Media Research Failure/Web Original

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Media Research Failure in Web Original works include:

Web Video

Paul Joseph Watson: Have you ever visited Tate Modern in London? It's a building full of scrap metal, concrete blocks, urinals [...]
The Needle Drop: Stop! Stop. Stop. Paul, stop. Do you even know the history behind this piece? Do you know the history behind this piece, Paul? If you knew the history behind this piece, Paul, I don't think you'll be calling it [fake British accent] "just a urinal, just a fucking urinal!"

  • When The Nostalgia Critic announced his appearance in the Entrepreneur magazine, we all went straight to or searched for the article online! But here's the thing: Mike Ellis and Mike Michaud have been mislabeled in the article.
    • Plus, Doug and the Mikes are listed as co-founders and runners of Channel Awesome...but not even a mention of Bhargav?
    • Moreover, the article actually goes into detail in another Channel Awesome website, the much less popular Chicago nightlife review site Barfiesta, instead of mentioning Bhargav, when that site is actually Bhargav's pet project. Weird, huh?
  • Spoony's Deadliest Character: Megazord VS Mechagodzilla video was chock full of inaccurate descriptions and blatant Critical Research Failure, including:
    • Talking about the Showa (1974) Mechagodzilla while showing clips of Kiryu. While Kiryu is an incarnation of Mechagodzilla, it is not the same monster (The original Mechagodzilla is a robot built by aliens to take over the world and Kiryu is a cyborg version of the original Godzilla).
    • Saying that Mechagodzilla was unable to defeat a single monster (IE: Godzilla). In reality, Mechagodzilla is one of the few Kaiju that Godzilla is unable to defeat on his own. The Showa Mechagodzilla required the aid of King Caesar (Godzilla VS Mechagodzilla) and humanity (Terror Of Mechagodzilla) to defeat.
    • Completely ignoring (or simply not knowing about) the fact that Mechagodzilla also has an ally in the form of Titanosaurus.
      • Yes, but that was an intentional parody.

Other Web Original Works

  • i think Halo is a pretty cool guy. eh kills aliens and doesn't afraid of anything.[context?]
  • In this blog post, baby-name expert Laura Wittenberg explains how distracting names that reveal that authors Did Not Do the Research (e.g., a Work Com with an entire office full of men in their 30s who have names that are popular now but not so much in The Seventies) have become to her.
    • The above example pretty much only fits the trope to said expert alone, since people have been giving themselves and their children odd or out of place names for millennia, and fictional media ain't exactly a bastion of reality in the first place.
    • The point is that one or two characters having names that seem out of place for their age or demographic is fine but it's implausible when the whole cast do.
  • The humour in Cracked.com is often an example on this. You may laugh at how silly the, say, Polish movie posters are, unless, of course, you happen to know that some of the pictures are not movie posters but, say, a comic parodying the film. Or, for that matter, how the Voynich Manuscript is described as undecipherable for all the wrong reasons.
    • An article on Japanese versions of Western characters claimed that Luke chopped Vader's head off. Which he did. In the cave on Dagobah where, if you recall the scene from the movie, he chopped Vader's head off. It also claimed that Hellsing using the name Alucard was a clumsy way to avoid copyright issues over using Dracula, despite the fact that 1. Dracula is in the public domain and 2. in Hellsing Alucard is Dracula, which is explicitly confirmed when he reveals his true form and how he came to serve the Hellsing organization.
  • The Agony Booth's recap of High School Musical made an error by saying that Ashley Tisdale basically played an identical Alpha Bitch character on that "awful sitcom The Suite Life of Zack and Cody". If you're not familiar enough with the show to know that Ashley Tisdale plays the exact opposite character type on that show, you obviously haven't even seen a commercial for it, and probably shouldn't be making judgments about it.
  • X-Entertainment liked to play on this trope when it still published articles, particularly for franchises that the author isn't interested in. Example: Behold! [dead link], an article on the Strawberry Shortcake cereal getting the names of Apricot and Hopsalot Bunny wrong, even though the correct names were mentioned in the commercial that's available for download from the same page!
  • An image for the "Bleach Has No Backgrounds!" meme had a shot of Bleach compared to a shot from Naruto and One Piece respectively. While this isn't a problem if you want to make a point, the problem is that the pictures from the other two were of cities, while the picture from Bleach was of...Hueco Mundo, a statedly empty and barren desert.
    • Arguably, the real issue is that Naruto had a visibly bigger animation budget (possibly because the original manga's art style was inspired by Akira and they wanted to do it justice), and One Piece's art style (being more cartoony) works better with a smaller budget than Bleach's does.
  • Animated Views has so many of these it's not even funny. A few of the examples include:
    • An assumption that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer began airing with "Fame and Fortune" instead of "We're a Couple of Misfits" in 1998 as opposed to 1965 (1998 is actually the year "We're a Couple of Misfits" returned to Rudolph, a fact the reviewer could have confirmed simply by watching the previous year's broadcast!).
    • A lament that the "Recommended Features" box on the Toy Story 3 Blu-Ray does not include a link to Day and Night even though the link is randomized, and could link to that short on certain viewings
    • An assumption that in the Watchmen graphic novel, Dr. Manhattan and the squid were the same being (a site devoted to animation probably shouldn't review Watchmen in the first place!).
  1. ↑ The Independent article
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