The Failure of Victorious

on march the 26th 2006 to the excitement of two thousands tweens everywhere the musical sitcom hannah montana first premiered on the disney channel the series explored the fictional teenager miley stewart whose one hit wonder father pressures her into becoming a massively famous singer but with an extra caveat miley is allowed to maintain a secret identity hiding behind a blonde wig while on stage while in the real world attending a completely normal middle school and experiencing everyday teenage drama she thus maintains in her own words the best of both worlds being able to live out the fantasy of being a superstar while still retaining a level of privacy which gives her a relatively normal childhood during off hours after hannah montana premiered it became a staple of children's television being widely recognized and known in pop culture even in the adult world and eventually something happened that i'm not sure anyone really expected miley cyrus became an actual charting musician partially elevated by the tv show pushing the narrative that she was an incredibly talented performer sadly for cyrus however she would not be rewarded the same luxuries as her tv counterpart as children and adults around the world became totally obsessed with both her public and private life as if a separation was not necessary but to the disney channel that didn't really matter what truly mattered was the massive amount of money that was quickly brought in once cyrus's fame reached an equilibrium to her blonde-haired equivalent when cyrus sold well hannah sold well and that meant residuals for albums merchandise dvds and of course tv ratings and at some stage disney seemed to stop and sort of ask wait can we just keep doing this and so the network then created sunny with a chance and wizards of waverly place both teen comedy starring young actors which eventually revealed the shocking twist that these teens could also sing and soon enough selena gomez and demi lovato were also elevated to a kind of mainstream musical audience and partially because they had been featured in tv shows which actively advertised that they were musicians and could sing a licensing deal with the jonas brothers continued this trend with jonas and the camp rock films promoting the careers of these stars while also sending residuals back towards the company and as disney channel raked in the cash there was this feeling over at nickelodeon that someone was jealous starting around the same time nick would also sporadically try and push their sitcom stars into becoming mainstream pop artists with drake bell miranda cosgrove and jennette mccurdy all being examples of this however these experiments ended up failing for the most part and one could argue that the reason was that none of these shows were about the performing arts drake and josh didn't make me want to listen to drake bell's music it made me want to watch three stooges skits and icarly inspired me to browse the internet look for online content not listen to some wishy-washy pop album that was probably made at gunpoint so what if theoretically nickelodeon were to try and make a sitcom mimicking these other shows by creating an atmosphere where adolescents suddenly breaking into song and dance was considered completely conventional would they be able to transition one of their teen stars from comedians into internationally recognized superstars like disney had done so many times before well there was a chance because this time nickelodeon had hand-selected the perfect person to add to the show someone so star-studded yet so approachable that they would surely become a glamorous piece of pop culture iconography in absolutely no time and that star's name was victoria justice yes victoria justice the latest teen star from nickelodeon known for such films as the boy who cried werewolf and such shows as zoe 101 and the troop soon to be elevated to international stardom by her hit new program vic tori house yes for a weird few years in the network's history victoria justice was the person who nickelodeon was confident would become their miley cyrus and her self-titled sitcom victorious felt like yet another attempt to make this vision into a reality did it work well we're going to find out real quick before we go any further a few things worth noting for those of you who are new to the channel in the past few months i have been making a deep dive into the icarly franchise and in my last two videos i successfully covered every story in the original run from the ipilot to the i finale the reason i originally wanted to re-watch icarly is that it occurred to me how much of the show i remember when i just typically don't think about it and revisiting it was fun because it felt like i was attaching a lot of half forgotten memories to real episodes and experiences victorious is going to be the direct opposite because despite the fact that i did watch victorious especially during reruns whenever nothing else was on i remember almost nothing about this show and obviously this is something i have to fix if i'm going to watch sam and cat the next piece of icarly history which was not only an icarly revival but a victorious one as well i wanted to make this clear before we start this because it's important to point out that there was kind of a bias to my last two videos a kind of listless nostalgia and that's going to be completely missing from here on out so expect a lot less oh i remember watching this and a lot more what is this who made this why am i watching this but i want to clarify i am going into this with a completely open mind i might end up hating victorious but i also might end up loving it however no matter what opinions i end up holding even if i end up loving this show and i praise it to the high heavens i know for a fact that this video is going to be titled the failure of victorious because it's the only good title i can think of think about it the failure of victorious it's pretty good as i mentioned this is not the first part of this mini-series and it won't be the last so if you want to make sure you don't miss out on the next exciting installment go down to the description hit that subscribe button and remember to set the bell to all notifications we're trying to see how many subscribers we can get to by the end of the year and the faster we move along the more energized i am going to be to continue working on this ever daunting miniseries really stretching the definition of the word mini there anyways before we get into this and before i say a bunch of hot takes that'll probably piss off the ariana stands a quick shout out to today's sponsor nord vpn let me ask you guys this question have you ever had fears about security of hackers gaining access to your personal data and devices of your 11 year old arch nemesis taking over your web show and playing piano music that isn't very good well if that's the case then i think a nordvpn is 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you can use nord right now on my phone i have my videos tab pulled up and what i'm going to do now is i'm going to switch over to nordvpn and i'm going to change my settings to the united kingdom now when i pop back over to my video tab and i refresh there you go the fred video is gone it no longer exists because my phone thinks i'm in the united kingdom so i'm gonna swap back over to nordvpn i'm gonna change my settings back and boom there you go now my fred video is back so if you're in the united kingdom or ireland you can use this service you can check it out and you can see an extra four hours of youtube content that the copyright police don't want you to see so if you want to check all that out go to my link nordvpn.com quentin to get a huge discount on two years of nord and as a special bonus an additional month free nord is also guaranteed a 100 money back guarantee for the first 30 days so you can totally get your service download it try it out for 30 days and if you decide you don't like it in that time you can get your money back no questions asked it's a risk-free purchase and once again something that you can get at nordvpn.com q-u-i-n-t-o-n anyways let's get into this okay so here's a quick rundown as per why victorious is such a weird show to try and analyze there are in total eight main characters in victorious now some of you might look at this setup and say well quentin you've included the puppet the puppet isn't a main character yes he is this puppet has not haunted my dreams for the last 10 years for you to come in here and say that he isn't one of the eight main characters he is his own character and we will be addressing him as such the point is that we have eight main characters here and that can be a lot especially compared to icarly in the first 60 episodes i ki in the first 60 episodes icarly primarily has four main characters carly sam freddy and for the b-plots spencer and in my opinion those episodes are nearly perfectly balanced in giving each character the right amount of screen time and development and meanwhile victorious also has around 60 episodes but has twice as many characters but in a way maybe i'm just kind of spoiled maybe this isn't that weird of a thing i mean look at head of the class head of the class is a classic 1980s sitcom that has a bunch of the same tropes and kind of led the way for shows like this and that show has nine main characters excuse me sorry the show has ten main characters i forgot to count the teacher and if head of the class can feature nine students and one teacher then maybe victorious can be just as entertaining with one less cast member but i've set up this little diorama for myself because one of my main goals with this video is i want to dedicate a deserving amount of screen time and analysis to each and every single one of these characters and i'm setting that goal for myself because i have this very strong feeling that if i didn't go out of my way to do that we could very easily get to the end of this video barely mentioning some of these kids i kind of figured a pin board was a good way to go about that one so with my rants about the show's expansive cast out of the way what is victorious really about well let's put it like this if you were to make a tv pitch that described the energy of every single disney sitcom from the late 2000s without actually being a description of any specific disney sitcom from the late 2000s what would it be you might be thinking well what if there's a school for the performing arts in california where the main character's older sister attends despite having no talent while the main character goes to a normal school because she thinks she isn't good enough to go to the art school but she doesn't realize that she's secretly the greatest singer in the entire universe and she has to discover that throughout the course of the pilot and that's it you guessed it that's victorious in the pilot tori's older sister tutsi i mean trina is attending hollywood arts high school where students train to one day become artists and she soon will be performing at the annual performance piece which is done by students and attended by talent agents producers and the like however trina is upset because she's been matched up with a sophomore named andrew harris a 10th grader who she thinks has no talent we soon find out that his name is actually andre harris and that he's actually extremely musically gifted something which trina immediately dismisses tori is forced to help the pair practice for their performance which is difficult because her sister is both incredibly egotistical and also without any talent whatsoever [Music] andre says he has a headache and tori recommends abusing drugs sometime later the school's talent competition is held but there's suddenly a problem trina suddenly has an allergic reaction as her tongue bloats to a massive size anyway she'll be able to perform today of course not oh god but andre suddenly has an idea tori knows the song and performance inside and out having assisted in every step of the way meaning she can take over the performance with ease tori protests this saying that she's absolutely not worthy of doing this before she's thrown on stage and of course does an unreasonably great job for someone who's supposedly never saying in front of another human being in their entire life icarly victorious are very different but they do both have one pretty common theme and that's that they're both fame bait the only difference is that icarly is about internet fame and victorious is about real fame the song that tori sings here which later becomes the theme song is about how if you fantasize about becoming famous you'll be able to prove everyone wrong and make it if you just let go of yourself and live in the moment originally i wanted to play a clip of tori singing this song you know to prove my point but it turns out it's very very difficult to play any music from this show without immediately getting copy striked so instead i'm just gonna read the lyrics out and hopefully that'll be enough to make you understand the point i'm trying to make you don't have to be afraid to put your dream in action you're never gonna fade you'll be the main attraction not a fantasy just remember me when it turns out right cause you know that if you live in your imagination tomorrow you'll be everybody's fascination in my victory just remember me when i make it shine there you go not only is tori supposed to be incredibly gifted she's supposed to be you you are the secretly gifted child who lives in their head but can live out their dreams if you just believe in yourself and buy nickelodeon merchandise and oh [ __ ] there's the puppet the performance goes over very well and they try to convince tory to attend the school tori has cold feet so andre opens the curtains asks the crowd if they think she's talented enough she's embarrassed the audience says yes she decides to go okay so let's try to recap everything we know about our established characters so far trina is tori's older sister who is older by one year she is egotistical self-absorbed deprecating to others and lacking in any talent or self-awareness about not being talented she's basically designed to be extremely annoying and is in the show constantly through the finale tori is extremely talented or as talented as the actor can manage to come across but has a low self-esteem and a lack of confidence likely generated from her sister telling her that she's less talented and worthy of attention andre is cool supportive and seems like a guy that you would like to hang out with he writes his own music is very gifted at playing the piano and i can't think of anything else but maybe that's all he needs after this point we're also introduced to a few characters who we didn't meet in the first half of the pilot first there's kat a classmate of tory who is very awkward and ditzy despite being extremely nice in the first few episodes cat is also supposed to be bipolar as she constantly switches between emotions from sentence to sentence my name's cat like the animal what's that supposed to mean nothing i i love cats me too they're so cute they dropped this within a few episodes by the fourth story she mostly has become a walking personification of jaden smith's twitter account and as the show goes on she only becomes a less and less coherent i wonder if mirrors work in outer space is it true that sweat and pee are like cousins next we have jade and beck jade is a kind of cool [ __ ] goth girl with attitude and becca is her boyfriend who is attractive if you're 17. i could sit here struggling to describe these two in more words than they deserve but i think i kinda nailed it there and finally we have robbie shapiro and his puppet rex robbie suffers from a personality disorder where he has trouble talking to people especially girls and so he often uses his puppet as an alternate personality that he can use to communicate although the puppet is far from pc and is known to insult the cast and flirt with the girls tell your puppet to quit being mean to me don't call him a puppet that's an offensive term interestingly rex is not actually voiced by the actor playing robbie instead series writer jake farrow dubs the puppet in each and every episode playing him to have a deep voice and an accented cadence i was hoping we could be more than friends you could argue that rex and robbie are in a way a representation of the freud's psychoanalytic theory which posits that there are numerous different aspects of our personalities which we strive to strike a balance between rex is thus the id the primitive and instinctional part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and robbie is the super ego the logical moral compass which seems to work in opposition to its counterpart i told you global warming was bogus stop watching fox news no it's fair and balanced robbie lacks any sort of ego or balance between these two parts of his mind and so he seems to allow each part to filter out into two different personalities and often verbal communication is the only way that information can pass from one side of his brain to the other sometimes rex will figure out a social cue before robbie for instance and can only communicate that information through mockery however another way to look at it more literally is that there's actually quite a lack of clarity if this relationship is really one person being personified in two different ways or if rex and robbie are literally two different people and something seemingly supernatural is going on it's worth noting that if say rex is stuffed into a backpack his voice does seem to come from the backpack and i'm sure as we go on that there will be more moments where doubt is brought into question about whether ventriloquism has anything to do with the rex phenomenon well on friday at school i asked rex if you wanted to see a movie with me on sunday night and now it's sunday night and rex says he has all their plans which i do however there is kind of a third side to this that um i gather if you're into victorious you're not supposed to say this out loud and it's something that's kind of subtle if you're a kid but really really overt if you're an adult but it is still kind of ambiguous so i just want to take a moment here to stop and go ahead and say this out loud so we're all on the same page rex is supposed to be black the joke of this dynamic is clearly that robbie is this awkward jewish teenager and meanwhile the puppet he speaks through is a black caricature that was a good one back lip gloss and i know that in a retrospective like this given that this is something very few of you probably figured out as kids i need to supply evidence well as far as i know there's only one specific moment in the series where this is ever confirmed directly in the blooper episode there's a joke where we see rex auditioning for the show and he speaks with a natural british accent and we hear the show's creator off screen yell can you do a realistic american urban accent and even if i didn't have that piece of evidence just look at the puppet in the pilot episode look at it if this wasn't an aspect of the original joke they wouldn't have kept redesigning the puppet to try and lighten its skin over time it's pretty clearly what it seems to be and there we go the eight main characters tori tathy alex tabby beck bruce ben and blackface returning to the pilot episode tori joins a theater class that is doing an in-character improv and jade introduces her as a dog insisting that she thus perform as one too tori tries to get out of this but is told by her teacher that she has to get on her knees and bark like a dog wow what an organic thing to happen and not the writer's poorly disguised fetish inserted into this teen sitcom i'm going to be saying that sentence a lot in this video after more bullying from jade tori tries to call her mom to transfer her back to regular school but andre tells her to stick with it and that hollywood arts really isn't that different from a regular high school andre quickly corrects himself and tells tori that even if the school isn't normal she isn't normal she's talented and above the groveling weak amoebas who dare to stand below her and thus she deserves to go to the school as much as anyone else there and so she goes back in the next day casts jade in a scene and by the end jade and tori are having an improv battle that ends with tory winning and tori then uses the improv to make out with back cocking jade in an act of theater kid revenge and that was the pilot almost nothing they said up here carries over to the rest of the series one of the characters in the show who turns out to be surprisingly important is tori's theater teacher mr psykowitz watching icarly i got so used to having teachers appear one time and then literally never again so when i found out that this dude was basically the show's ninth main character i was a little bit surprised and i think it's mainly because i didn't anticipate that so much of victorious was going to be set in a theater class because the pilot was all about setting up that tori is an amazing performer a great singer and dancer and that victoria justice deserves to be a pop star in the real world as well and then she's in theater class for 57 episodes i guess it was expensive to have these musical numbers and choreographed sequences and such so it made a lot more sense to just do those a couple times a season and then find some wacky teacher to be funny while the show milks 60 episodes out of not showing you the thing that it pitches in its own branding and do you guys really need to know about every theater class and every school play that they put on in this show let's pretend the answer is yes starting us off is season 1 episode 2 the bird scene in the story andre writes a play for the school and wants tori to be the lead however before she can audition for any part in a school production tori must first pass the bird scene a monologue that everyone must pass if they want to do a school play tori memorizes the piece doesn't in front of the class asks how she did and is told she failed tori tries to ask the rest of the class how to do the scene right but they say they're forbidden from helping her or giving any tips tori continues to try harder and harder to master the monologue before growing so desperate that she handcuffs cat to the rail and tries to torture the information out of her before she attempts to seduce robbie to get him to spill the beans as well luckily for shapiro his puppet steps in and saves the day during a moment where it's implied that rex has genitalia he's the puppet he can't be you don't know what i got meanwhile robbie and andre enter a ballet class to try and hit on girls before they find out that the class consists only of guys who join to try and hit on girls a single girl does end up joining and in an attempt to impress her the pair try to do a dance but accidentally kick each other in the balls tori does an extravagant take on the monologue but when the teacher again flunks her she snaps saying that she did an excellent job and she doesn't care what anyone else thinks the class then begins applauding as the bird scene test is apparently all about building confidence and not caring about what others think which hold on a goddamn second none of this makes any sense according to the episode the bird scene is always performed in front of whatever theater class you're in and you're only forced to do it if you want to do an extracurricular activity so now that tory's done it right in front of all of her peers anyone in the class who hasn't done it yet knows the secret to the monologue so why is it against the rules to tell people the point of the scene if you can watch other people get the scene right before you do next in episode three robbie and trina get matched together for an audition where she kisses him because that's what it says to do in the script however robbie becomes intensely in love with trina not being able to understand that their kiss was just for the scene would you be willing to convert to judaism wow you've got problems it's not a deal breaker but just rex all right who took his pants robbie becomes more and more obsessed before cat tells him that he needs to let it go because it was just a stage kiss robbie says he can't because a kiss that passionate couldn't have been faked causing cat to kiss him to prove a point see i want you to meet my parents meanwhile in tory's other theater class they're given a lesson on stage fighting fight scenes choreograph to look real tori gets matched with jade and grows fearful that she's going to actually throw real punches in the fight however when the fight comes it seems that tori is the one that hit jade as after her hit lands jade appears to be bleeding from the eye and insists that tori hit her for real tori gets in massive trouble for this and is nearly shot by a trigger happy cop before we find out that jade was faking it the whole time using makeup to make her injuries look real shocked that tori hasn't told anyone the truth she decides to help with her punishment after school before they both bail and leave the cop to do it by himself okay so i realized while watching this episode that i actually do remember a lot of this show i remember a lot of the jokes a lot of the plot lines and i even kind of have favorite characters so going into this why did i think that i didn't remember anything about the show well as far as i can tell my brain saved all of my memories associated with this show in a folder labeled zoe 101 this isn't a joke there are several episodes in season one that i actually strongly remember watching but i had just convinced myself that these were just super late zoe 101 episodes which says to me that there must be a lot of weird [ __ ] brewing in this show if i applied that level of cognitive dissonance to my memories of it one theory i came up with while watching season one is that trina is basically to the victorious writers what lubert was to icarly for those of you who didn't watch my last two videos a thesis i came up with there was that the writers of icarly were so convinced that lubert would be automatically hated by everyone that they constantly had extremely horrible things happen to him without any sensitivity solely under the presumption that the viewers at home would be incapable of feeling bad and would only laugh at his pain in the same sense i think the writers are victorious presumed we would find trina so annoying that we would never look at any situation from her perspective and never feel bad for anything that happens to her and this is what makes stories like season 1 episode 4 feel so poorly thought out and executed in the story tori is fretting over her sister's upcoming birth week as trina is apparently so self-absorbed that she thinks her birth deserves an entire week instead of just one day tori frets over this as she has consistently failed in the past to find something good enough for her sister however andre comes up with a brilliant idea for tori to write a song for her sister and then perform it at her party and so she does this performing the song at the party as their parents excitedly record it and the entire plot line just makes tori feel so conceited like it's trina's birthday or birth week it's trina's birth week and tori somehow found a way to make it all about someone shining a spotlight on her so she can do a little dance around the kitchen they're celebrating her sister's birth and somehow she got her parents to film her instead of trina and worse yet she includes in the song's lyrics mentions that everyone hates trina and that she's crazy and then when trina gets confused and doesn't understand that that was supposed to be her gift tori kicks everyone out of the house into the pouring rain and yells at her like she's the one in the wrong like girl it's her birth week give her a break and meanwhile all of trina's friends are left out in the freezing rain but don't worry tori's on the right here that's what's important throughout the episode people just keep being mean to trina and it's supposed to be funny because we're supposed to hate her but the whole story i was thinking like oh man if someone talked to me that way on my birth week i would slap a [ __ ] so hard so trina goes behind her back and sells the rice to the song to a music group who promised to make her famous if she can record a new version in studio however as one can expect this goes over poorly because she is a very bad singer they call taurian who rocks the mic but halfway through the producers get a call from beyonce who says that she wants to record a cover of the song meaning they no longer want to work with the teens and are contractually not obligated to pay or credit them one thing we haven't talked about is arguably the highlight of the show and that's the three guys robbie andre and beck these three are illustrated as being super close arguably the closest in the group and they often are seen just hanging out and swapping banter and it's actually kind of relaxing sometimes to see these friends hang out with no drama no snide comments just like yo how was your weekend man the thing about andre and beck is that they really don't have consistent personalities but they're so chill to be around that you hardly even think about it and what ends up happening is every few episodes one of them will be given a random wacky trait just to mix things up like there's an episode where andre is really into cheese and it's never brought up again season 1 episode 5 is titled jay dumps back and oh you'll never guess what happens in this one in the story beck makes the news after paparazzi photographed him with a famous celebrity who he shares a yoga class with beck tries to say it's not a big deal but jade says it's not something she approves of especially after we learned that said celebrity has been texting beck every single day okay so you're telling me that this famous celebrity met a 10th grader and then started texting him every day back honey here in the future we call that grooming the two get into a big fight over this and it ends with jade breaking up with beck and storming off later beck is dropped off at the school by the celebrity and oh yeah honey you were being groomed so hard i mean they're literally dropping you off at school that's some jerry seinfeld [ __ ] jay comes to tori's house late at night and begins crying saying that she desperately needs back back tori becomes a middleman between the pair trying to hook them back up but ultimately finds cracks in the foundation of their relationship beck notes that jade hasn't done anything nice for him since they started dating she barely pays attention to his needs and for his birthday she bought him a lemonade in a can the kind that you have to stir together yourself and so beck doesn't want to get back together with jade because he doesn't think she really appreciated him meanwhile in the b plot trina puts on a terrible one-woman show which robbie is forced to see so he can write a review for a school publication robbie knows the play is crap but that he can't write an honest review because trina would kill him and indeed she begins stalking him and threatening his life saying that bad things will happen if he doesn't write a good review in the end robbie writes a semi-positive review where he calls the play a genius self-aware comedy which only enrages trina further but once she sees that having her work seen this way causes her to be admired and worshiped she accepts being the butt of the joke saying that it's okay to laugh i wonder if james franco saw this episode so jade concedes that to get back to like her again she'll need to do something nice for once remembering that he's always talked about getting a dog they get him one as a surprise and sneak it into the rv parked on his parents lawn which is where he lives however the dog goes wild and begins attacking the person inside and as beck appears we learn his father is the victim inside an ambulance comes to take his father away and a paramedic approaches back hey are you in college yet bye and that's statutory rape joke number one i can only imagine there will be more jay tries to explain to back how she wanted to do something nice and they begin making out tori is touched by the moment but less enthused when she has to walk home because jade was her ride episode 6 features tori becoming involved in yet another school play this one about a beautiful woman who ends up having to choose between two different men however the same weekend that she's doing the play kat borrows tori for a school makeup project where she needs to turn someone into a monster the makeup comes out perfectly ghoulish but it transpires that kat has used a parody of gorilla glue for the adhesive meaning the makeup is stuck to tori's face and also that the writers predicted gorilla glue girl she has to do the play as is and is finally able to get it off in the final song due to cat and trina getting the solvent for the glue it turns out that the play's actual writer has come to see the show but naturally praises their use of the monster makeup thinking that it added a whole new layer to the play with that let's stop here and talk about something pretty important to victorious theslap.com theslap.com was the in-universe website promoted within victorious that was both a real sight and served a narrative purpose basically a copy of what they had done previously with icarly the main way we see it featured is in a series of recurring transition segments wherein tori will tweet out things going on in her life in between scenes this sometimes actually gives important context about plot details and basically