The Annotated Series/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Acceptable Targets: Overly zealous or swarmy Christians, creators/animators/writers/actors of any particularly bad work, Buckley, and Bouchedags. The Nutshack lead to some non-malicious ribbing of Filipinos in general.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation
    • Simon Belmont as a "stealth mentor" in Captain N, happily hanging back and allowing the heroes to deal with the situation themselves in order to let them learn from the experience as his own input would solve the problem too soon. From all the ASCII wangs around him he is also seen as a stealth mentor and/or the true Gay Master.
    • The young man in Annotated Daydream as a woman, making it a music video about a same-sex relationship.
      • In the same video, the drummer/lead singer as a laboratory escapee from an experiment to combine the DNA of Justin Bieber and Phil Collins.
    • The Genie in an early episode of Captain N as a "guest annotator."
    • King Hippo and Eggplant Wizard as a couple. They're pretty convinced the writers intended it though.
    • Kevin is really a young psychopath, what with staying in Video Land over the petty fate of having to clean his room if he returns home. Along with blowing stuff up for attention. Simon tries to curb his nastier tendencies and set him on a better path.
  • Awesome Music: Some of them actually like the "surf music" used in some DiC Entertainment shows.
  • Broken Base: Sometimes there's some minor head-butting between Annotators. In the past there were a few debates over whether they should strictly stick to video game adaptions/series related to video games or work with other things. Though for now the compromise has been: regular stuff=video games, intermissions: anything goes.
  • Dude, Not Funny: Bouchedags was mercilessly ripped apart for its racial stereotyping, misogyny and making light of various mental and physical handicaps.
  • audience doesn't laugh*
    • A few were like this when Santa started to cry in Christmas Comes To Pacland.
    • A lot had trouble with the more serious parts of Tricky People what with child molestation hitting a little too close for home
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: There's almost always ONE character that the annotators actually like.
    • Cheatsy and Kooky in Super Mario Bros 3. as well Doug the Bug, who was merely a frequent animation error.)
    • BISON!!! *flames* from Street Fighter
    • Raiden from Defenders of the Realm. Night Wolf too perhaps due to him taking a level in bad ass in the then recent Mortal Kombat 9, so people were easier on him. And for being genuinely amicable, when everyone seemed to bicker every five seconds, and rarely being useless when he got to head out into the field. Jax and Sonya got just a little less hate near the end when they started to show a little character development.
      • Quan Chi, a recurring Mortal Kombat villain, debuted in Defenders of the Realm of all places. For that was referred to as the best original character ever.
    • The buzzard (not turkey!) in the Bubsy pilot.
    • Simon of Captain N: The Annotated Series.
      • Bizarrely enough, GAMEBOY of all people is one as well, aided by "trying to kill" Pit and sporting bitching sunglasses in one episode.
      • And Mike from Captain N. Popular enough that people wished he was the Game Master, wished he came back for that Californialand episode AND got a Fannon backstory for All Star Cartoons.
      • Yet again from Captain N, King Hippo and Eggplant Wizard have slowly but surely come to this. One part, as disgusting as it is, shipping; one part that they're sympathetic and not very malicious has helped them grow onto the bulk of the crew. They were even disappointed that the chance to get the two into official couple status was missed in the Paperboy episode.
    • Santa, from Christmas Comes To Pacland, wasn't really ripped on much by most annotators. Some even were kinda depressed when he started to cry after he realized he missed his deadline for Christmas for the first time.
    • The Little Panda Fighter just barely one ups Ratatoing with having a very last minute dark horse: Polaris. In the last five minutes the cartoon gets 'awesomely mean spirited' and Polaris was a chess master and pulled a huge 'deal with it' poise at the end.
    • Uncle Theobold in Mouse Police barely qualified.
  • Ear Worm: The surf music.
  • Evil Is Cool: Ganon was complimented among his very first scene in The Legend of Zelda: The Annotated Series.
  • Fanon: Michael in Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue was made out to be Mike from an early episode Captain N: The Game Master. Despite now being enemies, he and his friends were sincerely distraught by Kevin's disappearance and turned to drugs to cope with the loss.
  • Fridge Horror: Typically pointed out in episodes but a more out of universe one was for the Armor of Light folks. It was a Christian special that talked all about victory and defeating enemies...Not a single word about forgiveness (for 96 percent of the special), loving your enemies or just freaking letting God sort out who goes to heaven and who goes to Hell like he is supposed to. The fact they weren't trying to hide the 'sheep' mentality was found a tad horrifying.
  • Ho Yay:
  • Hype Backlash: Inverted. Game Boy from Captain N was hyped up to be basically the most annoying character of all time... but aside from a couple jokes in the first two episodes of Season Two, several annotators ended up liking him (especially compared to Megaman and Kid Icarus).
  • I Am Not Shazam: There is no name for the actual group of people that do this, though they are often referred to as The Annotat Xperiment due to the YouTube account name. Similarly, CurtDogg is CurtDogg and not beeupyou; that's just a phonetic pun of the B^U emoticon.
