I kinda feel bad for Doug Walker, and I don’t like it.
I am creating Disneycember, twenty-four videos for twenty-four days straight during December, all about Disney. I can’t help but think of Doug Walker, the person I got this idea from. I’m not thinking about him in a negative light but pity. This Disneycember series has me feeling distressed for him, and I can’t stand it.
He runs the popular web series Nostalgia Critic for those who do not know who Doug Walker is. Nostalgia Critic is about a man who watches old media or new media made for all ages and complains about how terrible he thinks they are. This series isn’t the best, but I would be lying if I said it’s not one of the things that encouraged me to start making my own commentary-based content. Yes, I was seated every week for new episode releases and would watch pretty much anything Doug Walker spoke about regarding films, both live-action and animation. Doug Walker is someone I idolized when I was a teenager, but his Disneycember series was when I began to have second thoughts about him.
Because Doug Walker influenced me, him being the only person who made the kind of videos he did, and his opinions strongly affected mine. I felt that if he did not like something, no one should like it. If he liked something, everyone should like it. This bandwagon behavior stopped when I began watching his series, Disneycember. Doug Walker’s Disneycember is simple. It’s him watching Disney movies and giving his honest opinions on them. As someone who has seen countless films from Disney, I watched plenty of what he spoke about and started to feel uncomfortable with the comments he made on the issues regarding race in the films. I got pissed off when he disliked a movie I held special to my heart. I am in no way, shape, or form calling Doug Walker racist, but I will say that his input was ignorant and racially insensitive.
Once I distanced myself from his work, my eyes opened; I found other people to watch. After watching others, I realized Nostalgia Critic and Disneycember were not that good. It pains me that he is keeping these series going because his other project, Demo Reel, flopped. He has to do these productions to put food on the table and pay his bills.
I often say, “If you complain about bad media all the time, why don’t you make your own where you fix what you don’t like?” and Doug Walker did that. It’s painful because he does not have the range to make his own material. It’s beyond not having the proper film equipment and loads of money; the writing, the story, was too terrible to bear. The creator’s work usually speaks for itself when they give others critics for their media. Demo Reel, along with his other original works being released, is when people stopped taking him too seriously because they felt that he was the last person to talk about horrible entertainment.
Most of the time, no one goes into making something and wanting it to be horrible. Someone put their time, energy, effort, and love into their work. I can tell that Doug Walker thought he was making something better than the things he dislikes; I indeed do because I see he has a passion for film, as it’s one of the things he’s always discussing. But when you do not have it, that being artistry, you just don’t; you can not do much about it unless you ask for help from someone who does (and the team he works with lacks it just as well). I am literally a woman in my twenties feeling sorry for a man who is close to being old enough to be my father because I could see he tried, but it did not work.
There would be no Harriyanna Hook’s Disneycember if it weren’t for Doug Walker’s Disneycemeber. It hurts because I no longer think highly of the person I got the inspiration from to do this, and it’s my fault, to begin with. While I was a child, I should not have put him on this pedestal, thinking he was the best on the internet since Girls Go Games. I have no one to blame but myself for feeling bad for Doug Walker, and I’m still working to grow through this.
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