the impression we're given is that this is a satire of twitter in fact in the pilot episode before tori joins the school she is using twitter thus seemingly confirming that theslap.com is meant to be something exclusive to the hollywood arts anyways in season 1 episode 5 we're given direct lore about the website which seems to confirm this here we learn that theslab.com was founded after the school's newspaper closed and the seniors wanted a way to keep it going underground thus as we come to understand here theslap.com is meant to be a way for hollywood art students to keep up to date with things happening on campus while also giving students a way to post about drama going on in their lives in a way you could almost argue that this actually makes the site an in-universe version of yik yak does anyone remember that or am i just old all of these details are explored thoroughly in season 1 episode 7 roberrazzi i'm actually super super excited to get into this one because as a kid i remember this easily being my favorite episode of zoe 101 in the story robbie is being threatened with having his video blog taken off the slap.com after the seniors complain that it's boring and has low traffic tori suggests he try and focus on the kids in the school instead of niche topics and he does just that making an expose about a zit which has appeared on her face this grows massively popular and robbie begins a drama webcast where he accuses all of his friends of various addictions and problems this gets worse when he recruits the 9th graders to be his personal paparazzi constantly patrolling the school and all of la looking for hidden gossip his friends force him out of their friend group saying that they don't want to know him if he's going to continue forcing details about their lives into the public space but robbie likes being popular and continues his show in one very odd sequence we see that robbie has posted a hidden camera conversation with beck and jade recorded from the back seat of a car where it's implied that beck is trying to convince jade to have sex why not cause i didn't shower this morning and i had tuna fish for lunch and there's a dude in the back seat what's that hey man what are you damn dude let me kill you tori's mom comes home with a new armpit cream that is supposed to stop hair from growing and at that exact moment the robarazzi arrived to take photos of her capturing detailed images of her armpits which is a totally natural thing to happen in this teen sitcom and not the writer's poorly disguised fetish but the gang eventually come up with a foolproof plan on how to fix everything revenge porn stealing robbie's clothing after gym class they force him to run into the hall naked taking detailed photos and videos and telling him that if he doesn't quit his drama webcast they're going to post the material online robbie caves in and turns his show into a baking program which seems to go over very well and is just as popular and isn't that just brilliant why didn't keemstar ever start a cake channel meanwhile in the b plot cat becomes addicted to shopping from a magazine her uncles gave her buying a large collection of useless crap despite having no use for any of it thank god i don't have a problem like that season 1 episode 8 is notable for being one of the first event storylines in some way you see remember how the finale of season three of icarly was set during a heat wave with the girls trying to find a way to cope well i understand after that episode icarly took a very long production break which is why the creators had time to develop a second show on the side but because nickelodeon stretched that block of icarly episodes over several years the season 3 finale didn't air until halfway through victoria's first season and so the writers decided to create the very first event story where it's directly implied that icarly and victorious take place in a shared universe by filming an episode of this show with the same basic plot a heat wave strikes the town and they all try to cope true jacksonvp and big time rush then followed suit and all four episodes aired on the same night as part of a heat wave themed extravaganza which either implies that all four of these shows share a universe or that this is a pan-dimensional weather phenomenon in the victoria story a heat wave hits the hollywood arts area and the gang decide to go on a road trip to the beach to cool off however they're locked into beck's rv when a family parks their larger rv up next to them cat has already left by this point and the crew hopes she'll soon come back for help but she gets distracted hanging out with a group of teenage boys it's my impression that this is supposed to be a fan service episode like if you were a 14 year old at home and you were into these girls seeing them in these situations was probably appealing if you get what i'm saying but the thing is i'm 24 and most of the actors in victorious were 16 in season 1 so to me these [ __ ] just look like toddlers and tiaras so i spent most of this episode either being bored or turning away from the screen because i found a lot of this stuff was just weird and hard to look at the next episode wi-fi in the sky is another bottle episode and is also incredibly boring tori and her friends have to write a script for a third theater class which is distinct and separate from the other two theater clashes she's in but because her plane is late flying into la she starts a video call so she can work on it while she's airborne but constant distractions intervene look i'm in a kaleidoscope oh how does she do that look now i'm a cherry pie i'm pie girl hi jinx ensue when we find out that perez hilton is on the plane and he then has a cameo in the episode were there really kids in 2010 who knew who perez hilton is i'm in the future and i had to google him and boy is this quite the wikipedia article on june 13th 2010 perez hilton posted an upskirt photo of a 17 year old miley cyrus to twitter and 44 days later he was on a nickelodeon sitcom what a fun time in the next episode we find out that beck has managed to be cast as a waiter in a movie starring melinda murray a famous actress he invites his friends at school to join his cena's extras but after melinda claims that beck got his line wrong tori points out that he actually got it right and she fires both of them from the movie for speaking back to her tory feels horrible about getting back fired from such a big movie and sneaks back in the next day to try and convince melinda to change her mind although she initially speaks to her stunt double by mistake so what's your name i'm 16. later and that's statutory rape joke number two as a reminder victoria justice was actually underage when they wrote and filmed this material so some convoluted setup here there's this crossbow dude on set who's supposed to shoot an arrow when he hears melinda yelled get out but when tory tries to talk to her she organically yells get out so the dude shoots the arrow and it goes right through her hand melinda has to go to the hospital and is recast in the film and the cast and crew throw a massive celebration for tori saying that they absolutely hated working with melinda and that tori is their new hero something something hospital something something ambivalent to this meanwhile in the b plot robbie begins having ongoing nightmares where rex is a giant looming over him torturing him in many ways to try and assist against this the school's guidance counselor gives the two couples counseling and eventually robbie feels like he's gained some emotional control over the puppet who seems to terrify him so much episode 11 is titled the great ping pong scam and features a mystery that tori tries to piece together throughout the narrative in the episode tori wants to hang out with the gang on a specific day but learns that they're all going to be taking part in ping pong club which is something that surprises her as they've never mentioned it before it just so happens that there really is a ping pong club at the school and that it consists of their friend group and no one else with the exception of tori of course who only joined the school recently she thus auditions for the club but despite beating everyone on the team she doesn't get on because jade is team captain thinking fast she seduces one of the students at the school into building a prop soda machine which she hides in during the club practice until the other students rattle it too much and it falls over confronting them with the evidence she's gathered the group decide to explain what's going on which they do via flashback two years ago which wow three words in and already this [ __ ] doesn't make sense you guys are in the 10th grade two years ago you went to a different school my god were they just not keeping a lore bible anyways so two years ago when they were also 10th graders i guess cat's family took her to a really fancy restaurant which the group also wanted to go to however it was extremely expensive making it unlikely that they could get in however someone in the group quickly formulated an idea sports programs at their school must be given a minimum amount of money for facilities and trips every single year and so they invite mr psykowitz to become their faculty advisor he initially wants nothing to do with the plan until they learn that the principal is under risk of being fired because the superintendent wants the school to have more sports trophies they thus expand their scam to go all the way to the top the principal will knowingly greenlight a club and sports team which he knows to be bunk he'll give them money every single year they'll use said money to buy a victory trophy to show off in the hallways and then psychowitz and the students will spend the rest of the money on fine dining and breathing tori promises not to tell as long as she's let into the club and they eventually all go out to dinner however in the middle of dining robbie suddenly orders a large bowl filled with caviar meaning that they end up going 600 over budget on the meal psychowicz sneaks out the back but as the restaurant's live entertainment has yet to arrive tori realizes that she can sing her way out of their troubles and so she does weirdly enough the biggest piece of information this episode ends up delivering is that all of tori's friends were already in a friend group before she transferred meaning that she was basically a really late arrival to a group of pals who had been vibing their whole lives together which kind of makes you realize exactly how little tori feels like she fits in this specific group of people like she doesn't necessarily feel like a very good friend to all of them but rather more like she's just in the same room as them and that feeling crosses over into our next episode which is easily the worst of the season season 1 episode 12 kat's new boyfriend in the story tori is surprised when hollywood arts is visited by daniel someone who tori dated at her old school before she suddenly broke up with him tori is then shocked to find out that he is there because he's dating cat which causes a bit of an awkward air as this information comes to light tori can help feeling strange at school with the situation playing out with things getting worse and worse until it all comes to a crescendo at the school dance when she triggers the school cheese fountain to spray hot liquid cheddar all over the dancing lovers you see this is what happens when you mix teenagers and hot cheese tori tries to find the couple later and apologize but while cat is in the bathroom cleaning up tori and daniel begin making out causing a dramatic situation when cat catches them in the act and immediately isn't this like a little bit too much look i'm used to these kinds of situations playing out in teen sitcoms disagreements between friends and wacky sitcom antics but i'm not used to the comedic relief character having her boyfriend cheat on her with the main character and the worst part is that they never really truly justify this tory says she's sorry and cat punches her in the nose but it never gets to the point where you truly believe that tori has changed as a person in her apology tori claims that she did what she did because she must still have feelings for daniel but in the actual text of the episode this isn't the impression left behind at all in every scene we're shown tori gives off total ambivalence towards daniel as a person not missing him at all or even being happy that he's at the school she only starts to show emotions when she sees that daniel and kat are happy together because she and daniel were never happy this is basically tori's ego playing out on a loudspeaker throughout the entire episode in one scene she's shown growing jealous because daniel enjoys cat's brownies noting that he never liked her brownies when they were dating i'm sure that's an innuendo somehow but the point is that her frustration with her ex dating cat doesn't lay in any repressed feelings for him but in the fact that she isn't the person being focused on she is the main attraction she's the main character so why aren't people acting like it and this is a theme we've seen time and time again on the show it's the reason she became obsessed with the fact that she was the only person not in the ping pong club and why she thought a good birth week present for her sister was a private concert where she's the center of attention and what makes these episodes frustrating is that clearly this was a purposeful part of tori's characterization it's arguably her most defining trait but for some reason having her recognize this fault out loud is just completely against the will of the writers so you have these episodes where tori is an absolutely horrible person then she shrugs says well i wish i knew why i did that and the credits roll and i think episode 13 is the first story that so clearly represents how this issue lies not only with the characters in the show but also the writers in the real world episode 13 is twice as long as all of the other episodes which means that it has twice the problems twice the weird moments and most importantly twice the insecurity that is the word to describe what this show suffers from victorious is an insecure show it is a program that from episode 1 was not confident in its own premise and the strange quirks of this story represent that so clearly the episode starts off with trina answering tori's phone while she's in the shower trina finds out the caller is a cute boy from school wanting to ask tori out on a date that friday but trina says that tori is busy and suggests he go with her instead when tori gets out of the shower and is told what happened the two get into a massive fight until their father says that neither of them are going to be going out as trina will be getting her wisdom teeth removed and will be in intense pain he adds that tori will be watching over her as both of their parents will be on vacation while trina is recovering now this is actually a funny episode for me because i actually had my wisdom teeth out i think about six or seven years ago and to me it's like it was yesterday one thing i remember really specifically is they put me on this gas you know obviously this is that's what they do they put me on this gas they hooked this thing up to my mouth and i remember being really worried about the logistics of of having to be fed this gas well also the surgery is like is like inside my mouth so i was like what if it doesn't work what if you know what if i run out and so i was just thinking about all that while they were feeding me this stuff and then it all kind of co it all goes gray and blurry and then i wake up right and i turn to the doctor and the very first thing i say to him is hey so when are we gonna do this you gotta get my wisdom teeth out i got a bun can you take my teeth out and so obviously they had already done it and it was just such a strong gas that i i didn't realize that the passage of time had happened i was that out of it and so they had to help me to my dad's car and the thing is i'm 6'4 so so that's not an easy task it's not a job for one person so one arm was this you know this dentist this doctor the other arm was my dad and they're just dragging me across the parking lot right and so dad drives me home i'm in the passenger seat i think we're on the road for like five minutes when suddenly i start to wake up a little and it hits me how there's a lot more blood in my mouth than there usually is the point is that when you get your wisdom teeth out it can be kind of a painful experience and you need someone to help look after you to make you soft food and to run to the pharmacy to pick up medication and get gauze you can cycle it out throughout the day and what you don't need is a concussion okay up the stairs this episode continues the ongoing theme of the writers designing characters you're supposed to hate and then having completely awful things happen to them all under the expectation that you're going to laugh because they're not the main character so the entire conceit of this episode's b plot is that trina is in intense pain the whole time and tori tries to force her to take medicine in a kind of three stooges routine but every single time it skirts out of the boundaries of physical comedy and into the arena of physical assault that isn't funny to watch this eventually leads to tori tying trina up with ropes and duct tape and then commenting that she didn't actually check to see if her sister was still alive what's made even worse is of course the detail that tori's parents have gone on vacation mysteriously the exact same weekend that trina was going to have this big operation with the implication of numerous scenes being that trina's parents secretly don't love her and hates spending time with her which you're supposed to laugh at of course something something golden child towards the end of the episode trina ends up becoming nearly animalistically territorial and reactive and it's supposed to be played like that's just who trina is but the obvious text that they present is that she wasn't like this until her sister waterboarded her and then tied her up with duct tape because she didn't want to take an antibiotic don't worry though tori's the good guy in the story you're told that's the case so you have to accept it at face value here's a quick fact about this sequence during this b-plot when trina ends up in a lot of pain tori calls her dentist and this exchange takes place call dr dodie okay pop quiz why is this notable enough to point out well as some of you might have jumped up from the couch to say dr doty is a cameo character who appeared in several similar nickelodeon sitcoms around this same time dr doty is apparently a surgeon a concussion expert a paramedic and now a dentist either meaning that he's one of the most talented doctors in the world or that he's so terrible that he keeps moving to new towns and taking up slightly different professions now you might be a little confused why i keep describing the trina storyline as the episode's b plot and that's because it is the b plot the a plot features the rest of the cast to go to an la karaoke bar while tori is busy with their sister there they get into a feud with a group of snooty mean girls who challenge them to a singing competition and this is one of the most important moments in the show so far the two rival girls go up on stage and decide to sing a ginger fox song you'll remember ginger fox as the character from icarly who is a mean-spirited britney spears parody and is designed to have absolutely no talent and so the song they sing here is supposed to be a terrible song within the universe and the two girls do a very bad job at singing it it is a purposefully bad performance of a purposefully bad song [Music] and after this jade and cat go on stage and wow i immediately was blown away by the song that these two girls sing and to put it lightly it is because it's the first song in the show so far that sounds like a real song someone would actually listen to [Music] and furthermore it's a weirdly sexualized musical number considering that these two were underage when they filmed it but the main hot take you go away from this with is that these two can sing like you can't imagine but around here is where i have a personal conspiracy theory that comes into play but to explain it i have to tell you about the rest of this storyline the competition ends and surprise surprise the two talentless girls are selected the winners and given the daily award when one of them calls the owner dad the other singers decry that this is nepotism and that he's only giving them the award because he wants to make his daughter feel special and i actually disagree i think he gives them the award every single night because he only has one and he has to make sure he gets it back every single night real quick i want to stop and read an excerpt from the victorious wiki page about this character personality haley seems to be a fan of ginger fox as she and her friend tara perform two songs by her number one and hate me love me it is unknown whether she really loves her father or just likes him because he always lets her win his karaoke competitions what the [ __ ] dude the group were banned from singing at the bar in the future and go home angry that they were delivered such a disservice however they come up with a plan and invite tori along for the ride the next night they challenged the girls saying that anyone in the bar could beat them in an honest competition and they allow them to pick any girl to sing against they happen to have tori dressed up in a potentially offensive disguise and they end up picking her and boom she takes it all off on stage to reveal that she's actually a good singer and is attractive if you're 17. and of course she wins the competition okay so here's where my personal conspiracy theory comes into play i think that this episode is specifically strategically designed to make sure that victoria justice and her cast members never compete in any way and are not even singing near each other in the same parts of the episode because if cat or jade sang against tori in an honest competition it would be so impossible to believe that tori was considered the most talented member of the group show me what is real if it breaks does it heal open up your ears [Music] i don't want to be mean but the difference between these two songs is night and day elizabeth and ariana sound like they have a natural talent for singing and victoria justice sounds like the studio got her a pretty good singing coach and so the only way that the writers or producers could have allowed a story like this to play out was if they introduced a third straw man group of performers a set of girls who sing badly on purpose just to make sure there's no risk of their future pop star looking bad in the episode the show lacks so much confidence about victoria justice actually being a potential star that they rig the competition so badly that the girls she sings against aren't even allowed to use their real singing voices and i wonder honestly if we'll ever get to a point where tori is put up against a real performer or if the show will continue to be too insecure to pull something like that off the next episode is season 1 episode 14 rex dies and boy you'll never guess what happens in this one while rehearsing for yet another play directed by mr psykowitz tori is put in charge of a wind machine that both sucks and blows robbie leaves rexon set for a moment only for tori to accidentally put the machine on suck when it should be blow leading to rex being pulled inside causing the class to react as if they've just seen one of their classmates die in front of their very own eyes tori tries to retrieve rex and oh [ __ ] sorry i know that rex is kind of racist and we've all agreed that we're not fond of him but i'm just so used to him being a cast member that i'm just shocked that they show him in this state his head broken open with one eye lazily dangling down by a strand of puppet cartilage it really does hit you the first time that you see it what i miss tori tried to murder rex as robbie and andre are in the play and have to go on stage everyone else in the gang agreed to take him to the hospital at the request of robbie once they're in the hallway however they regroup and argue over what they should actually do as they all concede that rex is simply a delusion of robbie that he hasn't let go of despite being 16. jade says that rex dying is the best thing that could happen to robbie as it would finally allow him to be a normal teenage boy and so they all plan a devious escapade they go to the hospital and explain to one of the doctors that they want him to hook rex up to a fake iv and then convince robbie that he's actually dead remember what i said in one of my last videos about these shows feeling like someone watched it's always sunny and didn't get the joke this episode is a great example everything in this story feels like something that the paddy's pub gang would get up to will you do something for me and that's statutory rape joke number three but no it turns out that the doctor doesn't want that kind of we discover he has a son who is kind of a loser and he wants tori to go on a date with him in order to help his self-esteem when she sees a photo of him she reels but agrees to do it in order to help robbie meanwhile kat is speaking to a receptionist and accidentally leads her to believe that she is mentally deranged causing her to be locked up in a white room with foam boxes to help stop her from hurting herself she's also put in what appears to be booty scrubs because of course she is they never resolve this storyline moving on robbie soon finishes the play and heads to the hospital and beck retrieves the doctor i was trying to stop that man from choking yeah this is really important again i can't just not point out how much this reads like always sunny to me couldn't you just see this being a charlie episode like charlie gets addicted to a puppet so dennis kills it and they convince the doctor to do a fake death scene actively stopping him from saving people who are dying but in this show the characters aren't the bad guys and their egotism is portrayed as a justified aspect of the universe because they're just that cool they do the fake scene rex flatlines and robbie breaks down sobbing in what is an amazingly good performance that really sells you on the tragedy but tori realizing how much rex means to him turns the machine back on announcing that rex is still alive the group are hesitant but they eventually accept that this puppet is far from gone that's it the credits rule they never explain how he fixes the damned thing a wizard did it the more that we see rex expanded on as a character the more i eagerly hope and anticipate a potential episode where they directly imply that something weird is going on here all i want is an episode where someone for a split second wonders if rex is really alive i don't care if that means rex does something and no one can figure out how or if someone starts hearing rex themselves in their own head but i just want the show to get a little bit creative with this a great example of what i want is how eddie and eddie treated plank for those of you who missed out on that show flank was a piece of wood that one of the cul-de-sac kids thought was alive and while plank was never spoken to by anyone else he apparently would retain memories so if the edge stole plank and then did something to him plank would tell johnny about it and i think that kind of energy is what the robbie rex dynamic is desperately missing episode 15 starts once again in mr psykowitz's theater class with him asking the main clique to stay after the bell to talk to him there he explains that he has an old friend from school who has become extremely rich and has a young son who is having a birthday party soon his friend had hired a famous children's band for the event called the wooga waffles who i'm pretty sure are supposed to be the wiggles but this party plan has sadly literally gone south as their airplane has crashed into the side of a mountain on the way there apparently the wagofafl's private jet crashed i'm not making this up there is a running gag in this episode that the wiggles have died in the exact same way that buddy holly did and the way they describe it i'm pretty sure that's supposed to be the joke i heard the wag of waffles airplane fell on a mountain anyways his rich friend needs a brand new band for his toddler party and he suggests the group try and take the opportunity they say they aren't interested until psykowitz says that they're going to be paid 1 000 which holy [ __ ] that's a bad deal why do they not recognize that that isn't a good deal are they stupid can they not do basic math you're each getting paid 142 dollars if it's not something you want to do the money really isn't worth it anyways unable to find a calculator they decide to take the gig and they each struggle with writing children's music in their own style it's fun to run it's fun to play it's fun to make things out of clay it's fun to fill your car with gas it's fun to break things made of glass this character really is charlie in every conceivable way there is a spider spider spider steep in my soul so in the middle of their brainstorming session andre gets a call from a record producer who has been trying to sign him up to a label and he learns that things are looking good and he's likely to get signed soon enough the birthday party comes and the gang prepare to go on stage as psychowitz realizes that they haven't picked a name and makes one up on the spot the diddly bops oh come on that's not even subtle someone working on these shows had a bone to pick i'm telling you so the hollywood art 7 come out dress this different food and sing a childish song about how cheese is great because cheese goes on all kinds of food do you know what's interesting this episode was actually produced far earlier in the season than it was aired which means that not only is this the first time that ariana grande was allowed to sing in the same room as victoria justice this was the first time that they let her sing at all and it was all for a doodle bop's parody about cheese the song goes over very well but part way through one of the kids begins filming the performance and we later learn that this recording has been uploaded to splashface and several other social media sites and that it's gone hyper viral with the kindergarten aged audience this is frustrating to the cast who have been trying to become famous basically for the entire show's run but now are known only by an age group who watches nick jr the exception to this is cat who absolutely loves being in the band and forms a new group and keeps touring without the rest leading to a group of five-year-olds noticing the changing cast and forming a violent mob to make matters worse andre learns from his record producer that the label has passed on signing him exclusively because the embarrassing video popped up in a background search despondent andre begins skipping class becoming addicted to chocolate milk and trying to sulk through his emotions however in a stroke of genius inspired by tori andre begins changing his song anti-weird-owling his own material until a love song comes into being inspired tori and andre invite the producer and the head of his record label to hear his song live and the performance goes over amazingly well one thing i've noticed about victoria justice is that sometimes she doesn't know what to do during a musical performance and she's certainly not very good at lip syncing so instead she'll start doing what i like to call the broken neck dance like whoa whoa tori whoa tori whoa do you have a do you have a spinal injury or something anyways i'm gonna return to that list of things that exist in this universe and i'm just gonna jot down the wiggles are dead okay so i have two more additional things i want to bring up now that we're at the end of this episode first of all i want to highlight a comment that i found on the victorious wiki page for this story i feel bad for andre in this episode when i first saw this episode i was hoping that the gang would find out who recorded them performing as the diddly bops and i was annoyed that didn't happen and i have to agree with tori andre robbie beck and jade that being the diddly bops is not fun you can clearly tell they didn't want to be on it and andre almost got his life ruined because of it kat and trina are stupid for wanting to join the deadly bops this episode is still decent to watch though because the ending song song to you is an awesome the song broken glass is also pretty fun despite having dark lyrics to it so what i love about this comment is the implication that the way this episode should have ended is that the gang find the five-year-old who recorded them singing and they get revenge and they go out and they find this kindergartener out on the street and they go it was you you did this and they start like curb stomping him they take his lunch money they spit in his eyes that's what you get [ __ ] that's what you get for like a [ __ ] song and there's like toddler blood all over their clothes but they're not stopping they just keep going and this whole time the loudest laugh track you have ever heard has just been blaring but the more notable thing to me is the way that this episode actually does end in the story as we've set up the record producer and the owner of the record label come to see andre's live song and they love it they absolutely love his song and he finishes the song and it fades to black why is this notable why is that something