  • Idiot Plot: Lampshaded.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: The Annotators had a lot of fun with the chicken noises coming from the robots in Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Annotated Realm.
    • Isn't that trope usually for 'good' sounds? What might be a better example is Bison's 'yesh' since everyone went wild when that awesome scene occurred. Also the music accompanying it later invoked many glorious 'yeshes!'
  • Never Live It Down:
    • Sagat in Street Fighter: The Annotated Series was made fun of for his inability to use a tank to knock down a gate.
    • Guile was consistently mocked for the fact that he boasts about Honor, Justice, and Commitment... When, at some point during season 2, he used a Sonic Boom on a guy from behind. It did not help he proceeded to do it again in later episodes. People tend to say he has some sort of compulsion to shoot them from behind with a Sonic Boom, and say something along the lines of "He had his back turned, he was asking for it!".
    • One part this and one part running gag for Captain N for two. First there's Eggplant Wizard's non sequitur 'Radio Controlled Sweet Potato' and then there's Lana asking 'what about the peace treaty?' whenever Mother Brain departs from her.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Some of the annotations note how creepy Mother Brain is.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Bully Koopa saw some love after bullying (what else?) Kootie Pie and Big-Mouth in one episode.
    • The "Surf Music" counts, too. The annotators hated it in SMB 3, but have warmed up to it since Captain N.
    • Jeffrey Scott, the writer of season 1 for Captain N. He wrote some pretty bad episodes (Simon's amnesia being a particularly hated one) but he also wrote the Mike episode and seemed to maintain some very minor consistency. Some even worse episodes of season 2 have some people wishing he came back, though he isn't the only one to write some noteworthy episodes.
  • Rooting for the Empire:
    • Characters the audience is supposed to hate tend to get the most sympathy.
    • Seems to be averted in Captain N, as of current.
    • NME, from Armor of Light, just barely passes. Nobody likes the annoying bad guys, except maybe Dark Master's look, the Annotators just despise smarmy protagonists more. Also NME wasn't shown doing anything bad in the special so the kids came off as a bunch of Christian extremists that sabotaged corporate broadcasts and interrupted a vague band contest.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Given that their work so far consists almost entirely of animated adaptations of works full of already established characters that are already recognisable, most original characters (insistently termed OCs) get a lot of hate. Exceptions to the rule take the other extreme; see the Ensemble Darkhorse entry above.
    • In CAD, Ethan. One might refer to Buckley himself as such too.
    • Super Mario World had Oogtar, Yoshi and Kootie Pie. Any appearance by the latter brought in a running gag of her tolerance meter showing up on screen. It was always quick to max out, and the very last time it literally went off the scale, let out an Atomic F-Bomb and exploded.

Kootie Pie Tolerance Level: Exceeded

      • While Oogtar and Yoshi were frequently compared to Mario 3's Toad, they went quite easy on him once they annotated that series. Maybe they realised he could've been much worse.
      • Come Super Mario Bros. 3 they got quite sick of Big-Mouth and Bully Koopa too.
    • Nearly EVERYONE from Nutshack with a little less hate for Dickman.
    • Stryker seemed to get the most hate out of the heroes of Mortal Kombat.
    • Everyone in Bouchedags.
    • While the cast of the Bubsy pilot were generally disliked, Terri and Terry got the worst reception by far, even more so than Bubsy himself.
    • Everyone from Ratatoing. Even the VILLAINS were terrible, since they never really had any good ideas throughout the film.
      • Continuing with the Video Brinquedo hate, everyone from The Little Panda Fighter sans Polaris was hated, especially Beth, the bear bitch that shows no character development other than: "Pandas are so ridiculous and stupid. Big, muscular, and popular bears are so hot".
    • Puff, a One-Shot Character from Captain N, was a baby dragon that knew how to say "Mama!" and how to scream. And that was it. Also from Captain N are Kid Icarus, and to a lesser extent Megaman, due to their voices and verbal tics. Gameboy was played up to be this, but has since ended up ignored (and sometimes even appreciated) for the most part.
    • The Pause Annotation is becoming this because somebody/ies really likes using it for every slightly off face.
  • Back in the Bee Up You days there was one annotator during one Mario Bros. series that would not stop bringing up Republicans whenever something bad happened. This started getting on people's nerves.
  • Sequelitis: Dr. Rabbit hurt these people hard.
  • So Bad It's Good: What their targets often are.
  • So Okay It's Average: The general reaction to Beauty and Warrior was that while it wasn't good in any sense of the word, it was mainly tedious and confusing rather than hilariously stupid.
  • Squick: Simon Belmont tearing off Donkey Kong's toenail.
    • The main girl character from Tricky People...and the short skirt of her costume. BRAIN BLEACH!
  • Ugly Cute: Annotators were touched when Eggplant Wizard helped King Hippo escape from the trap protecting the triforce in the 9th episode of season 2.