over the other creators, or doesn't care.

 

On top of that, some of the newer content creators, & some of the older ones, said they didn't have any bad interactions with the site management (which explains why Brad Jones & Guru Larry are still listed as creators on the site, on top of loyalty to friends in Brad's case), but quit after they read what the others went through. Then there's Doug basically loving being able to run a comedy webseries free from financial weight, since he obviously makes a decent living off his content. I can't imagine, especially after the disaster that was Demo Real, that he'd be willing to give it up. I imagine what they plan on doing at CA is doing the stuff they said they would, but keep business as usual until the whole thing blows over. They'll hold out until they eventually bounce back. Other people have bounced back from backlash like this, like Keemstar & Ricegum (though CA's content is more watchable & respectable than either of those guys' outputs), after a while, at which point they'll start gaining new subs & views rather than losing them again. If they do pick up any new content creators again in the future, it'll most likely be smaller creators who'd be happy to get the extra views through their word of mouth. I can't imagine that happening for a while, but we'll see. This is a situation where I don't think we'll get what we want, like the CA people actually learning from this experience, or any wounds to be healed. I can only see either CA trying to stay quiet on this, or them possibly running it into the ground with more awful responses. In the meantime, they'll still keep getting YouTube views & revenue from ads, which is what really sucks. I hope Michaud grows up & owns up to his mistakes like he should (as well as Doug, since he's partially responsible for some of the things), but as far as I can see, Michaud has nowhere near the right level self-awareness or patience to do any of that, or the other things I've mentioned. He's a stubborn man who can't admit to his faults & he's surrounded by people who don't care if he does or not, so he has no incentive to do so, unfortunately. It's sad, but that's the situation here. I hope for the best, but I expect the worst in this situation, unfortunately.

 

Doug'll keep running the NC into the ground & Mike will keep running CA into the ground. Sad.

Edited by Scsigs

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Very sad. For a while their view count was dropping, but it suddenly jumped the other day. There are some rumours floating around that Doug, Rob, Brad, Tamara and Malcolm quietly resigned last week and are in the process of getting a lawyer, but I have found nothing to confirm this. The thing I'm hoping is that if Doug and Rob cut ties, Michaud will realize that there's no way to continue the Nostalgia Critic without Doug and he'll relinquish the IP, but I know full well that that most likely will not happen. Given what I've read about Mike Michaud the guy is extremely stubborn and refuses to admit when he's wrong or when he's made a mistake. I never thought we'd find a person who is even close to being as bad as Donald Trump, but I think we've found one.

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Yeah. We'll find out tomorrow if Doug & Rob did resign if there's no new Nostalgia Critic (though there could be other reasons as well), but I feel there'll be one.

Edited by Scsigs

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Yeah,, that's what I thought, since I believe they have a Vimeo account where they post the episodes to for archive purposes & they get a commission for people subbing or whatever their version of that is, over there. It's either Vimeo, or another service. I forget. They also let people watch the episodes a week early over there, so it's at least a week in advance.

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Well, it seems like we've hit a standstill in the whole Channel Awesome situation. Seems like Brad Jones and Guru Larry will be there until the end and everyone seems to be focusing on the reveal about JewWario. Which isn't surprising seeing as that whole revelation was such a shock.

 

 

Update: Rumors are stating that Doug and Rob Walker quit and that they're getting a lawyer to get full rights to the Nostalgia Critic. Although I'm taking it with a grain of salt until I get confirmation from a reliable source. Though Doug did change his work info on Facebook to "Worked at Channel Awesome" instead of "Works at Channel Awesome", which seems to be the indicator for most people that he's quit. Plus Rob deleted his own Facebook page last week. Seems we're not finished with this whole situation.

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Could be, but until they stop uploading Nostalgia Critic episodes, I'm not gonna completely believe it. I DO hope they get the NC's IP back, either through suing CA or Mike Michaud, or they work out a deal so they can buy it back legally, as well as the side shows the others have been doing, like Tamara doing reviews on films she's just seeing for the first time. I imagine that they've saved up enough money to do that. Then they can change the CA YouTube account to the Nostalgia Critic or they can simply start up a new YouTube channel & re-edit the videos to take out the CA logos. Given that they haven't uploaded anything but NC videos in the last few weeks, I thought that it was because of the restructuring at the company & them working on some of the problems they said they'd work on. Personally, I think they should fire Mike Michaud & get someone who can actually be a good CEO of the company would be a good step forward, but if Doug & Rob wanna go their own way with the NC, then fine, but they'll need to start on a long road to gaining people's trust back if they do. There's an amount of people who just enjoy watching the NC, so they have an audience still, but they need to look better going forward, whether they're with CA or not.

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If this is true and they've quit, once they've successfully severed the ties they'll have to post a video explaining their side, not to mention give a pretty huge apology. People are also saying that there'll only be one or two more Nostalgia Critic episodes  now that Doug has supposedly quit.

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They're saying that because of how far in advance the episodes are recorded. Personally, I thought that that was only a week, but if the gap between filming dates & release dates increased, ok, but I don't know. That would explain why the last few episodes have been very minimally done, as if they had to shorten them to just the bare minimum of what people expect from the Critic. No sketches, no real anything, just Doug in character summing up the movies & making wisecracks. This could be him harkening back to the early days of the series, but even most of those had good gags in them. These feel like someone who's just getting into online video reviewing. It's weird, especially how Doug went into such a diatribe about his newest style of reviewing being better now than back then in the review of Christmas With the Cranks, so you'd expect him to throw in a few sketches minimum per review with another actor. I wonder why this is. We'll probably find out soon.

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That would explain why the last few episodes have been very minimally done, as if they had to shorten them to just the bare minimum of what people expect from the Critic. No sketches, no real anything, just Doug in character summing up the movies & making wisecracks. 

Huh. I haven't been watching Nostalgia Critic ever since I discovered this whole controversy. It just isn't the same for me anymore. So I didn't know that this is what the new reviews are like. That does sound like he's slowly making his exit. 

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Yep. No truth, vitriolic, & full of misinformation. Just like Donald Trump's Twitter account.

 

 

Or like anything from Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

 

Friendly reminder to keep things on topic.

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Huh. I haven't been watching Nostalgia Critic ever since I discovered this whole controversy. It just isn't the same for me anymore. So I didn't know that this is what the new reviews are like. That does sound like he's slowly making his exit.

Maybe. Then again, it's not like he really tore into those movies, so I don't know.

 

 

So, I'm assuming Doug & Rob didn't quit CA, considering that Starship Troopers is more of the same NC we've been getting for the last 2 years. I don't hate it, but I do hate that it's under the CA banner. Also, they released another Top 5 video on Monday, so I'm assuming they're trying to quietly sidestep the issue because their "response" was something they thought was sufficient. I mean, I'm glad they're not making things worse, but this issue isn't gonna go away.

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