that i feel like i want to point out well to put it bluntly it's because this is the kind of vague non-ending that the show seems to consistently reach towards you see while icarly and victorious do share the common trait that they are both fame bait they are different in a lot of ways most notably that icarly is a semi-serialized show about teenagers becoming famous and victorious is an episodic show about teenagers who will become famous you know later and what this means is that andre can't have the happy ending implied here because if he or anyone else gets signed to a record label that's it the show's over and furthermore you'll take note that throughout the show so far we haven't really seen any development of any kind characters haven't learned any lessons they haven't grown from their experiences and the show has even abandoned the pretense of having any sort of romantic ships or love triangles the most you can say about these characters at this point is that they're definitely more concentrated versions of the exact same characters we saw in the pilot episode and furthermore i've done some math and i've checked the wiki and it seems to me that the characters in this show don't age because they're sophomores in the pilot episode and trina is one year older and the show lasted four seasons and three years so yeah i i guess they don't age and that's weird because the show is so overtly set in the same universe as icarly a show where the characters do age and they do develop over time season one carly sam and freddy are different characters than season six carly sam and freddy because again it's semi-serialized and i'm willing to bet that the versions of the eight leads that we see in the finale are going to be almost exactly the same as the eight leads that we know to exist right now which makes me kind of question if analyzing this show episode by episode has actually been a mistake because i don't think we're going to see a lot of story lines or overarching continuity by the end yeah but it's fun right i'm having a good time anyways let's move on to season 1 episode 16 rockstar this one is racist in the episode jade wants to put on a play that she's written about a girl who falls into a well and dies although we initially are led to believe that the story is nothing more than edgy nonsense we eventually come to realize that it's actually a deeply personal story that jade has written about her troubled relationship with her emotionless and unloving father however the school rejects the script meaning that she has no platform to make the play happen unless she finds external funding somewhere else tori accidentally offers to rey said money and when mentioning it to the owner of a local chinese restaurant they're surprised when she suddenly offers to put up the money herself because i love acting in theater and maybe one day if you kids get famous you'll end up on my wall of celebrities long story short it turns out that she wants to make massive changes to the play including casting her talentless daughter as a fairy character jade laments that her father will be seeing the show and that it's her only chance to prove that her art has value to him and so tori comes up with a scheme for them to do the play straight but only for the night that her father comes to the performance while trina and andre distract miss lee at the chinese restaurant the audience absolutely loves her play and afterwards oh [ __ ] is that josh peck post pax josh peck anyways her dad says it's brilliant and jade finally acts like tori is her friend who has done something truly kind for her it's too bad these characters are incapable of retaining memories episode 17 is a parody of a trend in the 2010s that we've talked about a lot on this channel the sudden emergence of sensational reality shows done exclusively to punish american writers for striking a few years before in the story a new reality show comes to hollywood arts to film new material and afterwards the entire school ends up auditioning during beck's audition one of the assistants on the show suddenly blurts out are you dating anyone and that's statutory rape joke number god what are we on now four tori jade andre and beck are picked as the best fit for the presentation and are soon followed around by the crew at all times in one memorable sequence at the beginning of filming tori begins doing a black voice to the camera before being asked to speak normally she notes that she was simply using her urban voice causing the only black person in the scene to say that she isn't doing a very good job she then develops the hiccups explaining oh man why do i always get the hiccups when i talk urbane i just want us all to agree at this point in the presentation that while black and urban are not synonyms and you can be black without being from an urban community and you can be from an urban community without being black in this show specifically when the writers use the word urban we all know what they mean the game managed to obtain the pilot episode for the reality show but are shocked when two different phone calls one taken a day and one at night are cut together to imply that beck and tory are having an affair causing jade to nearly kill tory the producers admit that they're just trying to use the footage to tell an interesting story even if it's not a very true one and after the four realize that all they have to do to appear on tv is act crazy they begin staging fake fights and drama all around school meanwhile in the b plot trina is so distraught with not being selected for the show that she starts a fight outside of the school's food truck which their lunchroom is a food truck by the way which is the most theater school thing i've ever heard of and anyways they accidentally dragged the dude out of his food truck and he sent to the hospital later in the office of the school's recurring guidance counselor the two continue to fight causing him to aggressively spray lotion on both of them especially trina which uh man i wish i could remember the name of the guy that made these shows people warned me that this show was going to be filled with weird innuendos but i think this is easily the worst one so far anyways as punishment the two are put in charge of running the school's food truck robbie continues to yell no i'm not andy samberg at the customers which made sense at the time trina deep fries rex's foot the rest of the segment is boring back in the a plot tori and jade are finally getting along in trying to think of crazy things to do on camera to make it seem like they aren't getting along eventually they come up with an idea tori notes that they should start a fake beef with the school's gender who is actually very nice as she notes that he gave all of the girls chocolate mops for valentine's day jade says that she never got a mop causing tori to realize that she was the only person to get a gift on valentine's day from this member of the school faculty leading to her bragging that she must be liked the most and i guess that's a statutory rape joke number five anyways jade has a friend drop a junker car off in the parking lot so they can trash it and say on camera that it's the janitor's car that they're destroying however part way through this it turns out the car they're trashing actually belongs to the injured food truck driver the school's guidance counselor enraged by what's happened kicks the film crew off of the school the camera crew decide to scrap all of the material they film so far and tori and jade are forced to carry the food truck worker home in a wheelbarrow as they sing a song for their personal pleasure the second time that jade has been allowed to sing with tori and once again entirely as a joke season 1 episode 18 starts off in the fourth theater class that these kids are in i'm sorry does this school even have core curriculums because every time we see a new class or a new teacher it's another theater class there is no way that you can go to this school and have any college take you seriously anyways they're in their fourth theater class when they end up meeting dale squires known in universe as a famous director who has recently exploded on the scene dale is in between projects and wants to do a film with a group of inventive students and he's picked this class because he was a former student of the teacher this teacher specifically has no name and seems to only appear in this episode which means that the victorious wiki just pretends he doesn't exist i'm serious this character has a good handful of encounters with people in this episode but absolutely no page references his existence i find this to be an oddly intriguing element of fan wiki culture there's this obsessive dedication to archiving every detail of every fact up to the point where a character doesn't have a name so you don't know what to call the article anyways beck has an old play that he did the semester before which they decide to recycle for the feature however when they start filming dale completely blows off the creative process goofing off and acting like a child while everyone else does the hard work later when the project comes out and is acclaimed the group discover that dale has only put his name on the project basically cutting them out of any credit for their ideas and hard work meanwhile in a boy-centric b plot robbie asked beck to help him work on a car which he recently inherited robbie refers to the car as an it causing beck to correct him saying that all cars are girls there she is oh right cars are called she not just cars not just cars also boats airplanes my uncle barbara becca's transphobic the storyline goes on from there robbie gets blasted by a hose beck laughs there's some cheerleaders it's a b plot who cares so the a plot gang figure out that dale is going to be talking on a national talk show and plot to get revenge on him they pay andre's cousin to interrupt the show and orchestrate a plan that they've come up with although we never actually see them describing the plan to her however when dale is asked about the viral short he made he admits that he barely had anything to do with it and credits all of the leads directly by name giving special credit to tori as the film's true director however they failed to convince andre's cousin to abort the plan leading to her storming on stage accusing dale of being her ex as she begins violently assaulting him in what is again apparently a caricatured illustration of what women of color look like to the showrunners several people are knocked out in this torrent of fists including security guards and dale is placed in a situation that could lead to him going to the hospital and all because of the actions of the main characters say it with me now they're ambivalent to this and finally let's move on to the season one finale sleep over at psykowitz this episode is simple enough psykowitz is teaching a class on method acting but grows frustrated when tory continues to break character when distracted sulking after the bell rings the gang apologized for not taking method acting seriously at which point he says that it's understandable as they are just children and are simply amateurs the students of course react negatively to this and eventually psykowitz suggests they join in on a dare they will all go over to his house that saturday and will spend the night in character whoever lasts the longest will prove him wrong and anyone who breaks will be banished rex makes a joke that he wants torrey to play a character who's in love with short puppets and she in turn gives him a long passionate kiss causing him to awkwardly ask to be taken home this show has such brilliant subterfuge just when you start to wonder why a middle-aged teacher is so obsessed with getting a bunch of teenagers to come to his home on a weekend something even weirder happens and you forget to think about it after school the gang end up assigning each other the roles that they will play while at the party and this is where things start to fall apart instead of the parts being things you'd actually want to do a method performance for the roles are all just really lame jokes that each kid has thought of so for instance tori's joke is that she's a cop who's really into raisin bran robbie is a motivational speaker who has wobbly legs and sometimes falls over amid speech and andre is a man who just ran a marathon and is also pregnant which was really funny 10 years ago i imagine and the rest of the episode is basically just these kids all repeating the exact same one sentence joke over and over and over again i'm pregnant i just ran 26 miles can i please get some water i'm so tired and pregnant i gotta sit down i think i'm gonna have a baby why did i just run that marathon at least you're not pregnant and exhausted from running a marathon i'm sorry this isn't andre i'm a pregnant marathon runner oh why did i run that marathon while i was pregnant one by one each of the kids are eliminated robbie breaks character when psychowitz falls through a window in his house and then cat breaks character on purpose to go on a date with a ken doll who lives with psykowitz which annoys tori because it's a boy she wanted to go on a date with as well don't you think i was gonna let that boy eat my raisin bran when you watch enough of this show everything sounds like an innuendo i can see your belly button why yes that is my belly button have you ever considered filling it with raisin bread andre is suddenly visited and dragged away by his paranoid grandmother who is extremely delusional and violent because of course she is jade burns her hand on a tray giving her third degree burns as she runs outside and breaks a car window in anger and finally it's just the final two kids as psykowitz gives up and decides to go to bed the next day as tori and beck wake up beck breaks character causing tori to celebrate that she has won the competition i am a police officer and i am victorious ah they said it okay go home everyone okay so now that we've digested each and every episode of victorious season one it's time for us to generally analyze everything we've learned as we slowly work our way back towards the conspiracy board whenever i would watch one of these episodes upon reflecting on them later i would always find that my first thoughts were never about the characters or the jokes that they would make but instead the setting this school where victorious takes place which i find to be fascinatingly absurd the core defining aspect of this show is that it's essentially advanced fantasy material trying to get you to envy the lives of this group of rich kids going to an expensive private school in la this is a life that you are supposed to wish that you were living which means that the school itself is presented in an extremely careful way i paid very very close attention to all of the schedules and classes mentioned by students in this show for one specific reason i wanted to know if any of these kids take real classes art high schools exist they are real but if you go to one you're still gonna have a science teacher you're still gonna have a math teacher because there are still required core curriculums i'd say the closest we get for the most part is there's an episode where some of the characters mention that they're trying to get out of a gym class the school apparently has a gym class but there are alternative courses you can take which count as gym credits so some of the characters in the show are taking a dance class and two of the characters in the show end up taking a ballerina class but as far as i can tell outside of that there's only one character in this show so far who is illustrated taking a real non-theater class because in season 1 episode 6 we see robbie in what is very clearly a real history class being taught by this teacher right here you look around this room you see they're learning about abraham lincoln and there's like real history stuff on the walls it seems like a real history class however this is actively contradicted in the previous episode where we see an entirely different class discussing the history of theater with the same teacher that robbie is also in and so my personal theory about this at the moment is that these are probably two different periods of two different classes both taught by the same teacher which was really really common where i went to high school you know like it was it was like you know period one you got mr roof ap literature period two you got film studies with mr roof period three you got yearbook with mr roof i mean i mean my god i couldn't get enough of them i just imagine that like you know robbie could really like this teacher and took two different history classes with them um but it's also entirely possible that this is a production continuity error it's very very likely that in the script itself these two classes were intended to be the exact same class and then people just got confused when they were filming it because when you watch the scene that i think is a real history class the thing that they're talking about is then at 10 p.m president lincoln was watching the play at ford's theater booth quietly slipped into lincoln's box pulled out a derringer and shouted i'm gonna kill you oh no the assassination of abraham lincoln so you could conject that the lesson they're learning here isn't supposed to relate to the history of the united states but in fact the history of theater heckling however even if we do end up considering these to be two different classes to me the most important aspect is that robbie is the only person taking the real history class now what this implies to me is the very horrifying revelation that every single core curriculum at this school can be replaced with a theater class which by the way remember that running joke i've been doing where i've been counting all the theater classes these kids take and it's four i actually forgot about this class so it's actually five so far there are five theater classes that these kids take in this school once again pretty clearly the whole concept behind presenting the school this way is to make something that children at home can fantasize about attending but as an adult i only kind of feel bad for these kids because statistically speaking most of the kids who go to this school will not make it in the industry not only are they not going to be famous but a whole lot of them aren't even going to work behind the scenes in any capacity they're going to end up getting really normal jobs and live really normal lives and i feel like going to a high school that didn't teach in math didn't teach you science didn't teach english that's going to make it a harder to get into a good college and b harder to be a functioning adult because you know that kid in class that would be like um excuse me when are we going to use this they were only right about sixty percent of the time but as i say all of this keep in mind i'm only done with season one and we have three more seasons to go so it's very possible that down the line there's going to be an episode where one of these kids has a math class one of these kids is a science class and you know my whole theory here is going to be exponentially disproven anyways let's now move on to the topic of the characters who actually appear inside of the school i want to start the section off paradoxically by talking about some of the characters who get the least amount of screen time in the show because in a shocking twist the secondary cast ends up being equally as important as the main cast in several of these episodes the secondary cast mind you is for the most part just the same joke repeated over and over and over again but the thing is that's also how you can describe everyone on the board right now so by the end of the season despite the fact that these nine end up getting the most amount of screen time i can tell you as much information about sinjin as i can andre so yeah let's get into this starting us off is trina and tori's parents i was very surprised that these guys ended up being in a good handful of season one episodes i think watching icarly you know icarly had such a bad track record for um stopping their secondary actors from being stolen by disney channel so it was like really common on icarly for a character to be introduced who is clearly supposed to be a recurring bit only for them to disappear and then six months later that actors got a disney channel show so i got used to characters showing up that seem like they're important and then they just disappear and it's never mentioned again so so you know when i was watching the pilot episode and tori and trina got parents that barely have any lines i was like we're never seeing these bozos again tori and trina ain't got parents they're gonna be raising themselves because we're never seeing these guys again and i was wrong they're like constantly in the show the most consistent joke with these two is that they secretly don't love trina and will do anything not to be around her they often end up being thrown into the antics of the main characters which can make them kind of worry because the the main cast is they're kind of weird for instance in the finale there's this bee plot where the two are having an anniversary sex night but every kid that's kicked out of psycho witch's party continues to burgeon interrupting them and as they watch the film terms of endearment all of the teenagers think that the film is a comedy as they laugh at the idea of the lead character dying on screen the two adults disturbed by this turn in for the night staring back at the scene playing out before them so in other words straight men personas prone to comedic banter who also probably in future episodes just as likely to screw things up as their two kids also tori's dad is a cop in los angeles so he probably sucks next we have the previously mentioned sinjin sinjin is basically this show's version of gibby he is the socially awkward underdeveloped kid prone to saying and doing very weird things the first time we see senjin is in episode 2 when tori is trying to figure out how she wants to decorate her locker he explains to her that his locker is constructed out of food that he's chewed spit out and then covered in resin she runs away convinced he's a serial killer and for a time that's his core joke sinjin will go up to a female character he will say something weird or perverted and then they will act discomforted and that is basically like his first few episodes in the show however i feel like by the middle of the first season the writers get kind of tired of this running joke and so sinjian instead becomes this kind of weird socially awkward quiet kid who is prone to misfortune like he gets robbed by a bunch of northridge girls in one episode and there's an episode where cat starts dating him only for the purpose of stealing his credit card in episode 17 sinjin drowns and the main characters all gather around him and find that they can't wake him up and they decide to respond to this by leaving that is sinjin to me that is the way i would describe his role in the show he is the character that the main leads think so little of that they can watch him die and they walk away without even calling an ambulance i have kind of a soft spot for shinji wow get in the robot shenzhen i have kind of a soft spot for shinjin because um he's the only character in the show that looks like someone i would have hanged out with in high school and like i feel like shinjin is the only character in the show he would be a real theater kid and he would out act every [ __ ] in this school and next we have lane alexander the school guidance counselor we are scraping at the bottom of the barrel at this point lane alexander is supposed to be like the school therapist that's his bit the characters in the show will have troubles of some kind and they'll go to his office and he'll typically give them guidance or therapy or whatever the thing about this character is if you were watching the show casually i wouldn't blame you if you thought this guy was the principal because he does a bunch of stuff that you'd think the principal would do like he's the guy who invites the reality show to film at the school and gives them a a tour guide of the school and then of course we have psychowitz who is borderline the ninth main character in many many ways psykowitz is the first of the known five theater classes that the main cast i'll attend and from what i can tell i believe he is like an improv theater class because for the most part that's what they end up doing in his class in every single episode a huge focus is put on his very bizarre teaching style which passes on to his students the fundamentals of theater in universe out of universe he's completely bonkers he doesn't know what he's talking about a long-running joke is that despite being old psykowitz has an intense investment and obsession with the lives and drama of all of the students in his class but most specifically of course the main cast in fact one thing i took note of very very quickly is that you almost never see psykowitz directly teaching any of the students except for the ones in the center of the board he doesn't really care about anyone else in the class except for you know the main seven one of the favored jokes that the writers continue to do with this character is implying something odd about his life and then refusing to explain it any further in the school dance episode he's serving a specific kind of hot dog and when he's asked what's in the meat he begins laughing hysterically later in the season finale he tells the students not to look under a certain drawer in his bathroom which is also never explained and in episode 15 he's shown making his own butter out of cream something that he says he does quite often when he's asked how it tastes he says he doesn't know because he doesn't eat dairy he also at one point casually states that he was once acquainted with crispin glover and it's basically implied that the two were once lovers before he trails off and fails to finish the thought you get the idea it's just kind of odd fragments of his life and personality which rarely match up that are supposed to be funny but are never explained alongside the occasional implication that psykowitz suffers from mental health issues and that's him that's psychowitz i'm sure as the show goes on we'll learn a bunch of other completely useless information about him and with all the side characters out of the way it is finally time to properly talk about the hollywood eight i've said this before but i just want to reiterate it again you know for the record i think some of the best characters in this show are andre robbie and beck which is kind of weird because i mean when you remove rex from the situation these three characters have half a personality between them there's a scene this season where andre goes in to interview for that reality show in the reality show episode and he goes in and they say hey tell us about yourself andre and he says and i quote i'm andre i like music i dislike brussels sprouts and that's all he says and you know what i'm standing here right now and i'm going to tell you i can't think of anything else to say about him either if the writers couldn't think of anything else that's andre man that's andre andre likes music and he dislikes brussels sprouts that's all they give him but i think the reason that i still end up appreciating these three guys is that they all like each other they're all friends they sit together at lunch and they love and support one another and there's not a lot going on there but they're chill to be around and you appreciate that and this is going to sound really sexist to just say out loud but i'm not lying i swear to god it is a lot harder to appreciate the women in the show because they all [ __ ] hate each other and they're not fun to be around because they're just mean to each other i mean i mean we're not even going to talk about trina because literally no one in the show likes trina but looking at the three main women in the show i mean trina hates jade jade hates trina and kat oh god poor cat i'm not lying when i say this i think that cat performance wise the best performance in the show is cat because she's really funny and she's really wholesome and sweet and you grow to love this character that ariana grande has constructed and i didn't expect that i was going to say that going into this but i'm very happy that i am saying it because i didn't feel like getting a bunch of death threats this week but the thing about cat is you feel really bad for her because like people are so mean to her like there's scenes in season one where jade threatens to kill cat to her face and meanwhile you got tori over here right you got tori over here making out with cat's boyfriend okay and did you just get this feeling this mood whenever she's hanging out with the gang that the moment she leaves everyone is starts talking [ __ ] about her everyone's like she's weird right and you feel bad because cat is great and she's just a nice person and she doesn't deserve that you know moving on to some of the other characters let's talk about jade originally i had a lot of not nice things to say about jade i'll be honest with you and i think it's partially that i went to school with a lot of people that remind me of jade and it's not a girl thing most of the people that remind me of jade from my high school experience were guys but um i realized i was thinking about it this morning actually and i was like why don't i like jade and i realized it's only because she's mean to cat right like trina deserves it sometimes but cat doesn't deserve that you know and i think jade is one of those characters where if they start writing her better i could see her becoming one of my favorites by the end which is one of the reasons i want to pull back on saying too many mean things about her at this point because we do have a wiles to go on this but speaking of jokes that are kind of mean and not very funny i wanted to mention real quick there's this running joke in season one with beck where beck will occasionally just flat out say that he doesn't love jade and he wishes he wasn't dating her and then he'll be like i'm joking though he's like he'll literally go like i hate my girlfriend just kidding but it happens so often that you're like he's not joking and that's not really funny as i've talked about tori can be kind of a cruel self-centered person but despite the fact that that's one of her core defining characteristics there's this weird unspoken rule that no one in the show can tell her that she acts like this basically anything that you can say about trina you can say about tori and vice versa and this brings us back around to a thesis statement which i introduced several videos ago these shows for the most part feel like someone watched an anti-sitcom you know like always sunny or the such and they didn't get the point the reason that most of these tropes work in anti-sitcom contexts is that in most anti-sitcoms the characters aren't allowed to win it's always sunny in philadelphia is still enjoyable to watch despite the characters being awful because it's gratifying to see these characters continue to spin out and be stuck in the same awful jobs and lives that they've been in since their early 20s arrested development is ultimately about the financial downfall of a bunch of snobbish rich idiots and seinfeld literally ends with all of the characters in jail and meanwhile this show is about a bunch of hot if you're 17 popular kids they're rich they go to a private art school they get to hang out with famous people the show is called victorious so yes it is a show about them winning so the fact that they're all horrible people is not a point of subversive expression it's just really lazy writing done by people who are really really mean and now that we've identified the core problem that makes this show bad we get to watch three more seasons of it look at this point it's completely understandable if some of you guys are actually starting to miss talking about icarly and i actually saw this coming because in my last video there was one episode of the show that i decided not to talk about there and it's because i was saving it for this video and that is season four episode 10 i party with victorious the official icarly victorious crossover which received 7 million views and if you consider it to be an episode of victorious then it is the most viewed piece of media in the victorious franchise but let it be said talking about this crossover isn't going to be an easy feat i mean there are some episodes of these shows where you find out that you have three sentences to say and that's it this is not one of those episodes first of all this crossover is long usually when victorious or icarly did an extended episode it would be the length of two regular stories in this case the episode is the length of four the full extended edit of this story is one hour and 25 minutes nearly being the length of a full feature and incidentally there is a big difference between the non-extended and the extended edits of this episode and sadly i could only find an off-air copy of the longer cut so if you end up noticing the quality here is inconsistent and sometimes there's this little logo in the corner that's why so at the start of the story carly freddy and sam come home to the shea household to find that spencer is precariously balancing a series of radios in place having found them all at a junkyard and wanting to glue them together carly they all begin to take notice is much more happy and vibrant than normal which freddy and sam diagnosed to be the effect of her most recent relationship which apparently has been her longest so far as they've been going out for nearly 100 days the next day at school carly is given a surprise visit by stephen who was supposed to be flying to la to visit his father but first stopped by the school to give carly a gift during the scene were delivered a painful amount of exposition which is mostly directed at mr howard as carly gleefully explains every detail of her boyfriend's life to him and he excitedly listens despite this being out of character for both of them his parents are divorced but they maintain a healthy friendship really steven has to rush off to catch his flight but first is reminded by carly of their upcoming 100-day kiss something which mr howard has never heard of how can you have never heard of the 100-day kiss thing and yeah the kids in this episode act like this is something everyone their age knows about but no way dude this is some jonas brothers purity ring [ __ ] i refuse to believe this was a real thing after just these few clips you might start to catch on that this episode has kind of a floaty fan fiction writing style where no one says stuff that sounds like real sentences and everyone feels a little bit out of character and weirdly enough that's something that you're gonna have to get used to but only in the scene set in seattle shortly afterwards across the country in la we check in on tori vega who is watching the icarly webcast with her boyfriend and what hi icarly you've never heard of it no why yes as we learn carly's boyfriend steven is by coincidence also the boyfriend of tory and we quickly piece together that he has been dating two sitcoms stars for nearly a completely equal amount of time we've been going out for over three months we're coming up on our 100-day kiss boys only want one thing the kiss you specifically get on day 100 of dating a girl anyways the next day at school the victorious gang are all hanging out when andre approaches them with some big news his real estate uncle in the area has recently sold a house to keenan thompson of snl and all that fame and andre was even able to hang out with him for several hours after the sale went down i knew a guy whose dad bought a house they found a dead woman in one of the closets she was blonde it's really weird that all of the victorious characters in this episode feel completely on point and natural but all of the icarly characters just feel off in a way that makes it feel like fan fiction it's like the writer of this crossover had been away from icarly for so long that he completely forgot how these characters are supposed to sound we find out that andre jokingly suggested he throw a party at the house and keenan said he could as it would be a few weeks before he'd be ready to start moving in meaning that andre is now going to be able to throw a small party at keenan thompson's house with all of his friends steven visits tori in the middle of lunch to say hi but is befuddled when robbie takes a photo of him and uploads it to his collagia friends on the slab.com back over in icarly land carly is trying to look up stephen online and accidentally comes across the photo of him and tori she looks like that shelby mark's chick you fought carly begins to fret over the possibility of her dreamboat being a cheater and freddie uses theslap.com to ogle at photos of victoria justice truly the true intention of the website oh she is smoking her spencer enters the room and is told that stephen is cheating on carly with someone freddie describes as quite some girl causing spencer to look for himself let me see this girl [Music] that is quiet and that statutory rape joke number six spencer complains that his back hurts from spending so much time holding his sculpture in place and he notes that he needs someone to come and rub ointment all over his back and body the main three turn him down so he turns to the only person he knows will be interested hey gibby i know this is bending the rules but i'm gonna have to call that statutory rape joke number seven well at least the victorious side of the episode is just as tasteful as it normally is ah jade you're a sour taste aren't you tori and beck are in theater class acting out a scene where they're supposed to be scared but psykowitz says that their acting is terrible causing them to say that it's because they've never experienced true terror before cat comes in shortly after with a note from her doctor explaining that she has a vocal injury and thus cannot speak or else she may never sing again i bet you money there's like an open mic later and the writers just needed a really good excuse to make sure ariana grande didn't sing anyways then this happens this is a lovely color by the way like a red velvet cupcake my god will this episode stop being [ __ ] weird with the minor [ __ ] for five minutes andre continues to plan for his secret small party at keenan thompson's house but a wrench is thrown in when rex openly tweets about the party claiming that it's an open invite andre tries to confront robbie about this but grows frustrated when robbie continues to act like he and rex are different people you're a nut he's really mad but he's got beautiful skin one scene later incidentally sam is doing some snooping on theslap.com and comes across the profile of rex commenting some kid named rex whose profile pick for some reason shows an urban puppet i'm including this moment just to remind you guys i'm not crazy rex is supposed to be black anyway sam discovers the open invite to the party at keenan's house and she suggests they all sneak over to try and do some snooping the gang stopped by an ex-girlfriend of spencer's in the la area who is an expert in special effects makeup there she applies prosthetics that make them all look like different variations of mac's headroom as the icarly webcast is now so popular that they need to do this if they are to go unrecognized in a crowd so the party happens and it's coursing with hundreds of people as andre runs around trying to keep things under control and catch a panda bear which has been hitting people in the butt yeah this is a whole running joke where this panda bear is running around and hitting people in the butt and i read online that this bear is played by the guy that played boogie and i'm just gonna guess that they couldn't think of a role for him but he really wanted to meet keenan thompson meanwhile psykowitz appears at the party and scares tori so much that she pisses herself something she repeatedly confirms this is apparently his goal as he is trying to show the kids true fear so that they can draw from the emotion as actors in the future beck is unfazed as we learn that very few things actually scare him after this beck and jade leave to change clothes as they've brought bathing suits to hang out in a jacuzzi psychowitz hears this and excitedly follows because yeah that's normal oh also trina has to babysit some kids this night and didn't want to miss the party so she drags them around on a leash this episode has z plots robbie knocks down some soda on to the dj's laptop at the party frying it instantly and when a freestyle session is suggested to replace the music robbie performs a song which is instantly hated by the crowd during this section incidentally kat has been using a text-to-speech program which has been her sole tool of communication while she has laryngitis or whatever after robbie is knocked out by a potted plant rex takes the mic instead and drops a rap that goes over extremely well try and test my skills man who you be look dope wrap up in the dictionary and you'll see a picture of me this is truly [ __ ] awful if you told me that a writer who in 2007 had a running joke on this same show that rap is terrible and is hated by everyone would then go on to try and write rap lyrics four years later this is exactly what i would imagine your flow is just bad so i want to help you so look here's your homework go read my rhyme book spencer tries to use the jacuzzi at the party to cure his back pains but he's surprised by psykowitz who jumps out of the water at him psykowitz's plan was apparently to linger under a teenage boy and a teenage girl wearing bathing suits and to then lunge out at them from below this show is weird jaden beck come in and psykowitz indeed does his plan and boy it wasn't less weird to see it happen in real time carly finds steven and is pretty clearly able to tell that he has a relationship with tori something which deeply wounds and offends her later after de-prostheticizing and deprocessing carly realizes that sam was right all along and begins to cry freddy plans to go beat the [ __ ] out of stephen but is reminded that he's an in-universe wimp and despite being played by an actor who's more ripped than photos of the pope he would lose in any physical fight meanwhile gibby is trying to find a fake mole he lost at the party and is recognized by a fan of the web show causing him to knock the person in question out and hide them in another room meanwhile meanwhile the kids that trina brought to the party get lost and end up in the hot tub where all of the other characters are hanging out in bathing suits there's an alternate take of this scene in the extended edit where it's exactly the same but everyone is holding half-eaten corn dogs which yeah that's subtle trina ends up eventually running into lane who found the kids sleeping outside of a dumpster by the side of the road also these kids are supposed to be his brother's children the casting director made some odd choices there tori comes into the same room as the icarly gang recognizes them and declares that she loves their web show causing carly to comment that she also loves her boyfriend the two get caught up realize he was cheating on both of them and decide they want mutual revenge as andre continues to worry about the increasing size of the gathering keenan actually shows up in the flesh and is annoyed that the party is so small making andre realize that he was overreacting to so many people showing up while i meanwhile realized that keenan thompson asked a teenager to throw a party mostly consisting of teenagers over the purpose of showing up and mingling with the teenagers now i can't imagine that kind of stuff goes down in the world of snl but those have gotta be northridge girls you can tell by just how they and that statutory rape joke number eight maybe nine this episode's so [ __ ] weird i'm just gonna round it up to ten keenan isn't mad about the size of the party but is upset when he sees the panda bear explaining that the panda has been showing up everywhere he goes which is the sole reason that he's even moved to a new house i do want to point out real quick that it's really fitting that the icarly and victorious crossover is also basically an extended crossover with the most famous cast member of all that i'm going to talk about this a little deeper later but there's a direct metamorphosis from icarly leading all the way back to the original run of all that it's basically the big bang of live-action nickelodeon sitcoms and of course it's fun to have this big star return to make this episode feel a little more special the gang end up asking keenan to be a part of their complex revenge scheme in said plan they invite stephen to a closet to make out and have kanan play a trumpet in his face live streaming it to icarly.com and publicly revealing that steven is a cheating hussy back in the koozie psychowich suggests they all play an improv game they'll tell the story as a group one person taking the reins at a time going counter-clockwise but the catch is that you aren't allowed to use a four-letter word and anytime this happens you will be splashed also there's a joke where psykowitz is implied to be hitting on spencer and gets rejected meanwhile xinjin is playing a surfing game which he is a pro at when it suddenly glitches throwing him out of the window and into the jacuzzi where he promptly drowns once again while the cast ignore him meanwhile meanwhile rex has apparently won every rap battle against everyone at the party eventually being declared the ultimate freestyle champion until sam approaches and declares that she wants in and yeah this is basically the final arc of the mega crossover a rap battle between two characters from these shows all written by someone who has never heard a rap before i always get things popping and you should stick to shopping this is the most embarrassing thing i've ever seen and i think it's consistently made worse by how the crowd seems to think it's the greatest entertainment of the century how cute a little rapid puppet psych you're more like a rejected muppet whoa she rhymed puppet with muppet who could have thought of that am i in the [ __ ] eight mile and i'm so famous you can find my name and applaud but not you homie rex is the name of a dog can i just say right here this project has taken 20 years off my life i will not see my golden years entirely because i did this series i will die very young and very very bitter you couldn't even rap if i stapled his lips and took his hand out your back this is the whitest [ __ ] i've ever heard a backup rig is installed by the dj's friends and he announces that it's time for karaoke this is where stuff gets weird and predictably for icarly lazily meta carly steps up to do the first song and it's her theme song from the icarly sitcom which everyone in the room knows and then tori is given the mic and sings her theme song over the icarly theme song because she's completely self-centered also victoria justice couldn't lip sync if you put a gun to her head [Music] and for the first time ever they allow all of the backup casts to sing the theme songs of these shows making it immediately clear that jeannette mccurdy is the best singer on icarly and the best singer on victorious is anyone but victoria justice i know i keep pressing on this but it's so obvious that it's distracting your imagination and there we go i party with victorious the biggest episode in the history of victorious and arguably one of the biggest icarly episodes and a story that we will now pretend isn't canon because further stories down the line pretend that this never happened my party with victorious is an awful weird mucky story but one thing was clear watching this all of that awful energy was contributed exclusively by victorious when a scene showed something weird happening in the icarly half of the universe it felt unusual and out of place but when an equally murky event takes hold with the victorious gang you're like oh sure it's [ __ ] tuesday victorious drags icarly down to its own level in order to make the writing in this story work and in a way seeing it presented under this context is kind of a wake-up call like you almost get to thinking that all of this is normal how adult characters will hit on underage characters and underage actors are actively sexualized for a primarily pre-teen audience but somehow seeing spencer inserted into some of those same played out victorious scenes makes you kind of go hey what the [ __ ] dude and i think more than anything else i party with victorious has been kind of a big wake-up call for me a way for me to remember that victorious isn't just fascinatingly entertainingly bad it's also kind of gross in a really awful way look i think it's fair to say that the last hour or two of victorious analysis so far has gotten kind of heavy so perhaps this is a good chance to take a little bit of a break okay guys welcome to the very first victorious intermission for those of you who skipped my icarly and fred videos i started a tradition with those where i like to occasionally take a break from the main analysis to talk about little side tangents that wouldn't fit into the main season discussions and as our first official order of business uh what do you guys think of my haircut now that i think about it i guess you guys have seen my haircut before i don't know sometimes these projects get confusing to film real quick i actually do want to talk about something that is completely and totally off topic and it's basically like my entire year basically i've had this this really weird coincidence going on in my life and this is the first real time that i've had the opportunity to talk about it at the exact same time that i have been working on this rewatch project about three shows from my childhood which are unified by a shared universe my father has been working on his own rewatch project about three shows from his childhood which are unified by one shared universe i have been re-watching icarly victorious and sam and kat and my father has been re-watching the beverly hillbillies petticoat junction and green acres and so every time that i've seen my dad in like the last six months we've basically just immediately started talking about what's going on in our respective little universes in our respective shows like the the funniest thing that's happened most recently is you know i started telling him about how i just hit like the big crossover the big icarly victorious crossover and he started telling me well you know i just hit my crossover too it was a thanksgiving special and and hijinks were to be had and i don't know it's just been a really cute special thing we've shared but one big thing i've realized is my dad is having a lot more fun with his project than i am with mine and there have been points where i stare at him and i go like why aren't you making a video about your thing because you're having way more fun than i am anyways on to the meat of this segment's actual content one thing i've done with pretty much all of my mega videos is talk about merchandise connected to whatever franchise i'm talking about i did it with b movie i did it with fred i did it with icarly and i guess there's an expectation that i'm going to continue that further so let's go ahead and get this over with like icarly victorious also had its very own happy meal box set and like icarly as well i have all of those in a plastic bag okay starting us off we have like a really tiny victorious handbag there's a bunch of victorious bracelets which i think would fit me if i kind of broke my arm and folded it in half look at this we got like a bunch of victorious pinky rings that's pretty cool i got a victorious hairband i think i don't know it's kind of designed weird to be a hairband maybe it's like a choker and then we got a little microphone that is also a doll hairbrush and finally a star with hair growing out of its ass look i gotta say something okay this is a bit of channel lore i've mentioned this before but i just want to get out there again when i was really little okay i had long hair you know and you guys are used to me having long hair but you know it was bright blonde and i was really tiny and i had kind of soft features and so i would walk around with this long blonde hair and everyone i met in my life thought i was a little girl this is not something i'm making up you know when i show old photos and videos of me looking like that those are actually images of me and so um often i'd get babysit or you know i'd be kind of left at the kids table at events and some adult would go to get mcdonald's and i i would sometimes forget to tell them i'm a boy and so they'd go out and they'd get me girl toys and i would always get so mad because i mean ladies how did you put up with it how did you put up with this you know what i mean like the boy toys at mcdonald's were always like the coolest thing sometimes mcdonald's will release like the coolest toys of the month just in their happy meal sets for free and meanwhile the girl happy meal toys were like hey here's a mirror so you can look at your face hey here's a doll hairbrush do you have a doll go get a doll i mean i actually researched this the same time that mcdonald's was doing victorious as the girls happy meal set they were doing young justice as the boys happy meal set can you imagine your mom goes out to mcdonalds she gets your brother a batman toy and then you get you get a star with hair growing out of its ass would you be happy with that transaction sometimes mcdonald's would do this thing where to really truly experience their happy meals you had to go at least twice because they were usually like two toys that would play really well together okay and i think it's clear this is a really great example of this this set right here because you had to get the star with hair growing out of its ass and the hair brush i mean look at this i mean that's a play feature that's a play feature right there they're a little girl she could do this for hours and never get bored never get bored in a million years this choker joke is either gonna land really well or it's gonna get me cancelled so the same year that that happy meal set came out 2011 um victorious also had a popular line of victorious barbie dolls now i'm calling them barbie dolls that's because all of those dolls are barbie dolls to me but they're actually i wrote this down they're spin master dolls and uh these dolls creep me out and in fact um early in working on this project i kind of made this promise to myself that i wasn't gonna buy any right because i thought they were so creepy that it would like it would like lower lower my points you know in in terms of getting into the afterlife i thought someone at the pearly gates would open like a video screen of moments in my life and they'd see me holding one of these creepy ass dolls and they'd be like that's not going to bode well for you but what ended up happening was there was an ebay bid on on three of these dolls the main three that people remember and seek out and i put on a bid on that ebay bid that was like absurdly low and i was like someone will outbid me and miraculously no one did so i ended up buying uh three out of the four of the characters that they released the only one i didn't get was trina i have actually kept these in the bubble wrap and careful protection that they came in uh and there's two reasons i did that reason number one some of these are really valuable and i could potentially resell them reason number two i'm not joking i don't like looking at these they creep me out a body dead wrapped in plastic i'm hoping i can just hold this thing up okay and i'll hold it up and you guys will be like okay no explanation needed i get why you don't like these things okay i don't i don't like this this is weird i don't know do you want there you go it's it's tori there there she is it's tori let's move on this is the most valuable one it's the one they've most carefully wrapped this is uh cat valentine because that's her name there's an obvious reason people want this one the most i'll talk about it later next we have the third doll and the final one which i personally own and that's jade this is the one i like the most because uh it's the least creepy to me and it's it's got some cute accessories she has like a little skull and crossbones on her wrist which i think is just charming to see unlike you know a barbie doll and uh yeah this just looks like a barber you would see on the shelf today so it doesn't really it's not as weird as the other ones i don't know if i'm being unreasonable i just don't like these dolls immediately you know when i look at victoria's merchandise i want to compare it to the icarly merchandise that we've looked at over the last two videos and and to me the big difference is that icarly merchandise was kind of purposefully dopey like think of like the the icarly dolls that i've had on my set for like forever now like those icarly dolls set up in that little corner the ones i showed off those are so cute to me because they're so exaggerated they're so cartoony they don't even necessarily look like the actors but they feel like the characters right and they're they're very ugly toys which is why i find them charming and meanwhile over here i think what creeps me out about these so much is that there were i think there was an earnest attempt to make these dolls attractive and because of that to me these approach are kind of uncanny valley that that's the best way to explain it i think these dolls look kind of uncanny i'm gonna be totally honest usually when i work on a project like like this and i collect merchandise i get anxious that i'm gonna need it for some reason so i typically like keep it in a box in my closet with these i really think i'm gonna flip these um i i don't want to keep these when this project is over i want to get rid of these stupid things check out this epic unprecedented play action you can take this doll and you can take this hair brush that comes with her and you can brush her hair is this all that girl toys were and that's it that's all the victorious merchandise that i could find you know it's worth uh pointing out obviously there were big changes in the toy industry in between you know when i carly started and when victoria started and that affects like the output of merchandise that was made for each show but there's also another element to this that we should quickly discuss and that's the fact that i'm sure there were other pieces of victorious merchandise that are notable enough to mention but i couldn't find those things because despite the fact that victorious is not really a relevant show today the merchandise for the show can be extremely overpriced and extremely rare for one specific reason and that's the fact that ariana grande remains today a decade later one of the biggest stars in the world so for reference if you go on ebay right now and you play your cards right you can get the victoria justice barbie doll for like 20 30 tops but the ariana grande barbie doll those sell for hundreds of dollars in some cases 400 to 500 and it's like a weird surreal miracle that i was able to get this set for like pennies compared to that i did find out through my research that at one point victoria justice had a set featured at build-a-bear workshop so i went ahead and made my very own victoria justice garfield now isn't this just not the same okay so there are a few other examples of kind of victorious spin-off media that i want to talk about in this video but i'm going to try and save those for the second or third intermission so for now it is time for us to leap back into the victoria saga by looking at season two now the good news is that from here the average amount of victorious episodes per season decreases substantially meaning that it's not going to be another two hours before you and i talk again i say that like like intermission quentin is a separate entity like totally unconnected from regular quentin so with much further ado and whatever else i say during the segment here's season two bye so with the start of season two episode 1 we see the characters in a choir class with their music teacher mr guy with no last name i'm sure we'll be seeing him again mr whatever assigns to the class a singing project and everyone tries to hook up with tori because she's the best singer in the class however tori turns them all down saying she wants to do a solo directly after this she's approached by writer a hot senior guy who i presume is the cousin of sako from icarly also is this evan hansen because this guy looks 30 writer has approached tori for a very simple reason to ask her out on a date and she immediately accepts meanwhile we see robbie in the halls as he approaches the girl from the ballet episode and asks her out on a date she immediately turns him down and he approaches his friends and asks if there's anything wrong with him they begin listing a long series of things causing robbie to be even more dejected meanwhile in the sea plot cat has a new cell phone but some odd glitch in the phone lines has caused her to get phone calls intended for emergency services caused by car accidents she gets one of these calls learns that there's been a car accident and that it's serious pretends to be the emergency service says help is on the way and then hangs up and does nothing what the [ __ ] we're not counting crimes in this video because this show is a crime itself robbie asked tori if he can spy on her date suggesting he hide in the bushes outside of her house tori says he would be spotted instantly before robbie notes that she's never noticed him doing it before what tori begins preparing for her date at home but when trina finds out the tour is going to be going on a date with writers specifically she warns her to be careful she notes that writer has a notoriety for dating specifically underclassmen for a very short amount of time and that she needs to make sure he isn't up to something brief pause i'm writing this analysis as i watch the episode i bet you money that we're gonna find out right or only dates girls to get them to do his homework the date ends up going okay but when ryder goes to the bathroom trina suddenly pops up and insists that tori go through his phone saying that this is the best way to figure out what he's up to he gets back rather quickly and is extremely mad to find her doing this and he storms out tori then sees a bush moving on her balcony and what she discovers isn't exactly a twist robby shapiro yes robbie begins dressing like ryder and acting cool thinking that his disposition is why he isn't getting dates meanwhile kat is still doing that thing where she lets people die for her personal amusement someone should stop her another car accident yeah [Music] tori finally finds writer and apologizes for what happened and asks him to give her a second shot however ryder says that he isn't free that night because he has to prepare for their musical assignment noting that he doesn't even know what song to sing and that he has a fear of singing alone here it comes and of course tori agrees to be his musical partner for the project and he thanks her for this that sounds nice you make me feel safe victoria justice was 17 when they filmed this the actor playing writer was 26 they were dating in real life this is all heavily documented on the victorious wiki page rytoria which is a page about the ship between the two actors and not the characters carefully documenting their entire relationship which begs the question what's creepier to you age gaps or stalking cam runs up and asks if it's possible to perform cpr on yourself she then tells the man on the other end that it isn't he stops breathing cue canned laughter cat killed a man round of applause for cat killing several people in this episode [Music] yay robbie talks to another girl that he wants to ask out but she thinks that he looks like writer and she begins venting about how writer asked her out on a date but stopped talking to her once she had gotten him an a on a homework assignment oh you must have felt so dirty get it it's sex that's what the metaphor is the gang hold an intervention and tell tori the bad news jade begins laughing at her pain and beck looks visibly annoyed telling her that she's in time out now and ordering her to go sit on the steps outside continuing the long-running joke that bec secretly hates his girlfriend tori now has to make a new song for the competition and begs andre to help stay up riding with her that night he's pressured into it and is forced to cancel his great grandfather's 97th birthday party just to help tori instead you see when she uses people for school assignments that's okay so the night of the big performance tori tricks writer into thinking that they're going to be doing the song but in actuality she's doing the new song written the previous night which is called begging on your knees and is all about being used by a man until you find out his true intentions homework you know when when a guy when a guy he like he seems like he he like cares about you but he just wants you to like do homework and stuff i really hated sitting through this song and it's hard to put into words but i guess the reason is that it really does feel like some crap you'd be forced to watch for a school assembly which makes me hate it a lot he is humiliated fade to black that's it season 2 episode 2 is titled beck falls for tori and has a title that's a little more literal than you'd think at the start of the episode mr psykowitz is watching a class improv and suddenly interrupts to say that the segment is boring because it's too predictable character writing he notes is more engaging when something unpredictable happens to show this he approaches tori and asks her what her hopes and dreams are probably to be a pop star a really successful singer well maybe you could sing at weddings for the hearing impaired he explains that he just proved his point as everyone is now fascinated by him doing something that no one expected while we're here can we talk about the quality of the education at this school again on the whiteboard in this scene there's this long analysis of the history of english renaissance theaters and the whiteboard has a drawing of the swan theater but next to it it says south park england what the [ __ ] is south park england it's southerk england guys suh durk also this structure was built in 1595 but the board says 1596 so really just bang up work here guys after the bell rings and everyone goes to lunch psychoids keeps tori behind and asks if she wants to do something exciting she stares back eyes wide with fear and asks to have more details just to be safe let's call that statutory rape joke number 11. psygwitz reveals his proposition and it is really an exciting opportunity for tori he has a friend who is casting for a film and needs a spunky teenage local to play a part he has recommended her and suggests that she audition before he does a flip and ends up in extreme pain tori prints out a resume fast enough to show it to her friends at the same lunch period but it's horribly out of date and only features one play the only play that she's actually ever been involved in the gang suggests she fluff it up with extra information noting that it's not lying it's just exaggerating if you're curious about cat's costume her b-plot is that she's begun a costume class and is thus wearing a series of eccentric outfits throughout the episode so tori goes to the audition and is told that she's a great actress but that she hasn't gotten the part entirely because the lead looks too much like her however the casting directors can't help but notice that her resume includes numerous things which make her sound like a stunt actress and without wanting to cause an awkward heir she accepts being the leads double for numerous dangerous shots also ariana comes in with a coloring book because she's been learning to color this episode do you see how they're making her more stupid over time but also how the more stupid she gets the more talented she somehow comes across like she's apparently been learning how to make costumes for about a week and she's already making these perfect outfits that should be expert class tori wants to quit the film but everyone says that doing so will lead to her being blackballed in hollywood something psychowitch seems to confirm when it's implied that he too is no longer allowed to work in the industry and thus tori must do the dangerous stunt work even though she has absolutely no background in the art form she initially is led to believe that all she has to do is fall off of a chair but she's told on set that she's actually going to be knocked through a railing that will lead to her falling 40 feet something she grows extremely anxious about especially as she sees that the floor below is barely padded and that there is a dried puddle of blood from the last person who did stunt work at the studio gosh i wonder if anything had happened recently in the lives of these writers which could have inspired an episode like this luckily the director's son born from his secret mistress is bitten by monkeys at the zoo and the shoot is cancelled early however tori still plans to go through with the stunt despite the fact that it might lead to her untimely end i don't want to get blackballed the gang i'll go to the shoot to support tori and are given visitors passes to do so the exception is rex who complains that he isn't being treated like a person here tori goes through with it but gets a text from back and she declares that she just got a text message telling her that she needs to pee while she's gone everyone on set tries to find this app because it seems like a very convenient thing they don't have pminder all i can find is tinkle time i got squirt alert begg meets tory backstage and reveals that he is now in a perfect duplication of her dress courtesy of cat's new tailor talents ben goes out and he does the stunt himself except that he doesn't really because a stunt actor does it in the place of avon now isn't that meta tori feels bad later and begs psychoids for a chance to do the stunt for real and when she proves that she still can't do it jade pushes her off the balcony season 2 episode 3 is titled ice cream for kesha and boy you're never going to guess who cameos in this one i hope it's perez hilton again in the opening scene kat and robbie are having a not couple fight cat dreamed that robbie did something awful to her and robbie pressures about what it was so he can at least understand why she's mad cat says that in her dream a horde of children tried to eat robbie and that he instead insisted that they eat cat first robbie tries to apologize but relents that the dream is indeed something he would do if given the chance directly after this andre approaches and we learned that he has been eating copious amounts of ice cream in hopes of meeting kesha an in-universe ice cream company has been running a competition where certain containers have letters hidden at the bottom the first person to use these to spell out kesha will get a private concert from the pop star trina then enters with the b plot carrying a note which tori wrote to her when she was six said note states that when tori is 16 she will live with a prince in a sugar castle and that if this doesn't happen tori will be trina's personal slave for a month her friends say that she basically has to do it and she accepts after the opening sequence we see that tori has been playing a game where she shoots big foam darts into andre's face while she eats pretzels he says he doesn't understand how the game is fun but tori has apparently done it at least seven times because she is a bad friend she's called away by trina who complains that she needs her music changed over as her hands are full with a pickle and lip gloss this causes tori to think of an idea and she asks trina if she can be let out of her contract if she holds a private kesha concert for trina trina thinks this is impossible and accepts later the rest of the cast come over and help look through thousands of dollars worth of ice cream hunting for all the letters that they can although they only end up finding the k e and a in one night jade hates doing this and begins complaining you don't have to help robbie says that wasting all this ice cream isn't right so he announces his intention to take a large container of the stuff to the local playground to give to kids beck immediately tells robbie that he shouldn't do that but jade angrily insists that they let him and soon enough robbie returns covered in bruises explaining that he went to the park and screamed hey kids who want some free ice cream only for all of the moms in the area to chase him into an alleyway and beat him up so robbie got mistaken for a pedophile that's the joke i guess that statutory rape joke number 12. kesha posts on twitter that someone at northridge has won the competition and the characters are all defeated not realizing that this episode is a thinly veiled willy wonka parody so the person who won probably faked it because of all this tori has to keep being trina slave and attempts to drown her sister in order to get out of it the next day what do you know kesha announces that the guy who won faked it and boy do i not remember what kesha looks like i have no idea if that's really her i can still win the contest run for tory run straight home don't stop till you get there after this revelation they continue searching cat finds the h meaning that all they have left is the dollar sign robbie realizes that they've only been looking for letters in the most popular ice cream flavors and that they logically should be looking for the rarest letter in the least popular ice cream they run out to an obscure store where said ice cream is sold but there's only one container left and it's another h they then find a boy eating the same ice cream and running towards him they offered to pay him for it cat lets it slip wide causing the boy to suddenly want more especially after it's revealed that it is indeed the dollar sign he says that he'll give it to them but that he also wants to come to the concert and that he wants to make out with tori and kat which cat seems really into and finally jade he then stares directly into andre's eyes implying his next train of thought we suddenly jump cut to kesha doing the concert incidentally i'd take it all back as soon as i heard the voice and i saw the glitter i knew this was her god bless kesha she is a legend cash ends the concert by shooting glitter all over tory's house and boy does this bring back war flashbacks why was glitter such a big [ __ ] thing in the early 2010s who the [ __ ] liked being covered in glitter got in your eyes man you couldn't get the [ __ ] out the kid asked for his kiss but tori tricks him into going outside and locks the door kesha spends roughly 30 seconds with trina and decides that she hates her and says that she feels bad for tori having to spend so much time with her trina gets confused and lets the little kid back in and she then offers to kiss him instead of the main three he says this is gross and storms out the funniest thing about this episode is that i've poisoned my own perception of this cast so much that there were numerous points during this episode where i really thought they were just going to curb stomp this kid at the beginning of season 2 episode 4 psychowitz announces the cash sheet for an upcoming play which tori and jade both tried out for we learned through the art of hissy fit that jay did not get the parts she wanted and in fact tori has been cast as the lead while jade is her understudy jade of course realizes that if anything happens to tori she will be allowed to perform in the play and she begins plotting a devious series of escapades to make this happen these include getting sinjin to pretend to offer tori a job over the phone that same weekend and then attempting to put tori in the hospital by having a delivery person give her flowers that she is allergic to although trina manages to warn tori in time in a brief b plot we also see that trina is supposed to be playing a child struck with tuberculosis but psykowitz says that her cough is terrible and she needs to work on making it authentic this is all suddenly interrupted by the revelation that robbie has been sent to the hospital we learned there that when he was seven a bully forced him to swallow a toy car and said carr has now been discovered parked in his small intestine where it now has the possibility of ripping his guts apart from the inside content warning for this next bit blood here's a time code robbie needs o negative blood stat and on short notice tori is the only person in the general area with the right kind of blood the doctors take a pint of the stuff and there's still enough time to get her back to the play but jade then steals the blood forcing tori to have a second pint that same night robbie then drops said blood splattering it all over himself meaning that she has to have a third pint taken meanwhile trina searches around the hospital until she finds an authentic person suffering from tuberculosis filming his cough up close when she gets back to the play she has perfectly emulated the cough because she has contracted tuberculosis tori makes it back to the play but is so delirious that she delivers an incomprehensible performance before passing out jade thinks that it's her time to shine but psykowitz says that she's been a total gank all week and doesn't deserve the role and so here puts on the dress and gives what is easily the best performance of the episode robbie gets the car out tori passes out again trina still has tuberculosis no one cares moving on in season 2 episode 5 we discover that andre has a new girlfriend and that they've been spending copious amounts of time making out at school after this moment passes jay relays that she's going to be putting on a live performance that weekend and that she's asked kat to have her brother find props for her cat says that her brother has found everything on the list including 12 gallons of blood wow where did you find 12 gallons of fake blood you wanted fake blood i'll go call my brother we'll be coming back to cat's brother don't worry jade says that her art show is about a clown whose parachute doesn't open and that it's called clowns don't bounce explaining why she needs all the fake blood gee i wonder if this one's also secretly about her daddy issues robbie reveals that rex isn't feeling well as he went to a prom at northridge on his own and got a hickey and a stomach virus as robbie and rex run off tori discovers the very odd detail that hollywood arts for literally no reason has never had a prom before this is despite the fact that in the pilot episode rex taunts cat for failing to get a date to the prom the previous year but if the writers aren't going to care about canon why should i tory decides this just won't do and goes to psykowitz who tells her to go to the head of student activities tori says that he is the head of student activities causing him to celebrate as he actually didn't know this he agrees but after checking an oven mitt he says that they can only do it that saturday leaving tori only five days to plan an entire prom he then says that he has to take his grandmother to the hospital suddenly dragging a woman out of the corner of the room who has apparently been in a very bad state the entire time tori has been bothering him fan theory i think that this woman is the same person gibby nearly killed in icarly and she's just been barely holding on since then tori builds a complex 3d model of different parts of the school because apparently she's good at everything and constructs a committee to begin plotting out the event okay uh since you mentioned prom a lot of people have told me they don't want hollywood arts to have a normal prom so the first idea i came up with is we call it a prom right it's really stupid tori moves forwards with the prone planning but jade storms in completely furious it turns out that her art show has been canceled for coinciding with prom meaning that she won't be able to do her show about a dead clown tory stands her ground but jade says that she will regret this and promises revenge robbie asks cat to prone but she turns him down and says that a boy from another school already asked her rex thinks that she's lying and just wanted to turn robbie down politely causing him to become obsessed remember when i carly did the same storyline like two years before anyways they have the prom and it's exactly like the dance they had in season one so i'm not sure why they even made a big fuss about it tori walked up to the stage to make an announcement is that a [ __ ] soundboard shaped like a pair that's too much man tori makes an announcement while she's doing this the power of the dance turns off and the projector begins showing a collage of disturbing clips jade walks up and we learn that she has done this and that she's putting a shrimp in tory's bra very normal show they eventually kill the projector and get the song back but tori learns that jade has cancelled the band who was supposed to play that night worse yet jade has hired a diaper guy who comes to parties in a diaper and pees in his diaper in front of party guests if he's paid money this is a fetish it's not thinly veiled it's just a fetish so this guy goes out to this group of teenagers and does something that will force him to be registered as a sex offender luckily everyone is amused and laughs at the situation robbie gets into a huge fight with cat over her supposed fake date but it turns out he's actually real when he's not looking tori goes up to announce the prom king and queen but lies and says that the real queen is actually jade and the king is doug the diaper guy he lifts her up and carries her off screen let's never speak of this again if you consider i party with victorious a victorious episode then it aired right here but arguably it does take place before season 2 because it's set earlier in icarly season 4 than it aired honestly trying to find a timeline in terms of victorious episodes is stupid i mean the show exists in this weird vague time loop where they're constantly sophomores and juniors at the same time they just did prom in seven episodes it's christmas who gives a [ __ ] season two episode six followed i party and it's fitting that it's also an extended event episode arguably the most movie-like plot to happen to the characters up to this point and also easily the worst episode so far at the beginning of the story we learned that the characters are about to take a week-long break from school but are dejected because they've all failed to come up with anything to do however when the school's foreign food truck worker hears this he invites tori to meet him behind his van come to the back of my truck he wants you to go behind his truck i know that statutory rape joke number 13. there he gives tori a proposition for her to take an all-expense paid vacation to his home country oh this gonna get racist didn't it it turns out that his brother has a hotel back in yerba and is willing to pay for the teens to come overseas as long as they do one musical performance per night at this hotel after the specially made opening sequence diligently spoils every twist in the episode tori looks at photos of the hotel on a review site and grows excited soon enough she's invited all of her friends including jade however after trina injures her father playing golf and her parents once again state that they hate her they insist that tori has to take her they also say that she has to have adult supervision and thus she invites psychoids as well however once they arrive in the country they learn that things aren't quite as they were told their hotel is a dingy castle with a framed photo of the image from the review site and the nation itself is far from a prosperous tourist destination it's run by a fierce dictatorship actively restricting its citizens rights and the nation is at war with rebels within the country if you're curious every character with a speaking role basically does a really bad borat impression but you could have guessed that now you guys might think that it's kind of sad that not a single one of these kids was capable of researching the modern geopolitical standings of an entire nation within their universe but to be fair they did exchange ap world history with ap dance history when tori first approaches the owner he smells her hand and it's explained that this is a tradition in the country and throughout the episode people continuously do this tutorial on only tori which is a totally naturally thing to happen and not the writer's poorly disguised fetish when they get back to their hotel andre is bitten by a black moth and the owner states that this was likely a vampire moth known to be extremely lucky but only to those that survive for vampire moths kill a large portion of people they bite that night andre's neck begins to swell up with a gigantic mass and it's questioned if he's even going to live through the rest of the trip after failing to sleep through the sound of rebels fighting the military in the night and then seeing one of the rebels crashed into the room the girls run down to the lobby and insist that they're going home early however the owner pulls a string and the urban military immediately appears as the teens realize that they're going to be forced to perform one way or another andre is looked at by an 11 year old doctor the most qualified person the nation could find on short notice and he smells tori's hand they then learn that the hotel is going to be visited by the man in control of the nation and that he will see their musical performance we also learn that he has one working eye because he lost the other one after being bitten by a vampire moth they sing a big song and god i always forget how boring the music in this show is until they start singing again tori gets really into the dance and accidentally kicks her shoe into the chancellor's face being immediately arrested and detained good shot babe my boy munditar missed when he tried that at the beginning of part two tori is given a mock trial where she is declared guilty by the chancellor and is sentenced to four years in prison there she immediately gains her reputation as the prison's baddest [ __ ] having essentially blinded the nation's cruelest dictator psycho psykowitz and the kids managed to convince the dictator to let tory go but robbie then kills his prized pet octopus and they're all sentenced to the exact same fate way to go urkel psykowitz slips out the back but everyone else is put in prison oh look robbie's in the female half of the prison that's a really funny gag psychowitz reveals that he's disguised himself as a prison guard and that he's rented out a van he plans to break the kids out the following night but leaves it up to them to actually escape cat joins a prison gang because she's innocent and presumably because she loves killing people and she tries to teach them all to dance tori is inspired by this and uses her infamy at the prison to form a gigantic dance troupe she then goes before the chancellor admits that she blinded him on purpose and insists that she be allowed to perform as a chance to apologize shortly thereafter the entire prison does a performance of i want you back by the jackson 5. showing off the incredible talent the cast has and making real songs sound like fake ones [Music] and at the end of the performance all the kids escape along with one woman who helped them in their plotting and they managed to sneak across the urban border in the middle of the confusion season 2 episode 7 is one we briefly alluded to in my previous video but obviously we'll cover it here as well in the story the school's principal who we haven't seen since the pilot makes a reappearance and announces that he is retiring to spend time with his new girlfriend a young hawaiian woman at the same time robbie is in the parking lot along with tori and buys a bike from shenzhen after spending 400 on it robbie has to suddenly leap away when a car speedily drives up and wrecks his bike the driver exits and it's helen a recurring character from drake and josh who announces that she is the new principal of hollywood arts we cut to psycho witch's class later as tori kat and jay do an improv scene where cat is dressed up like a giant baby if we've been here again this is someone's fetish helen then enters and announces that she wants to introduce herself personally to every class as she gets a vibe for the school you see her that's the spazzy boy whose bike i ran over helen is ableist spazzy rex's tube you could have guessed that now a real quick note in my last video i discussed how helen is an interesting character because she originated on drake and josh as the owner of a movie theater before appearing in victorious as the principal of an art school and then in game shakers as the host of a celebrity talk show now i had a lot of commenters ask how she could have logically made such career leaps as these are very different professions i even saw some people posit that while drake and josh is confirmed to exist in icarly it could be a reality show instead of a sitcom meaning that helen would be propelled into hollywood exclusively by appearing in this reality show like snooki however i never personally needed to jump through so many hoops to justify this in my mind you see in drake and josh one of helen's main character details is that when she was a small child she was the star of a famous children's sitcom so it's simply my presumption that her background in child acting would be the thing that connects her back into mainstream hollywood well i'm happy to say that the writers apparently had the same idea as it's directly stated in this scene that her experience as a sitcom star is the background that led her to become the school's principal anyways helen announces that next week they're going to be having re-auditions as she insists on judging every person in the school to decide if they really deserve to be there after helen leaves psykowitz asks who else is frightened by her and everyone raises their hands except jade because she's cool and edgy tori and andre attempt to come up with a song for the competition but they're both distracted by trina who is practicing a martial arts class that she has been taking one has to wonder if she's been inspired to learn self-defense after her sister literally tied her up with duct tape the season before also the other characters in the episode continuously refer to what she's doing as karate but she's actually wearing a vovanom ghee indicating vietnamese martial arts the yellow belt in vovanom is the equivalent to a black belt in all other martial arts meaning that she is already very skilled at her craft so alongside the fact that we've already seen she can dance now she's an advanced martial arts student and she looks like marissa tomy but it's very important that you remember that she canotically has no talent or value whatsoever the gang all re-audition and most of them do pretty great kat does a scene from her favorite play juggles and performs an incredible song in just 90 seconds beck does a monologue from a really sad play about a dead brother or something jay does a lynchian short film that no one understands but is really scary and in the most frightening retcon of all time we find out that robbie's talent is supposed to be stand-up comedy which means that he's just really really bad at the only reason that he's supposed to be going to the school and that he's obviously supposed to be a jeff dunham parody next comes tori's audition her second chance to get into the school now for victoria justice this is a very big moment in the show because it's her chance to show off how much she's grown as a performer since she filmed the pilot episode so many years before now obviously i can't really play any clips from this song but i was hoping that we could once again kind of read the lyrics of the musical piece that she performs here so we can pick up on some of the you know subtle themes that they were trying to pitch in this particular sequence you don't have to be afraid this the same song yes for her second audition tori once again sings make it shine and although it sounds much different you can't help but feel like this is a major cop-out and a letdown i will give it to them this is the song where tori has always sounded the best and most natural as a singer but it's just weird that the pilot episode music wise was such a massive peak for the show back at home tori and her mother okay come on guys that's a little on the nose i know you've been slipping a little fetish stuff into your teen sitcom but restraint is the name of the game anyways torah gets a call the next day and is told very bizarre news trina has passed her audition but tori hasn't and will be expelled from hollywood arts there are several scenes of tense emotions played out like a bad ending finale before it's eventually revealed that helen's assistant messed up the names and it's actually trina who's going to be kicked out tori tries to tell trina that she's out but her sister doesn't exactly take the clues and begins a narcissistic rant about her own self-worth if i could just somehow suck some talent out of me and sprinkle it all over you i swear i would consider doing that okay so what do you think tori is going to do next is it a tell her sister the truth despite the awkward air b try and convince helen that her sister actually is talented in an unseen way or c tell robbie to dress up in a ski mask and attack helen in a suit a robbery when she arrives at the school hoping that when trina sees this she will organically attack the robber and save helen thus guilt tripping helen into letting trina come to the school despite having no talent whatsoever and furthermore tori will orchestrate the entire plan under the presumption that trina will do the right thing without prompt and that helen would not be able to easily beat up a 16 year old who's 5 10 weighs 90 pounds and carries around a puppet all day the third one you get no points i'm afraid it's just a beating the plan actually works somehow trina saves helen and tori suggests she reconsider a recent choice she made about who gets into hollywood arts helen takes the hint but trina still thinks that tori was the one who was going to get kicked out and that she thus owes her a big favor as the two run off helen quips i thought crazy steve was crazy now helen was actually supposed to become a recurring guest star after this just as she had been in drake and josh however she never appears in the show again despite being an implied presence so i suppose that she might have just been busy after this keeping in mind the victorious was only in production for about a year after this episode aired side note there's a blooper at the end of this episode and it's the funniest thing in the show so far i was grinning ear to ear watching this so now that we've watched the episode that confirms that drake and josh and victorious are said in the shared universe let's go ahead and watch the episode that confirms that drake and josh has a tv show within the victorious universe that being season 2 episode 6 who did it to trina at the beginning of the story trina has been given the lead in tory's directorial debut after she kidnaps tori's favorite childhood doll and blackmails her for a role we see the cast practicing the opening scene as trina suddenly breaks character to schedule a feet bleaching over the phone because she apparently wants to make her feet more white her words not mine rex approaches trina shortly after this and makes a sexual comment causing her to punch him in the face so they do the play on the opening night and everything seems to be going okay tori has changed all of her sister's lines to alien noises to excuse her bad acting and has thus written a twist that her character is an alien the audience is mostly confused by this but hey freddy seems to be into it trina begins to hover as her character proves that she is an alien but something goes wrong and she comes crashing to the ground followed by a wall which collapses on top of her there's a lot of injured stuntman jokes in this show after the play all of the characters are brought into lance's office as he discovers a cut in the broken stunt material which implies to him that trina's accident was sabotage what follows is a sequence where each character recounts what happened highlighting the unique narcissism present with each character particularly highlighted in how jade sees tori and how tori sees jade jade recalls tori threatening to kill trina over the abuse of her childhood doll and everyone seems to back this up while it supplies motive it doesn't prove the action being carried out at the same time andre is furious that they have to go through with this charade because he has a date planned with a beautiful woman and doesn't want to keep her waiting i want to go play with kiko eventually robbie puts his input into the story where he claims that kat and trina got into a massive fight because they are both in love with him why don't you just get out of here why don't you ladies come on now look there's one of me two of you and seven swinging days in the week he even makes math hot naturally when we cut back no one believes robbie when cat is given a chance to give her side of the story she begins describing a scene from a late stage episode of drake and josh only for everyone to reprimand her and say that it was just something she saw on tv drake and josh that show was classic oh then i don't know what happened with tori and trina eventually tori makes a plea that while trina is very annoying no one in the room would want to hurt her robbie makes the argument that much of their equipment is old and might have just broken on its own and lance seems to accept this later that night robbie is seen yelling at rex as we learned that he alone sabotaged the play wanting to get revenge on trina for hitting him robbie was thus forced to lie in order to cover four racks nobody ever suspects the puppet i thought you hated that word it's okay if i say it so far this is really the closest evidence we've ever had that rex is a supernatural phenomenon beyond simply a puppet caused by a personality disorder so i'm kind of hoping that they lean more in this direction towards the end of the show next let's talk about season 2 episode 9 tori tortures teacher i have been anticipating this episode since the beginning based entirely on that title and i'm sad to say that instead of being shocking or offensive the episode is mostly just really boring in the story psykowitz announces that he has been given a coffee maker by helen as a celebration of 10 years teaching at hollywood arts tori reacts in shock to this because she thinks that 10 years of teaching is something that needs a bit more of a reward than that later at lunch tori raises this concern with her peers and andre makes this joke how come none of us ever sit on that side of the table tori decides to take psychowitz to a play but she doesn't check the plot online and finds out that it's about a man with former interests in theater depressed that he's been stuck as a high school teacher for 10 years psykowitz stands up part way through the play and quietly walks out the next day everyone is shocked when psychowitz is late to class implying that the class is early in the day when a few episodes before it was a lunch period good job guys eventually he comes in depressed and without energy and after falling out of the class window everyone comes to the conclusion that tory has broken psychowits however he eventually reveals that he's sad because his girlfriend dumped him via text during the play as she's now going to be moving away to fresno okay i'm gonna record two reactions to this twist in the narrative oh i see when psychoids is needed for a punchline he's gay but when he's needed for a storyline he's straight okay yes queen finally bisexual representation on nickelodeon unless him being attracted to men was only a joke in which case [ __ ] you nickelodeon yeah whichever those you like tori next orchestrates one of her weirdest plans to date she holds a fake audition at the school where age-appropriate women film a romantic scene with psychoits and after a kiss she asks him what he thinks of the woman so in other words tori has set up a casting couch situation without telling the man who is secretly orchestrating the casting couch during this part of the storyline we learned that whenever cat has a question she wants to ask jade jade simply begins feeding her handfuls of cereal yeah that's right cat likes cereal good good want some more want some more yeah any more questions truly she gets stupider with every passing episode psychowitz confronts tori about what she's done and says that it's quite silly because he doesn't really miss his girlfriend he misses his girlfriend's pet bonnie who had taken quite a liking to him and so tori finds a bunny and tricks psychowitz into picking it up it's then that he explains that his girlfriend's pet was actually a three-legged cat named bunny tory suggests a new plan where they try and find a cat and all of her friends abandon her meanwhile in the b plot trina decides she wants to go on a date with a hot upperclassman and goes about doing this by tricking him into thinking that she works for a pizza delivery service when really it's just a restaurant that she made up after having to remake the pizza numerous times due to mistakes she learns that the boy already has a girlfriend and she throws a hissy fit and storms off this is the first b-plot i've seen in any of these shows which is actually non-congruent to the timeline of the rest of the episode the a plot to this one is set over the course of several days but this b plot happens in one night but is still dispersed throughout the a plot it's kind of weird next let's move on to season 2 episode 10 jade gets crushed or as i like to call it andre is down bab in the story andre has to write another song for yet another music class he initially wants tori to sing on it but when she suddenly has to take a tech final so she can attend an r b singing class he's left on the hunt for another singer but andre says it's not a big deal and he'll find someone else not cat though yeah god forbid you get ariana grande to sing on your pop song that would be a disaster meg is trying to take photos of the mexican robot toy from drake and josh but cat interrupts him and reveals that she has grown an obsession with moon boots as she bounces away meanwhile in the b plot robber reveals that he has the highest final exam score in the history of the tech class that tori wants to take so he agrees to tutor her he brings in several life-sized cutouts of cat saying he has many of these at home but that he'd rather not say what they're for after tori and him practice cat hops in and awkwardly leaves to avoid knowing why robbie has so many cutouts of her andre eventually gets jade to do his song but upon hearing her sing for the first time he suddenly falls madly in love with her and he rushes to tori's house so she can give him counsel andre knows that being in love with your best friend's girl is wrong but he says he can't bury his feelings or else it'll make him go all wonky he begins avoiding spending time with jade at school causing her to think that something weird is going on tori learns that she's passed the test and in fact received a perfect score meaning that she has now replaced robbie's place as the head of the class his framed photo is taken down from the hall and he begins crying as rex laughs at him this is one of the only shows i've ever seen where they give the extras in the background more eye-grabbing costumes than the main characters in the foreground what's going on here why is this white kid dressed up like in like a native american what's he what's he doing tori tries to convince andre that he doesn't want to date jade by uh dressing up like her adapting a copy of her personality and then role playing with him she begins berating him with a series of cruel comments saying that she'll only get more mean if they start dating and this makes andre so horny that he tries to make out with tori without thinking andre reveals he wrote a passionate love song about shade causing tori to think of an idea if he can sing it in front of her changing the lyrics to hide who it's really about it'll let him get his feelings out so he can move on and so tori and andre sing this song at a school event and while he's not totally sure if he's really let his feelings go when a hot girl propositions him he totally drops the topic revealing that he was never really in love with jade he was just really down bad one thing about victorious that is pretty well known but i haven't directly addressed in this video is that it is well known for having a dedicated and enthusiastic shipping culture where fans at home decided which characters they wanted to end up together and they kind of you know wrote fan fiction and had arguments and that kind of thing very similar to icarly but the difference is that with victorious i think it was also a topic that the show heavily avoids at least at this at the point where i am in the show right now like it is not something the show wants to approach because the showrunners it seems to me didn't want to deal with the negativity that comes with purposeful shipping culture and so even though there were ships that were set up like in the first few episodes shipping episodes haven't really been a thing like they were with icarly up to this point i think the show even teases this and kind of mocks this a little bit by having episode titles like beck falls for tori making the audience think this is going to be an episode about how beck is in love with tori when actually it's an episode about beck doing a stunt fall and just to clarify this just so people don't get confused i don't consider beck and jade to be a ship because they're already together they're dating throughout the show so then being together is less about it being a good romantic pairing and more about the show maintaining a sort of basic status quo but this is the first episode that's like hey what if this character got together with this character what would that be like and it's interesting to me because it seems like this is a ship that no one was asking for which i think was what they were going for and i just think that's kind of an interesting development for the show like if you go back to the earliest work you go back to like zoe 101 that show was nothing but a ship the entire purpose of that show was that there were these two main characters that you wanted to see end up together and now we've gone to the point that you have victorious where the ships are kind of throwaway elements that you're supposed to be able to ignore speaking of ships though i actually want to rewind a second in retrospective here and talk about the weirdest scene in that episode okay and that is the scene where tori dresses up like jade in like a perfect imitation of her okay can we just stop and acknowledge that's a little that's a little odd right let me put it like this imagine you're in that situation and you have this friend right you have this friend and both of you have like a mutual friend that you both kind of dislike right but your friend specifically the first friend is infamous for hating the other person with a passion and one day you go up to the first friend and you say hey i've got a problem i think i've fallen in love with that person that we both hate and then your friend goes hold on hold on i got this i got this and they run out of the room and then they're gone for a bit and they walk into the room again and they're wearing a perfect costume of the friend you both don't like like down to having a wig that has like the right number of highlights and like the highlights are down to the correct length of where they should be and they got the perfect clothes on then they have the makeup down and they're like okay i'm gonna pretend i'm our mutual that we both don't like you would be like stop the train what is going on there is no heterosexual explanation for that scene anyways i want to stop here real quick and just briefly pause and kind of talk about something with you guys we have just watched victoria season 2 episode 10 aka victorious episode 29 which means that as of this exact moment we are now 50 percent done watching this show kind of you see victorious actually has an odd number of episodes 57 so in actuality the halfway point for the show was directly in the middle of that last episode unless you consider that like a bunch of these episodes are double length which means that perhaps there are more on the second end which would mean and then there's i parted with victorious which i didn't count anyways let's pretend i'm right this exact moment we're 50 done talking about this show anyways here's episode 11. season 2 episodes 11 12 and 13 are notable stories because they each contribute something that every tv show is supposed to have the spooky episode the christmas episode and the episode that [ __ ] with your head and starting us off is episode 11 terror on cupcake street the closest thing we really have to a victorious halloween episode and you know what that means yay halloween set whoa i went out and i bought all this [ __ ] because the wiki said this was a halloween episode turns out it's not so what they did as far as i can tell they picked a random episode they changed the title of the episode to be a parody of a halloween movie and then they just aired it in october it's not even set in october now let me tell you something ladies and gentlemen this show has done some stuff that's made me mad but oh boy that's [ __ ] up there so at the start of the story psychoids is teaching a class when he suddenly kicks everyone out except for the main seven when asked why he's done this he notes that the rest of the class isn't interesting to him because they never seem to talk they simply react everyone comments on how weird this is before they swiftly move on just completely stepping over the sudden canonization of everyone at the school being mindless drones you know what i'm adding that to the list psychowitz asks the class what they think of parades and cat tells a long story where it's implied that her brother molested a horse jade asked cat to play with some keys continuing the ongoing theme of infantilization with ariana's character psykowitz explains that his current girlfriend is in charge of the pasadena parade parade a parade meant to raise awareness for parades he says that he promised her he would ask his most talented students to put on a float for the parade but no one seems interested with jade storming out halfway through the explanation cat isn't even paying attention as she's at that moment trying to eat jade's keys psykowitz notes that the parade will be shown on national television and suddenly everyone is into it jade comes back in and asks for her keys at which point we learned that her house key is missing because cat ate it hey fun fact did you know that this actress is also a singer outside of this show back at tory's house the gang tried to think of float ideas but can't come up with anything even beginning to think of joke floats to pass the time come on guys be serious you want to look dumb on national tv trina tries to join in on the planning but everyone votes her out and calls her ugly causing her to storm out they randomly spin a wheel to see who on the team will pick their theme and it lands on cat and she picks a gigantic cupcake they begin constructing this as the gang complain about their enforced wardrobe of candy themed pajamas especially jade as she learns that she's expected to wear this as well i will pop your head like a zit graphic the kids ask psychowitz to drive them to pasadena but he explains that he has a semi-suspended driver's license when asked why he begins explaining that while he was in las vegas he gave a ride to several circus performers one of them was a woman with six fingers on her left hand tori cuts him off after this but the implication is that psykowitz got a handy so good that it led to him having a car accident charming as always nickelodeon their cupcake moves extremely slowly but they eventually end up on a dimly lit street where cop sirens and hip hop music can be heard in the background causing bec to comment that they're not exactly on sesame street i love sesame street now let her sing tori notices that a sack on board is moving and kicks it causing trina to pop out who says that she snuck on board to be in the parade this has no importance to the narrative halfway through the parade the cupcake suddenly gets a flat tire and they're stranded on the shady street worse yet the teens all lose their cell phone connection when someone steals the local cell tower and while psykowitz goes out to get help as soon as he mentions the cupcake to a series of police officers they diagnose him as a raving maniac and arrest him without reading him his miranda rights psychoids manages to escape and tori ventures out to try and find help running into a group of older men on a rooftop where it's directly implied that they are going to sexually assault her as a group before a transition cuts to them actually helping out and changing the tire that's statutory rape joke number 14. turns out these guys are all really into the parade parade and tori invites them to come along one of the men puts his arm around jade statutory rape drug number 15 right there and psykowitz runs after still being chased by the police so what i've gathered from kind of my brief voyages into the victorious fandom is this is generally considered to be one of the weakest episodes of this show and having sat through it i frankly have to agree that it deserves that condemnation i wouldn't call it the worst episode not by far but it does suffer from being kind of poorly thought out and rushed and just kind of boring and i also can easily say that this is probably the fastest i was ever offended by an episode of victorious not offended on a level that i started writing jokes but offended on a level that i wanted to write a strongly worded letter to someone about this show let me put it like this if victorious aired on fxx it would not be considered shocking or edgy if this was an episode of it's always sunny in philadelphia people would think it was one of the more boring ones but because it's a children's show that was marketed towards pre-teens and youngers i find the content of some of these scenes to be a little bit shocking i mean i just think that on children's television a punchline to a joke having the setup be that you think a rape is going to happen i think that that should be off limits to something that's intended to be watched by babies and that's the case you know when elsagate happened and that's the case when it comes to shitty sitcoms from you know 10 years ago on nickelodeon i think that this episode sullies the halloween set that's how strongly i feel about it i regret wasting the halloween set on this episode but the good news is that the next episode is not a lazy title swap as it is the bona fide official victorious christmas episode which means that we can now switch to the christmas set i put far less effort into this one so before we get into this one i just want to clarify something real quick this episode was actually produced as season 3 episode 1 wow the whole set's falling apart this episode was produced as season 3 episode 1 but it was distinctly aired during season 2. so if you notice any differences about how the characters are being presented or the world is being shown that's probably why so we open where we typically do on psychowitz's class with the usual cast banter but this time with christmas decorations robbie and cat flirt cat says something goofy while laughing jade threatens to assault cat cat gets distracted by her hair suddenly andre bursts into the room with tori clearly upset and when robbie makes a christmas joke andre flips him out of his chair declaring that he isn't in the mood for people's christmas spirit andre apparently is upset because he wrote a christmas song for his songwriting class but his teacher gave him a d and now for the most famous joke in the entire show's run i've always gotten a's in music how does a person go from an a to a d happened to me in eighth grade get it it's a boob joke jade has big boobs that's the joke sorry if i come across unimpressed i'm just kind of sex joked out with this show meanwhile beck keeps falling asleep in class and psychowitz asks him why we find out that beck can't sleep because there's a cricket stuck in his rv that keeps him up all night directly after this we find out that hollywood arts famously a school that doesn't have a prom has a secret santa program psychowitz has been matched with a random student who he hates xinjin's sister and asks if anyone wants to switch with him however no one signed up because they think secret santa is stupid psychoids decides the class needs some holiday spirit and announces that they will be forced to be involved in a secret santa program anyways and whoever gives the worst gift will have to go christmas yodeling with him on christmas eve you can probably guess this but everyone in the main six only gets matched with other people in the main six and what's funny about this is three or four episodes ago that would have been a plot hole but because of the last episode it cannot makes sense because they're the only people at the school who have free will tori is matched with andre for secret santa while her sister suddenly comes home with a massive tree and tries to drag it inside afterwards we find out that jade has been matched with tori and tries to get out of it while her boyfriend is jittery because he's become addicted to coffee he said he's not gonna change it so just deal with it why don't you just deal with it why don't you just deal with it cat begins offering people in the hallway her brother's christmas beef which makes people sick throughout the rest of the episode tori tries to give to andre a ceramic guitar she made but when robbie gives cat her gift it turns out to be a cotton candy machine with a man who will make her cotton candy all week and it is truly heartwarming to see exactly how happy this makes cat this is the best christmas present ever look everyone robbie got me a cotton candy machine with a man tory is so one-upped that she decides to get andre a different present after all trina knows that robbie is a symp so she invites him over to help decorate her tree knowing that she's pretty and he'll do anything for her you know she's just using you i know but when we're done she might hug me so i'm okay with it robbie sees something moving in torrey's bushes and it's gary busey what the [ __ ] beck turns out to be robbie's secret santa and gives him his gift he recalls how robbie talks often about a bully who used to pick on him when he was younger the same one who forced him to swallow a toy car when he was seven and beck reveals that the beautiful woman he's brought is robbie's former bully and the two end up going out on a date cat is meanwhile jade's secret santa and gives her a pair of scissors used in jade's favorite movie a teen slasher called the scissor ring very subtle guys tori asks for help on andre's gift but doesn't get a lot of good responses two words i bet they won't be helpful your problem i was right jade comes over that night and after tori suspects that she's brought scissors with her she searches jade's body don't be shy this [ __ ] show man so as her gift to tori jade says that she knows the perfect gift for andre however she says that before she reveals it she first wants tori to beg once again no heterosexual explanation for that and then trina sprays foamy white stuff into robbie's face andre gets back his secret santa gift and it's easily the best one so far the very cricket which has been keeping him up all night psykowitz asked to have the cricket and gives it to his secret santa what'd you get a cricket that's hot anyways the three main girls decide that as a secret santa gift to andre they will sing his christmas song in front of the teacher who gave him a d they take their trench coats off revealing skimpy christmas-themed outfits and tori sings a very very bad song i don't know how to explain this it's like each of these girls are trying to compete with each other over the very little screen time they have it doesn't feel like one song really it feels like an engineer randomly switching between three different covers of the same song and lyrically it's literally just them saying the phrase it's christmas over and over again but plot-wise what happens during the song cat mime's kissing tori on the cheek tori passes it along to jade and jade does this little feisty bite thing then the girls go up to the teacher and he stares at them in a way i don't like and apparently the teacher is moved by the performance and agrees to change andre's grade to an a let's be real here he wasn't listening to the song he didn't hear a single damn note cycloids decides that his own present was the worst by far and thus goes yodeling with a group of crazy strangers merry christmas everyone video posted in october i hope so that was the victorious christmas episode truly one of the most famous in the show's run and from my limited current perspective most likely a turning point in the show's history for many reasons some of them a little bit creepy this was filmed in october 2011 and from my personal judgment it seems to me that that most likely makes this one of the first episodes in the show where everyone on the show was 18 or older when they wrote the episode and i think that that's probably going to have an influence on the rest of the show i mean even when you look at something basic like costume design you compare season two to season three and there is a noticeable difference and that makes it feel feel like that someone on the show was keeping track of that to sort of have a counter on when they could get a little more out there with the show and i'm going to kind of leave it up to you guys to make your own judgment on what you think of that i do think that this is probably one of the better nickelodeon christmas specials i've ever seen just because it's all nice and fun but it's not derivative it's not like a meta parody it's not a dickens or a capra it's just this nice cute little story about how all these characters love each other and how tori and jade are probably definitely gay anyways i'm gonna put the halloween set back up but only some of it that that one sucked there we go okay so we still have one more episode of the season to actually sit through but it's not really canon so to most people that last episode was the season finale or the season premiere depending on who you ask either way i thought here would be a good time to kind of stop and give a little bit of a postseason wrap up in a sense stuff that i would like to potentially revise about the pin board segments of season one so here's a little bit of a funny story directly after that last episode after i finished watching it i actually got into a little bit of a holiday spirit which is a tiny bit of a sin because i'm filming this in october but the the point is that i i immediately right after that episode i got on spotify and i typed in christmas into the search thing and i clicked on the first like christmas pop song playlist and i noticed something interesting there in that playlist out of the first 10 to 15 songs two of those songs feature ariana grande or liz gillies and immediately this struck me with an overwhelmingly complex series of thoughts right like the first thought was kind of like it's incredible how victorious really did change the music scene there are people who are currently in the pop charts who would not be there writers and performers if it wasn't for this nickelodeon show and then at the exact same time my other thought was this show had so many talented people why the [ __ ] did it not use any of them liz gillies and ariana grande were singers before victorious and in fact they were best friends before victorious they met during their respective performances in a broadway musical titled thirteen and presumably this is how they were both discovered for the show because otherwise it seems like a massive coincidence that these two co-stars also got signed for the same nickelodeon sitcom and two years later ariana grande is hopping around on moon shoes and giggling about how she loves to eat house keys why are they not letting her sing she is a singer it is her destiny it was then it is now why are they treating her like drake bell on a budget i'm gonna take this off and y'all are just gonna have to be realistic about how your hair would look if you wore two hockey masks and a santa hat let's just let's drop the [ __ ] judgment for a minute alright don't get me wrong the status quo on the show has shifted substantially since the first season and for the better in season one ariana grande and victoria justice were simply not allowed to sing in the same room and now they are singing in the same room exclusively but it's always so that ariana can be used as a backup singer to victoria justice's songs so ariana grande has not had a full song dedicated to herself in this show since the competition two-parter in season one where she had a song with liz gillies and so while kat is still the highlight of the show it feels like the writers see ariana as a character performer and one they don't want to overuse and furthermore i think i would go as far to say that her character being so stupid has begun to impede on her musical performances in the actual show like in the christmas song from the last episode the entire time that ariana is singing she's kind of been instructed to keep the cat character going to like stay in that vibe and to keep that like faith that like doe-eyed face the cat has that's like i'm so stupid you probably shouldn't leave me alone you know like that whole vibe a cat and i'll be honest i think it really detracts from her performance in that music video or whatever you want to call that okay so we have cat out of the way let's cycle through the rest of the characters starting with andre i'm glad we had this conversation i think honestly the only revision i want to make at this point is probably tori i can only imagine the criticisms that exist of season 1 today also existed in 2010 so by the time they were shooting the rest of these episodes they had substantially changed direction as per what they wanted to do with this character and i think it really shows season one tori is really self-absorbed she doesn't really have an interest in anyone but herself she knows she's the main character and she kind of acts like that's the way it just should be season two tori is a little bit different in my opinion her vibe for this season is that she loves her friends so much that she would go to the ends of the earth for them and that leads to like comedic sitcom situations like tori is so nice that it gets a little bit wacky i think it's important to say that like season one tori would never have donated blood if it meant she potentially missed a performance in a play but season two tori literally almost kills herself trying to save robbie's life and that is a huge shift in how they're presenting this character but i don't think the show was really successfully able to pivot away from that in time because from my experience the general consensus still is that tori is a bad person and a bad friend and i do kind of wonder though are there going to be future episodes that do kind of stick closer to season one than season two because how could people hold that consensus if it's not even true throughout the entire show with all that out of the way let's now move on to the actual season 2 finale season 2 episode 13 blooptorius now those of you at home who have watched the two videos i posted before this one do you remember how much i constantly emphasize that the blooper episodes of these shows are really boring and there's not anything you could potentially come to say about them well the thing about that is i lied in my last video i spent a copious amount of time explaining to you guys the nsu the nsu is a theory that a long string of nickelodeon sitcoms take place in one shared universe most notably zoe 101 drake and josh on fabulous icarly victoria samming cap game shakers henry danger and every pro jared video ever made one thing i want to admit about that segment is that i was trying very hard to keep it simple to focus merely on the one-to-one connections between icarly and these other shows and the reason is that the nsu can suck you in and tantalize you with all the nuanced pieces and contradictions and there was one piece to the puzzle that i didn't talk about in that video because i didn't think you guys were ready for it and to be perfectly honest i'm not sure you're ready for it right now and you're going to see that for yourselves as we move beyond the nickelodeon sitcom universe and instead towards the nickelodeon sitcom multiverse icarly and victorious are both somewhat unique shows because they introduced to their audience not simply one universe or one canon where these stories take place but in fact three three universes for icarly and three universes for victorious however there are not six universes in the nsm there are in fact still only three because in each and every case every time one of these shows would introduce a subuniverse the other show would follow suit and then purposefully cross over the two different shows in that specific reality leaving massive implications for these newly created worlds and i have taken to referring to these three universes as nsu prime the nsu fool's verse and the nsu metaverse we're going to be talking about the fool's verse a little bit more at the beginning of season three as we discuss how victorious in that universe coexists not only with icarly but also saved by the bell drake and josh and the amanda show but for now let's talk about the nsu metaverse but before we do a quick warning here once we leave nsu prime i'm not sure when we're going to be able to make it back and as we venture into the most splintered pieces of the victorious canon i just want you guys to know that i too wish we could go back yes i know we can make it as long as you say it so tell me that you love me yeah tell me that i take your breath away i really don't feel comfortable right now have another [Music] maybe if you take one more then i would know for sure there's nothing left to say but tell me that you love me anyway so the nsu metaverse was first introduced near the trail end of icarly season 3. as you guys will probably recall near the end of that production block jeannette mccurdy fell ill and was suddenly admitted to hospital this led to the disastrous episode i won't cancel the show with a character's attempt to do the webcast despite sam apparently being in juvie the original icarly blooper episode was very evidently pulled together as a means to create more sam-like content without needing to draw attention to it and it was through this motivation that we were shown the first teaser of this warped version of our own reality in the episode miranda cosgrove is presented as the person in command of the icarly tv show not only being the star but also the showrunner producer and director after exposition carefully sets this up she demands a meeting with jerry traynor the actor who plays spencer and reveals that she is considering firing him from the show as she explains jerry has a tendency to mess his lines up on set and because of that he is the weak link worth getting rid of she then selects a compilation of his bloopers and blunders revealing that she keeps compilations for all cast members at jury's insistence and forceful clicking they eventually go through all of the sets including miranda's eventually and by the end she decides that he can keep his job on her show for now and that's the original blooper episode it's a very cute simple setup which is funnier when you can recognize the silliness of it as an adult but this little quirky storyline again designed to get around one of the leads being in the hospital set off a tradition with nickelodeon sitcoms which would continue for the next four years and lo and behold victorious would be the first to follow this trend and in quite the unique way ladies and gentlemen meet christopher kane an actor in the metaverse who is a completely sentient puppet and plays the puppet rex on the sitcom victorious so evan what kind of last name is jogia uh that's actually a really interesting story it certainly was christopher kane makes appearances in three main sources of media the victorious bloopers episode where he is hosting a nickelodeon special about victorious the second icarly blooper episode where the cast of icarly have been invited on his talk show and in a series of web exclusive videos hosted on theslap.com which features alternate material never meant for tv in the tv segments his bit for the most part is always the same christopher kane invites the actors out makes some kind of joke or awkward comment and then typically cuts them off so he can play a long collage of bloopers or just straight up kick them off the show let's take a look at some of your bloopers i'm sorry your bloopers the times you were acting but failed hilariously kane is posited as a well-known performer who is extremely washed up in the icarly bloopers episode he continuously coerces the guest on his show to do sponsor reads for a brand of salsa which he is trying to sell typically cutting them off so he can try and sell his brand further a highlight of the victorious episode is his long-winded build-up for an ariana grande interview before he finds out that daniela monet is actually the person that he has on next causing him to simply ignore her and wait for ariana to be ready he then attempts to interview daniella but is unable to keep his mind off of her red-headed co-star question okay do you ever sit up in your bedroom at night and think to yourself wouldn't it be grand if i daniela monet were actually ariana grande he has a similar bit in the icarly episode where after meeting boogie the actor who plays tebow he kicks him off without even showing the actor's bloopers christopher is implied to kind of be a pg-13 alcoholic as he always has a glass of apple juice at hand and i think the constantly lit incense is supposed to be kind of an insinuation of the visuals of chain smokers in old hollywood however the main defining trait most would attribute to christopher kane is that he is intended to be the show's older more established actor and also someone who has a sexual infatuation with the female cast members of his own show now i'm going to say a word then you say the first word that comes into your beautiful feminine head okay sounds fun i'm in love with you at the end of the victorious blooper episode after praising victoria justice's looks for several minutes kane professes his love for tori and clarifies that it isn't part of the show or a bit and that he's putting her on the spot don't toy with my affections aren't you married yes someone call my lawyer i'm done with my wife i'm trading up she rejects him immediately and he ponders why he didn't cut this part out before he tries to shoot his second shot but i might feel better if you were to kiss me stop you mean go no you mean yes this thirsting would continue in the web exclusive interviews posited to be part of his talk show now a quick note some of the segments you're about to see were basically lost media when i started writing this script so you're not exactly getting criterion level quality here and i apologize for the awful video quality in perhaps the most memorable of these three skits kane interviews liz gillies and announces once again his deep and passionate love for him please greet her with enthusiasm liz gillies how you doing christopher i'm lonely that's how i'm doing i'm sorry you asked me how i was doing and i told you the painful truth which is i live my life alone um i i go home each night by myself longing for someone to share the evening with so do you want to talk about victorious no i want to talk about the cure for my loneliness and there is only one cure so what's the cure you the cure for my loneliness is a heaping spoonful of liz gillies look christopher i told your people i do your show if we talked about my singing or my acting i'm sorry i've overstepped my balance yeah you have now a quick note the victorious bloopers episode was actually filmed near the beginning of season 2 in february 2011 and i can only presume the material is set when it was filmed meaning that in this segment liz gillies is her actual age 17. making this attempted child endangerment number 16. christopher then turns on mood lighting on his set trying to sing a romantic ballad to seduce liz despite her protests and her age so will you will i what press charges no no no no will you tell me that you love me no remove her remove me are you kidding are you serious are you kidding christopher so in short christopher kane is a sexual predator on the victorious set often using his power over the actresses to get what he wants in one slap exclusive video which you can still find online kane briefly asked victoria justice about her charity work before cutting her off and saying that no one cares i understand that you support a charity oh yeah i am i work the really great charity called books for kids that doesn't interest me it doesn't interest you i doubt it interests anyone even the kids no no see we we read books to kids and they really like it or they pretend to like it she eventually gets fed up and decides to leave at which point christopher attempts to blackmail her but first i'd like a foot massage what i'm not giving you a foot massage i have embarrassing photos of you what what you'll see when i post them on my blog no why why would you do that because you refused to give me a foot massage the metaverse gives me a splitting headache and i don't know why as we've established kane is also the host of the icarly episode ibloop 2 electric bloopaloo yes that's really what it's called thanks christopher thanks for asking me to be on your show i didn't ask you my associate producer asked you then she was fired uh i see here we're given a lot more exposition about kane as a performer we learned that he's still with his wife dede and that he despises her and that he has a long-standing rivalry with jerry traynor in fact we learn via audition real flashback the kane was previously considered for the role of spencer on icarly before he opted out and stormed off sat this rivalry has apparently recently been reawoken as we learned that jerry traynor is now dating a woman who kane was once in a very serious relationship with after i was finished with her she and jerry started dating yeah and she's a great girl yes i have some used snow skis i don't want anymore perhaps you'd like to have those too hey look now now let's be friendly apple juice after we cut back from trainers bloopers we see more of the two fighting over stephanie and here you see stephanie and me gazing at the sunset here we are together in the emergency room after stuff why are you showing me pics of you and my girlfriend here's one of stephanie me in a hot tub victorious was nominated for an emmy so was icarly i have fun in burbank kane repeatedly states that he's never watched icarly in his entire life until the instant he sees noah monk when he emphatically states that gibby is the best thing to happen to television in the last few years in fact he refuses to call noah by his real name only referring to him as gibby kane then has on miranda cosgrove whose last name he initially mispronounces which is a sin that can't be forgiven he makes the claim that she peaked when she was on drake and josh and attempts to coerce her into doing an ad read for his salsa when she turns him down he claims that it's for charity a fraudulent lie that he immediately gets called out on and that's i crime number 70. miranda does the line and kane celebrates you all heard it johnny depp's ex-girlfriend said she likes my salsa so go buy it i never dated johnny let's take a look at some hilarious bloopers he eventually wraps up the episode and there we go that's the metaverse see the bloopers episodes of these shows aren't totally meaningless and boring just mostly okay so in the last half an hour or so we have reached quite a few significant milestones all in rapid succession we have reached the exact halfway point of victorious in terms of total number of episodes we have reached the exact halfway point of victorious in terms of number of seasons and we have successfully exited from the mainstream nsu prime so we can now voyage into victorious media of different shapes and sizes as per usual we're going to take this moment to have our mid-season intermission and i've picked the topic already and when you guys see what we're going to be talking about i think you're going to be really really excited but first i want to take an intermission from our intermission i want to take a break so breaky that we just stop talking about victorious at all for a few minutes firstly i want to talk about a big issue with this miniseries as a whole and then i want to talk about garfield for like a good few minutes just going to talk about garfield for a bit because i want to and then i'm going to use that to get back on track to victorious it's all going to loop back around in theory to be honest i don't give a [ __ ] i just want to talk about garfield think about it this way i've been working on this mini series now for 10 months that has been 10 months of me standing in a room talking about nickelodeon sitcoms and i just wanna i wanna talk about some stuff that's been on my mind and i also wanna kind reach out and see if you guys can help me with a couple personal searches that i have been doing so in between finishing season one of victoria's in season two i decided to take a little bit of an elongated break to instead work on finishing the video that i arguably should have been working on the whole time which is icarly part two aka the end of icarly aka the video that came out before this one uh so i took some time off from this video finished that video obviously and worked really hard on it was really happy with the results was really happy with what my editors could pull together and it was a lot of work to turn around in the time we did as as per it usually is and i got it posted posted it to youtube decided to take a few days off went to visit my family we went out to dinner and then it was gone and the video no longer existed because while i was out at dinner viacom decided to take it down and so that video just stopped existing and it was really difficult for me not only because i had put so much work in but because i also knew that people were segmenting that video they weren't watching it in one go so i knew that there were all these people who were enjoying the video but now couldn't finish it and the weird thing about it is that it was a manual claim so it wasn't an automatic claim it's not like it took two days for an automatic claim to go through it was a manual claim so someone went to that video on purpose and took that video down which was weird to me because i was like why would you take down icarly part two but leave up icarly part one and obviously you know the obvious conclusion a lot of people had was because icarly part one is heavily nostalgic in how i present it and i icarly part 2 is heavily negative because the end of the last few seasons of icarly are bad i don't know if that's actually the case but it was just really confusing to me like why would you take down one of my videos about this topic but not the other one that doesn't make sense to me but what a lot of people didn't realize when that video got taken down is that there were still two places that you could have watched it even though the video was supposedly blocked and the first place was my patreon because i had a test edit on my patreon that was 100 done but was unlisted on a different channel and i posted on my patreon so people could see it early and i guess the logic is that viacom didn't want to pay me money to go to my patreon to see to find the link to block the video so that video never got taken down and so that whole time that that video was gone you could have just gone to my patreon and watched it there and the second place is canada i don't know why this is when viacom blocked that video they decided hey we're gonna leave it up in canada because those canadians seem like cool people aside from you know all the genocide and everything so so we're gonna let them watch icarly part 2 but no one else in the world can watch this video only canadians so uh this is a real quick reminder this video is sponsored by nordvpn during that whole ordeal if you had had nordvpn you could have just set yourself to a canadian server tell the internet you're canadian the internet would believe you and then you refresh the page and my video would have been back up because again for some odd reason only canadians are allowed to watch my videos once again my link is nordvpn.com q-u-i-n-t-o-n the reason i'm going on this tirade is to say in the very realistic situation that this video or any video that i'm working right now gets taken down after i post it the first thing you should do is go to my twitter see what i've posted there see where the video is blocked if the video isn't blocked in some specific country like canada or norway or whatever then you just use a vpn set yourself to that country refresh the page and you can continue watching the video but if it's blocked worldwide then i probably have an edit on my patreon which has not been affected by a manual claim and you can just subscribe to me on patreon give me a buck or two and get to watch the video regardless of what anyone has to say about it i'm very lucky that within like a 72 hour period i managed to get the video back even though it set it back i got the video back and i credit that entirely to you guys just bothering viacom because as i've always said bullying works and so i just wanted to put this little side tangent in the video so we're all on the same page about realistic ways to get around copyright takedowns anyways i'm going to talk about garfield now so in my last video i previewed a brand new patreon goal which i hadn't really publicly shouted out before which was that if we hit a certain number of patreon supporters i would do a video reviewing every single garfield video game ever released of which i think my tally is now at about 140 or so now i set that patreon goal really really high because i thought it would take us like a year to reach it but within three or four days of me posting that video we skyrocketed past that goal and obviously it was entirely because my video got taken down and patreon was a great way to watch my video but nevertheless we reached the goal that i was considering like one of my final patreon goals ever within like 48 hours and you know i want to encourage you guys to go down and support me on patreon but i can't keep making these new subscriber promises and these new patreon promises if i'm gonna make this video in that video in this video when i'm still right now working on the original sin the first promise that i made so instead i have added two new patreon stretch goals which are dedicated not to videos on the main channel but potential videos i want to do for the second channel for those of you who don't know i have a second channel it is called quentin retu's yes that is uh the best one i could think of i think it's pretty good and i like to post behind the scenes stuff little goofs and i'm trying to use it more often now but the idea is my next two patreon goals are four videos that i would theoretically post to quentin retwos so the first goal is a video reviewing every single heathcliff video game pretty basic the idea is on the same day i would drop the garfield video games video on the main channel we'd get the heathcliff mini video on the second channel you know pretty basic not a goal that's not that far away from where we are right now but the second goal which is the one that really excites me is that if we reach 3 000 patrons i will make a video chronicling and reviewing garfield knockoff merchandise that is garfield merchandise specifically made without the knowledge of paws incorporated and without the permission of jim davis those of you who follow me on twitter know that this has been kind of a recent hyper obsession of mine i've basically been going through and trying to chronicle as much information as i can about this completely you know unresearched topic and trying to save all the info i can and even going out of my way to try and buy uh quite a few pieces of garfield knockoff merchandise and memorabilia but what i've discovered is that in some cases garfield knockoff merchandise is harder to find than official garfield merchandise because official garfield merchandise is mass-produced it's shipped all around the world you can find it you know at your local goodwill but knock off garfield merchandise typically produced for a short window of time under the hopes of not getting caught you know sold on specific shady websites often without shipping to the united states and the really cool interesting stuff has a listing you know but but will be sold out by the time you find it some of the absolute highlights in the category of garfield knockoff merchandise that i want to own but i can't find anywhere include this indonesian plushie which is very clearly the cat from bob the builder but with garfield's face stapled onto the front this chinese garfield plushie which is not shaped like garfield or indeed any cat in the slightest but very clearly has all of garfield's characteristics filled into the spaces and finally my personal favorite this chinese garfield dressed like spider-man i call him andrew and there are a good 10 other funny jokes i can make about that if i can find this [ __ ] thing so i thought i'd do a little public service announcement not only to announce you know uh that you guys should support me on patreon to help pay for my editors and support this mini series and this and this and that but to also kind of say hey what you [ __ ] got one of y'all [ __ ] has the bob the builder garfield knockoff plush and and you don't you don't use it and you're like uh you i was gonna sell it but now you know what to do with it basically if you have a garfield plush um that you think might be a knockoff or that you just think you know is kinda neat uh i recommend emailing me at contactquintonreviews gmail.com and before any of you guys ask hey quentin have you seen the one on amazon that's a big meme that's all ugly yes of course i have i've bought four i dressed this one up in the icarly build-a-bear outfit do you wanna know why i've done that the only way you're gonna find out is if you go down to patreon and you pledge a dollar and you help me reach this goal this thing really is kind of gross so some of you probably think that i'm gonna be done talking about garfield now you are probably new here as we discussed in the last video i set up the patreon goal that if we reach that that magic number i was going to start working on a video dedicated to reviewing garfield video games and the first thing i have done since the moment we reached that goal is i have started going out and buying garfield video games to have physical copies of so this is my garfield video game shelf this is all the garfield video games which have arrived so far there are a few more coming in the mail i had to import a few um now as you can probably tell i've actually run out of room so i have a bunch more games that are supposed to go here at the start but the shelf is completely full so the funny thing is you know up on this shelf i got all these different garfield games from you know you know 20 30 years of history and then down here i just got the garfield cart games and then over on this side is wah field now some of you will probably question why i need a physical copy of games that can famously very easily be emulated and the answer is that i find as a videographer that having a physical prop to show the camera does so much in telling the story in the proper way i personally think that being able to hold this up and say this is the first garfield video game that was ever released i think that says a lot more than just showing you a screenshot on archive.org i mean this little disc tells so much of a story just holding this up you can start talking about the video game crash of 1983 and how that stopped garfield from reaching home console and how that crash was partially caused by the sudden innovation of relatively cheap home computers which were competing with consoles which is why the first garfield video game came out on a home computer you know just stuff like that and so my goal has now become to own a physical copy of every single garfield video game ever released in physical form and i'm very happy to say that including all the games on my shelf and all the games that are coming to me through the mail i now have only three games which i cannot find the first is a 1989 video game called garfield trivia game which was an apple ii game i believe that was released again on a floppy disk and i believe it was a mail order and thus it's really really rare the second is garfield labyrinth which is really infamous because it's a retool of a mickey mouse game from japan that was also released as ghostbusters 2 in america and was also an unlicensed knockoff of a pc game the point is that the garfield version of this game was released only in europe and so far finding a copy with the box intact has proved to be entirely impossible and the final game that i'm looking for is actually one that i already own and that is the famous and the infamous garfield and sonic pack i almost dropped it there that would have been scary um this was sent to me by a fan and so far it is easily the coolest thing that a fan has sent to me um because this is obviously an incredibly famous game i see this reposted all the time people don't think that the garfield and the sonic and garfield pack is real it's entirely real it was a pc release that sega did in 1999 to kind of repackage a bunch of their games together and it's become really infamous for this surreal cover which is absolutely beautiful so if i already have it why am i mentioning that i'm looking for it the answer is that with a lot of video games that have cardboard box releases you know you get the game you just throw out the cardboard box and so all that i have is the game in a jewel case uh there was no slip cover and i don't have the box and while i love that i have this i would really really love to have a copy with that famous box art you know included and one of the main reasons i think about this all the time is this is on my my shelf but because it doesn't have a cover from the side it looks like this is nothing it's just black and obviously like the box art for that game is what people love about it so if if i could get that somehow that would mean a lot to working on this project and it would make me really really happy and again i'm remembering as i'm going on this rant this is a victorious video but so basically once again i know that it's annoying that i'm talking about this in the middle of a victorious video but it's kind of my way to alleviate stress from the stupidity of this whole saga and it's also my way of saying hey i got this other stuff that i'm trying to build up in the background and i'm looking for this stuff because it'll help me out with these videos and it'll give me dopamine if i can get some of this fun stuff and i just had i've had this thumb in the back of my head this whole time like so many people are watching these videos for a reason i can't understand and somewhere out there there's someone who like has this thing i'm looking for and is maybe willing to sell it to me or to give it to me as a gift i mean if you've got you know the sonic and garfield pack or if you got a weird garfield knockoff or if you got the spirit of 76 statue or whatever just hit me an email at contactquintonreviews gmail.com remember to look up how to spell my first name and we'll see if we can make something work i would really appreciate it if you guys uh help me out with that voyage what i've loved about researching garfield video games as a topic is that it's given me a chance to look into a certain sub genre of video games which people don't take seriously unless they don't research they don't talk about and that is disposable gaming gaming which was meant to be enjoyed played for a second and then almost instantly forgotten and disposed of and that is a category of gaming which defines 2010's nickelodeon tv shows many of you guys will remember that in my last two videos i wanted to do a segment reviewing icarly video games but i couldn't find the time and i couldn't make it work thematically well i've got news people with victorious i found the time and i've decided it's definitely hopefully going to work out thematically yes our second victorious intermission is going to be dedicated entirely ignoring the garfield stuff to the topic of victorious video games we have a surprisingly high amount of ground to cover here so without further ado let's get this ball rolling so when discussing nickelodeon video games around the beginning of the 2010s one thing very tempting to skip over is video games that were hosted exclusively online whether that be on nick.com or the individual websites for some of these different shows but in my eyes these games were often the most important because they were the easiest to access and often some of my personal favorites as we've established victoria's heavily featured the use of an in-universe website known as theslap.com and apparently there are video game developers who go to this school because whenever the site is open up on screen you can very clearly make out what seems to be a games tab and that games tab existed in the real world as well and was one of the biggest draws of the site now online right now you can find this thing called flashpoint which is a community-run software dedicated to archiving flash games in a playable format but for some odd reason while icarly and garfield have basically been 100 archived by this team victorious hasn't been so lucky as only a handful of titles and oddities have made it onto the freeware so i'm going to be relying partially on fan-made run-throughs and that sort of thing and if i can't find out a lot about a game i'm going to tell you guys flat out but with that let's go ahead and cover every victorious browser game to ever exist starting us off is andre's date defense couldn't get this one to work next is beck and jade's rv racer couldn't get this one to work either then we have beck escapes hollywood hotties nope this one doesn't work all right yeah you may be stunned to get the picture ninety percent of the games on this site do not exist anymore they are hosted on shady gaming websites that basically steal and republish games but they still need flash to function and thus do not work clearly someone has the capabilities of making these games playable but that person is not me but in a way i feel like that flash games can be so basic that sometimes the titles alone can be the most entertaining aspect jade's prom wrecker kwaku's sushi tower xinjin's locker game tori's mustache bash wanko's warehouse stacker so yeah at this point i'm going to go through all of the games which have been archived or have youtube walkthroughs from back in the day because going through the numerous games which have no visual evidence whatsoever would be just kind of boring starting us off is the slap cookie rap this game is pretty simple we're playing cat and we have to make cookies for the school's yearly showcase because of course when you're having a showcase of the biggest talent at hollywood arts have ariana grande do the catering cat will become easily confused so you have to help her make orders now personally i was never good at this when this was my job so it took me a few tries to get this game right every time you finish a section you unlock a new option in the recipe board and of course you have to get it all perfect lest some kid's mom have a mental breakdown because you got her a white plate instead of a red one in the bad ending cat says that she's more confused than before and in the good ending she gives you a kiss for helping out one odd thing which is archived on flashpoint is a personality test which would define which character in the show you were most like and i figured while this isn't really a game it might be fun to play real quick and see which hollywood arts kid i really am you forgot to do your homework and psycho it's pulls a pop quiz what do you do well psychoids teaches a theater class so i guess just do panto or some [ __ ] and hope he uh grade some participation which adjective describes you this one's hard i can't be serious because i'm a youtuber i can't be genuine because i'm a youtuber and i can't be colorful because i'm white i guess i'm misunderstood boy i just realized that the mouse cursor on this screen recording is way off from where it really is and i don't know why okay so i got robbie but then i went back and changed all my answers until i got andre which i think is a real robbie move cats alien wipeout and cat's winter alien wipeout are two puzzle games released to the website they're pretty simple and have nothing to do with the show the kind of thing you'd find on the apple store in the first few years of that being a big thing cat is having a nightmare where aliens are attacking her favorite animals pigs in the original and penguins in the winter remake you have to destroy all of the aliens without harming a single innocent cat favored critter that's the game skate with cat is another winter game which is once again pretty simple you skate around as cat picking up candy canes boots and coffee and all while avoiding elves and penguins who will do you damage so penguins are bad guys now that's inconsistent i'm pretty confident that the plot of this game is that cat is stealing from the north pole think about it you're picking up iconic things from christmas but running into christmas authority figures deals you damage anyways i played this one for way too long i really didn't need to there were two games from theslap.com which do not have a functioning archive that i was able to find youtube let's plays for the first is rex's dunk for a buck the game stars rax who you would control to try and knock the regular cast into a dunking pit pretty simple stuff as the walkthrough guide angrily notes in the video that was the whole game that was the old game the second is locked up and it's basically an explanation of how tori and the gang escaped from prison at the end of the season 2 yerba episode and yeah it turns out tori is just straight up batman that's how she got out don't know why she was afraid of doing that stunt fall but isn't afraid of parkouring from one rooftop to the next without thought but hey at least now i got a pretty good idea of what happened to those boys at alcatraz i think they walked into a squid and then died instantly our final game is a unique one as it actually comes from near the end of victoria's shelf life i'm talking about nickelodeon block party once hosted on nick.com you can probably guess what this is without even seeing footage of it it's mario party but with nickelodeon characters and played on a browser instead of with bowser the game is a pretty interesting relic of its time if this had come out in 2007 it would have been released on console if it came out today it would be released on console but this was put out at just the perfect time where that didn't make sense and so is exclusively a browser game it's pretty simple stuff you pick a character you want to play two characters you want to play against and then pick a board from a specific show that you want to play on there you run into characters play mini games gain or lose coins again it's nothing original i find this game fascinating because it's so easy to forget this awkward middle child era of nickelodeon synergy oh boy when i think of nickelodeon i think of the penguins of madagascar i think of fanboy and chum chum i think a planet sheen i think of tough poppy truly the greatest lineup of shows to ever hit the network so yeah obviously i played as victoria justice and i picked the victorious level and i played it out just to see how it would go you know i've always wondered if beck from victorious and fanboy from fanboy and chum chum met what would they say to each other huh this is a really weird game to play with the live action choices because while the 2d and 3d characters are one-to-one with the art style you would see in the tv show with the live action stuff like this it's like yep that's definitely a girl good work game developers with all that out of the way it's time to move on to the actual topic that probably got you at home excited to hear about this segment of the video and that is victorious console releases as we've discussed many times one of the defining aspects of victorious is that it's supposed to be fantasy material making you wish that you went to a school like hollywood arts and the main purpose of these three main victorious releases each game different from the other and each game released on a different console was to give you a chance to explore that fantasy in other words what we're talking about with these games are victorious themed rpgs and we are going to start things off with the canonical first game in the trilogy hollywood arts debut for the nintendo ds and it's really cool that the first game we're talking about is for the nintendo ds because there's one other thing that i was saving to talk about until we got around to this segment and that is the official nintendo ds gaming accessory kit themed around victorious see this is what i'm talking about we got the props you're tuned into the [ __ ] story so here it is our official victorious gaming accessories kit i've bought a few of these in recent years and the funny thing is every time i get one of these it's always still in the box i never find one of these like out of the box used and the big thing i feel like that says to me is i don't think gamey accessory kits were marketed to children i think they were specifically marketed to like uncles that don't understand kids but want to be the cool relative so as a kid you would get this for your birthday or for christmas and then you would just be like well whatever i don't want this and then you'd throw it in the closet because realistically if you had a ds you were putting it in your pocket you didn't need like a big wallet for it and if you had a ds you probably had a bunch of styluses already i hate these big plastic cases because i never know how to open them up i guess i'm just going to try and kind of run a box cutter along the side here nope okay i found some scissors let's do this [ __ ] ouch ouchy wachi as a parent this is like the least safe thing you can expect your kid to open without help okay so here's what comes in this set first of all you get this victorious ds case that has like this cool 3d effect going on do you see that and you open this up and you just got a lot of nice room in there for some games in your ds and then the other thing this comes with which i think is the main steel of the set is the official victorious ds stylus this is shaped like a microphone very unique stylus in terms of the ds and a cool accessory to get in this set and here's a quick comparison between the victorious ds set and the icarly ds set i'm kind of split on which one of these i like more i feel like the victorious uh case is more practical you got more space you got a cool 3d effect there and the the icarly set meanwhile is a little smaller a little harder to squeeze that thing in there but it comes with a lot more stuff and you got a lot more pouches and i mean this that accessories kit came with so much cool stuff you have little packs for your games and there's like headphones that came with there that i lost but yeah that's the whole thing and so i want you guys to know as you watch me review some of these victorious ds games i am playing them with an official victorious ds case and an official victorious stylus victorious don't look at me okay so as we've set up the first game we're going to play is 2011's hollywood arts debut this is a very interesting game to play for a series of reasons that we're about to obviously get into the game starts with a character creation screen and while we're a girl by default we can change to a guy with a simple click of a button take that netflix comedians other than gender you can swap the hair and skin color but the only other option at this point is stretching or skewing the character's body shape once i made my guy as stretched out as possible i started my adventure we begin the game with tori approaching us in the halls as she welcomes us to hollywood arts she tells us that the school consists of a lot of friendly talented people except for one person jade who approaches and we talk to after tori leaves took you long enough okay first mistake why were you talking to tori i'm the only one worth talking to in this school and my boyfriend but you can't talk to him jay tells us that it's time for mr psykowitz's class but that there's a tradition that people who are new must wear silly outfits the first time they go to class we find a wig in the black box theater and head to class where mr psykowitz gives us a star for dressing up so fancy jade erupts revealing that she was trying to play a prank on us but as tory notes it apparently backfired psykowicz then challenges us to a break dancing competition [Music] wow this is just like the show i'm amazed after this tori suggests we go over and decorate our locker like she had to way back in episode 2 and i think i know just what i want to do a little bit of this a little of that here and there and there we go van gogh's starry night and now as a special bonus i'm going to draw a gigantic garfield attacking the town and he has a big spliff and that is where the smoke is coming from and their perfection now that we've finished chapter one of the game let's move on to episode two the bird scene tori approaches us and says that she's doing a play called moonlight magic and wants us to audition however psycho it's butts in and reminds tori that before we can take part in any school play we have to pass the bird scene tori tries to help us prepare but is obviously banned from giving us too many clues and there are several things blocking our path forward tori tells us that kat will be able to make us a perfect costume maintaining continuity to season two however cat is currently handcuffed to a railing in the hallway something that tori actually did in season one although she insists that it wasn't her this time she notes the cat looks like she needs to go to the bathroom so we'd better free her fast in order to free cat we have to go talk to festus the owner of the school food truck who has a pair of cutters however in exchange we have to look over his food truck and serve students coming to eat there and so starts our second mini game it's a little hectic but you get the hang of it you turn these little knobs to prepare a certain kind of food and then you make people's orders and then send them out for instance here robbie wants a taco cat wants a burger sinjin wants us away cat cat what the [ __ ] are you doing here where are you going get your skinny ass back here so yeah we finished the minigame festus gives us the cutters and we free cat who promises to make us the best possible bird scene costume before she runs away we then have to get andre to perform a song with us because the bird scene requires a pop song apparently now i want to lift the curtain really briefly to just explain something to you guys i couldn't find a ds with a capture card for this project so i'm recording this video with an emulator but the thing is this title is based entirely in mini games designed for the ds stylus so when you play these games with a computer mouse it's [ __ ] impossible so i spent this entire run through just royally failing to perform in the slightest and it's actually kind of surreal to have the tables turned on me so quickly now i'm on stage struggling to perform a song and victoria justice is looming over my shoulder giving sarcastic commentary about how i suck [Music] yes after this we meet back up with tori who has brought in a bird for us to train to do the scene with us and suddenly the gameplay completely changes we are now playing as the bird as we see ourselves training the bird by teaching it break dancing moves [Applause] oh no [Music] [Applause] nice work we do the play and cycloid says he hated it and asks us if we agree if you select no you obviously win the mission as anyone who has seen the show would probably anticipate now so far this game has done a phenomenal job of replicating memorable moments from the show without necessarily overwriting them however from here the game suddenly pivots direction starting with episode 3 and through episode 10 every single level is an adaptation of a specific tv story mimicking the beats of specific season 1 and 2 episodes so closely that the game cannot co-exist in the same universe however what's interesting about these levels is how they diverge from the main timeline in interesting ways there are two main limitations to this game firstly the developers created perfect replications of several sets from the show but only those at the school so places like tori's living room or psychoids house are totally off limits second you are intended to be the main character of this game and because you weren't in the original episodes in question accommodations have to be made very often characters will approach you and begin describing b plots of certain episodes which don't happen at the school and thus take place off-screen it starts to give the game a kind of surreal energy like you're a time traveler who knows about all of these events and is trying to pick up on context clues for where you've landed in history hey you guys hear about that zodiac killer for instance episode 4 is based on the birth week episode but because the birth week episode is mostly set in tori's house and in a recording studio most of the level is tori in a hallway describing the episode to you trina then approaches you and asks you to help design the cover to her debut album oh boy i think i know what i'm gonna draw and done episode 5 is based on j dumps back and it's perhaps one of the more interesting in terms of changes because it adds an entire b plot to the story just to make the gameplay work a little bit more in the story like the episode jade has broken up with beck over a disagreement but in the game beck has since gone missing as trina approaches we find out why beck is considered one of the most connected students at hollywood arts and trina believes that if she becomes his girlfriend he can help her get a role in the new resident evil movie after trina leaves beck reveals that he's been hiding from trina in a large cardboard box and comes out to talk to you the entire point of adding this to the game is giving you something to do in an episode that you were never supposed to be in throughout the level beck has you run errands and do petty tasks for him all while you overhear snippets of the main plot happening in the sidelines throughout the rest of the game you do such things as perform as a backup dancer for torrey songs play an instrument in andre's songs clean up a room that jade feels too lazy to do herself and dress up a set so tori can perform scenes on stage all in between running errands for the main characters to try and ease along story lines going on in their personal lives part way through the tedious list of all the things i was doing for these people i barely know it suddenly struck me i'm not the ninth member of this friend group i'm the second sinjin throughout this run-through i kept trying to change my costume to make my character look more like an [ __ ] but i eventually realized that the furthest i could possibly get was sharpay's brother episode seven is based on raparazzi and is overwhelmingly one of the most divergent stories instead of adapting the incredibly bonkers plot of that one the level is actually a sequel to the episode basically starting from where it ended and writing about five to ten more minutes of material at the beginning the gang are discussing how robbie has turned roberatsi into a cooking show and how he's quit his drama content because of the dirt that they have on him robbie then approaches tori and says that he's actually gotten bored with cooking and that he's decided to turn roberatsi into a prank show he then asks us to do a series of small favors for him which are in fact setups for pranks we firstly go to the lunch area where we witness kat and sinjin breaking up after briefly getting together at the end of the original episode sinjin's credit card apparently is for emergencies only and can only be used with parental authorization and cat was only dating sinjin to steal his credit card we i believe record this conversation and robbie posts it online we then hide a bunch of ketchup inside of andre's locker which i believe explodes making a mess tory cat and andre immediately accept that we were tricked into doing these things and they decide to tell on robbie to her grandmother which apparently does the job one interesting b plot the game invents is an extension of a running joke in one episode that andre has never been stung by a bee before in the original it's just a joke they tell a few times but in the game there's a conclusion where we actually trick a swarm of bees into attacking andre the bees then begin attacking everyone and we have to do a choreographed dance to slap them away you'll remember the episode about melinda murray the famous actress who gets backfired who tori puts in the hospital after trying to make things right well the interesting thing is that in this game you have a few different options as per how you want to try and make things right but no matter what you pick things end with melinda going to the hospital so at some point that wasn't even tori's fault god made that decision the final chapter based on a tv story is episode 11 i scream you scream that's not what the episode's called in the story tori has been locked into a demeaning contract with her older sister which she can only get out of if she gets a pop star to sing at her house luckily an ice cream company has been running a competition where letters can be found at the bottom of different pints of ice cream whoever can spell the word scream wins a private concert with quote a huge surprise pop star i wonder who it is they begin going through ice cream and at some point robbie says he's going to take the leftover stuff to a local playground to give to kids as he did in the original episode robbie then runs back to the school as he was mistaken as a pedophile and chased there by a group of parents he suggests that you dance to make the parents forget why they came there in the first place real quick can you imagine if you were a parent and this happened to you you chase someone who you think is a pedophile into a high school and you stop a student there and say hey a pedophile just ran into your school and their response to that is just and somehow that makes you forget why you came there the final episode is all about you preparing for the big showcase you do a song do a dance get a really low score but somehow get declared the breakout artist of the competition as the credits rule below a newspaper clipping is shown from teenage star magazine which reads tv talent show celebrity which is funny for many reasons the biggest one being that this means that in this version of the canon i became famous before anyone else in the cast hollywood looked at this lovable group of teens and they said hey that guy so we finished hollywood art's debut now let's move on to the second victorious game released on the exact same day victorious time to shine for the xbox 360 connect oh no so for those of you who weren't around or invested at the time the seventh generation of consoles was briefly ruled by a mysterious entity known as the nintendo wii i remember video games still having a kind of contentious air in the mid-2000s partially caused by news media insisting that they were the cause of all of society's problems and i recall the wii being a big hit because it was almost marketed to purify gaming's image wii was a fitness console you had to exercise to play a huge chunk of its most famous games thus the wii was good for kids little timmy asks for an xbox for christmas you get him away it's like slipping broccoli into his mac and cheese but i think the wii got away with all that because it was legitimately fun to play and a lot of its most famous games had a ton of effort put into them and this was all reflected in the fact that the wii for a time outperformed both the ps3 and the xbox 360. and so in the years after the week came out microsoft and playstation ended up trying to release knockoffs of the same basic idea first with the playstation move and then with the xbox kinect both in late 2010 as a partial outsider my hot take has always been that the nicest thing you can say about the connect and the move is that they did not represent the entire purpose of their respective consoles so when the gimmick of motion control games faded which it did almost immediately by the way you could still sit down and play those normal old school games that would slowly turn you into the joker now i haven't used to connect since i was in the 6th grade and i played just dance at some party so i went on ebay and i bought one and then i went and bought an xbox 360. the person who sold me this xbox offered to throw in like a bunch of well-remembered games from that era and i just didn't have the heart to tell him what i really wanted this for yeah we're going to be standing up for this we're going to be standing up because when i want to get around to gaming i want to do it standing up you all ready for this we're gonna play victorious and we're gonna become a big pop star it's what i've always wanted i settled i settled on tv show reviews but really the being the next drake is is my number one dream [Applause] [Music] man using the force is a lot harder than you would think it is like using the force seems so easy in the [ __ ] movies man me the jedi [ __ ] sucks dude wow it's like i'm really there okay so you guys might be wondering what could a victorious game on the connect possibly entail well it's actually pretty simple the game includes a selection of songs featured in the show and for each and every song you have a series of connect theme mini games that you can complete the narrative within the game is that hollywood arts has decided to fund a student-produced music video you are the newest student at the school and you're picked to be the lead because of how talented you are you might be crazy have i told you lately that i love you you're the only reason that i'm not afraid to fly my personal head cannon is that this is set in the same universe as the ds game but that i'm playing a completely different student after my original character became famous he left hollywood arts to pursue a career in the industry leaving behind the rest of the cast to dwindle in their total desperation i can't think of anything that would make the cast of this show more frustrated than the idea that one of the supposed no name dialogueless background characters would become famous before them and it is my goal to punish them to this fate over and over again for the first round of minigames you play through the game also shows you fully rendered cutscenes where one of the characters from the show will break down that specific minigame for you i call this drive by acting i will give you a request and you have to position yourself in the correct pose that's not what that means in the show it doesn't matter the first level is called act and features you being taught by mr psykowitz there he instructs you to take on various different poses basically if you try and imitate whatever robbie is doing in the background you'll do well enough in the second level we're instead being taught by andrei who is teaching us how to play some instrument featured on the song this is what a video game is i've been playing him wrong the whole time typically towards the end of the performance some cool effect is adapted by the instrument especially if you're doing well for instance here this electronic keyboard suddenly starts blasting out volts of electricity and several instruments literally breathe fire this school doesn't have like a great budget whenever you finish one of these levels the game shows you a collage of photos it took in the middle of your gameplay basically serving as a wake-up call for how much of a jackass you look like if you play with the kinect has anyone ever looked good in these photos i mean i mean if there's someone out there who has i just want to say i'll see you in hell next comes my personal favorite part of the game the singing portion hey that's the kid andre was talking about he's talking about me i'll kick that guy's [ __ ] ass hey you're lucky tori is really talented you should learn a lot from her i'm so sick of it your attention deficit those are the real lyrics to this song cat valentine fabulous describe your performance thanks cat but who cares what you think it's not like you sing or anything zinjin likes it sinjin likes it hey sinjin likes my song he's the only person i care about senjin says my song is good alright we're doing good okay so here's the great thing about the singing portions originally at the start i was trying to really put effort into them but as you guys saw i still missed quite a few notes here and there however i eventually realized something totally critical to my goal of finishing this title the xbox connect is so stupid that if you put the speaker of your tv up next to it it mistakes the vocals coming out of the tv as you singing initially i thought i'd have to still lip sync to make this work but eventually i realized that as long as i was standing in front of the motion detector while the song played i would pass the level automatically for the only ariana grande song in this game i ate a pizza during the mini game perfect score automatically i literally could not have done a better job if i had tried next comes the dance section which sadly we can't fake so easily we have to go ahead and at least try this section seriously because we can flunk it trust me i tried i don't think we can get away with playing the music for this one so i'm just going to mute it and sing whatever i want and this one is for the champions to the ain't one since i've been down [Music] i got what you're waiting for [Music] you was never really rooting for me anyways when i hit back at the top i'm gonna hear you say you came from long ago i never said i was a dancer was that oh that wasn't it we're still going we've entered the twilight zone i'm high on [ __ ] expired milk we're off on a wild goose chase and we'll be no strangers to danger the squadron will show no fear we're off [ __ ] they call this a new air in video entertainment i call it very very dull and finally we have the music video level where we're treated with a big surprise welcome welcome to my layer of cosmic lights i'm lighting director xinjin and this is where you learn to direct your video the better you perform the cooler it will look sendin's here holy [ __ ] the music video level is supposed to be a combination of all of the previous levels with you singing dancing and even briefly doing the pose acting we practiced with psychoids you're awesome traditionally the final two levels of every song feature you transcending the sound stages these levels are based on as some kind of surreal visual comes into play this can be something as simple as a bouncing postcard style illustration in the background or something as complex as the room ripping apart sending you cascading among impossibly tall skyscrapers until you end up at the visual of a gigantic rex attacking the buildings full disclosure for the first song of this game the one that i was still trying to take seriously i had absolutely no previous knowledge that the visuals were going to change at all so when it happened let's just say i wasn't exactly prepared you might be crazy have i told you lately that i love you you're the only reason that i'm not afraid to fly crazy that someone could change me now no matter what it is i have to there's a giant [ __ ] mr cycle with his head in the [ __ ] ball in the background how can i how can i shoot a [ __ ] music what is this [Music] no i didn't do a good job do they capture when i start freaking out i think it's right there wow what the [ __ ] is this game and yeah that's basically the whole game it's just those few levels repeated for every single song with different backgrounds every time my favorite thing to do during this game was to just sit down halfway through because in the eyes of the connect camera it was like i had just teleported away and it never knew how to handle that like look at the amazing shapes that i made this poor character model twist itself into isn't it beautiful in some odd way like a priceless piece of art being twisted into nothingness at a recycling plant here during this song tori glitched out and started t posing and as some kind of weird act of solidarity i joined her for the entire thing every connect game i've ever played feels like it never leaves the tutorial that's the best way to explain it it feels like i played the same tutorial level over and over again for almost four hours and the whole time i was kind of anticipating when the real game was going to start and then the credits rolled here's a random compilation of a bunch of mildly funny moments from the playthrough [Music] i just forgot why like trina she's miss piggy it's so obvious now those in dolphins are gonna hit any time now this is the reel that i'm the most proud of i just had to do it to him [Music] i know you're pining i've unlocked legs i've unlocked legs dressing time hey if shorts are called shorts why don't they call pants longs man cat you honestly just [ __ ] me up i need a break now that [ __ ] me up it's pretty sad to say that the best part of this game unironically is the menu screens because each menu screen features two kids from the show and if you linger around you can overhear conversations that the characters are having another sunny day at hollywood arts hollywood arts rocks what's the deal with hotel soaps why is it so tiny i think it's cool that the school is gonna find a music video hey spring breaks in a few weeks any vacation ideas i used to be scared of everything including guacamole i haven't been insulted in three minutes have you seen the new student yet we should totally say hi my voice always sounds so great in the shower i should really turn my bathroom into a recording studio did you see what was on the slap last night that was crazy yeah i had three main takeaways from eavesdropping on the menu screen conversations first of all cat is always funny and adorable [Music] second beck is definitely trapped in an abusive relationship with someone who doesn't value him at all if i was going to be on a deserted island and i could only bring one thing i'd bring my pearcat really is this supposed to be entertaining jade is angry at me again she took my car piece i would expect you to run in fear when i smile not smile back and thirdly there is some weird arg [ __ ] going on in the background of this game psycho wits is acting extra strange lately i wonder what gives have you seen my doppelganger walk by i think they're after me i wonder what's for lunch today you know what rex i appreciate our friendship oh touching i was told that there were loitering strengths have you seen it looks like i won't be able to make our double date on saturday for me i want to wrap things up here with one last clip which i really think was the total highlight of this playthrough [Music] oh my god senjin are you okay i'd help you but i'm remixing anyone nope sorry i'm remixing yeah hope you don't die i'm too busy remixing you see he's going to the hospital but i'm ambivalent i really am a victorious character now it's brilliant this is such an immersive experience the fact that this game even got made is so very strange to me because i just can't imagine that there was this huge crossover between people who watched the sitcom victorious and people who were jumping ship to get a connect i mean this kind of teeny bop shovelware was always meant for the wii and i just feel like victoria's fans were probably more likely to already have that console and so it's hardly a surprise that the very next year nickelodeon decided to return to releasing games on the wii leading to our very final victorious gaming venture victorious taking the lead okay so um [Music] kind of like a brief pause right here as kind of like a detox from the whole like connect gaming experience um so directly before i recorded this segment they announced the voice of garfield in the upcoming 3d animated garfield movie and it's chris pratt again so i'm just going to go ahead and take this [ __ ] down and and like to take take all this apart and i've i've decided i'm i'm just going to stop i'm going to stop making jokes i'm going to stop making jokes because every time i do the world becomes a little bit of a worse place to live in now a quick correction before we get into this earlier in the segment i told you guys that there are three victorious games which were released for home console but now that i have reached to the other side of this voyage i can confidently say that there are in fact four and the reason for this discrepancy is that i initially believed that victorious taking the lead for the wii and victorious taking the lead for the ds were the exact same game i mean look at them don't they look like the same game however having now finished both of these i can now say with ease these two are so totally completely different that considering them to be the same release would just be stupid as far as i can tell two completely different video game studios one known for focusing on handheld releases and one known for focusing on console releases were both given the same basic one sentence prompt and were then told to just go completely wild with it otherwise both games feature you playing as some character from the show they both feature you putting on a play as said character and they have almost nothing else in common i don't even consider them to be the same basic genres of video games taking the lead for the wii is a point-and-click puzzle solving adventure where you walk around the school pick up objects and try to use said objects to either further the narrative or just goof off on the side at the end of most levels is typically a motion controlled rhythm game where you watch one of the characters do something amusing meanwhile taking the lead for the ds also features a collection of rhythm-based mini games all of which totally unique to this port but there's not really any other kind of gameplay to be had outside of the rhythm games the best way to describe the title is that it's like a victorious themed light novel that you just kind of click through until it's over you'll note that while the wii version uses 3d models of the characters left over from the connect game the ds version mixes elements from the first ds title with stock images of the actors next to text the wii version also features extensive voice over work from the main cast while the ds game only uses voice over for folio in the mini games but i would say that it's hard for me to pick which one is truly better because they're both so different and i've learned to appreciate them for different reasons i would say that taking the lead for the wii is the victorious gaming title that had the most thought put into it they were very very careful with this game and it's not a short game it takes a long time to play and because of that one might call it kind of a magnum opus on the other hand taking the lead for the ds is the most charming victorious game it's the shortest one by far but it's also the one that features most of the elements that i think people really wanted out of a victorious gaming title as i mentioned both versions of taking the lead completely abandoned the idea of you being the main character and instead feature tori as the playable character kind of you see while the wii version indeed features you playing as tori with jade being your obsessive antagonist throughout the ds version does something a little more creative it gives you the choice of either playing the game as tori or as jade this immediately opens up a ton of creative elements within the story the game only has two save slots and the clear intention is that they want you to experience the story from both aisles one time playing is tori and one time playing is jade so the plot of the ds game which i again insist has nothing to do with the plot of the wii game is that hollywood arts is going to be hosting a brand new play directed by mr psykowitz an adaptation of shakespeare's romeo and juliet with the small changes that it's now a musical oh and also juliet is now a vampire and wants to turn romeo into a vampire as well you can probably tell that the narrative vibes a little bit more when you're playing as jade so tori and jade both want to audition as juliet and they get into a competition over this the interesting thing about tori and jade's storyline in this game is that a good handful of scenes play out exactly the same no matter who you choose to play so in other words jade has the same dialogue when she's the antagonist as she does when she's the protagonist this is all carefully done to make sure that the two aren't simply swapping personalities and in both versions it's very consistent that jade is the person obsessed with tori and is always instigating fights while tori just wants to be nice however my absolute favorite detail surrounding this gimmick is that choosing between tori and jade not only changes the outcome of the narrative it changes the title of the game when you play as tori the game is called victorious when you play as jade the game is titled jaded basically giving us a canon confirmation of what this show would be called in a world where victoria justice was never born there are however two notable mini-games in this section dedicated to other characters in the first you play as rex who is flirting with northridge girls and trying to stop robbie from screwing it up in the second you play a psychowitz who is high as [ __ ] balls and thinks he's in a dancing competition with a chair whom he is losing against [Music] eventually tori and jade audition for the role of the vampire queen juliet and they both make it to callbacks and face off one-to-one in the tory path tori is cast as juliet and jade swears revenge and quits the play in the jade path jade is cast as juliet and tori says that she's fine with that and decides to work backstage with senjin in both versions beck is cast as romeo the next day several technical things go wrong at practice and jade slash tory openly accuses tori jade in the tory run jade openly admits that she sabotaged the practice on purpose but in the jade run tori says that all of the glitches were completely accidental robbie calls tori out on this recalling her tech theater exam where she received a higher score than anyone else in the history of the school in this version of the run it remains unclear if tory really did sabotage jade but all that matters is that in both versions beck storms out of the play because he can't deal with the two fighting all the time this means that the role of romeo is now going to go to beck's understudy robbie who only took the role for the big kiss at the end that night tori and jade both have the same nightmare where they're being haunted by images of robbie wanting to kiss them the night of the play they meet up the next day and agree that they have to put their differences aside and try to act like friends a big theme of season 3. they do a public dance performance together and this convinces beck that they're totally amicable now and he comes back to do the part of romeo although i will remind you it's a very weird adaptation of the story oh vampire queen transform me into a creature of the night so that i can live by your side forever all it takes is but a kiss and you shall be transformed then a kiss it shall be give me the kiss of a sweet undying death in both versions of the game the play goes perfectly psykowitz meets with you afterwards and pitches a play about a man who falls in love with a coconut and asks you to be the coconut he then asks who is going to stay after to help him clean up causing everyone to leave he mutters teenagers and then we fade to the credits the taking the lead dsport is a very charming thing i think it works because it's so short it's only about 40 or 50 minutes you know one way or the other and at the end of the day it isn't actually about tori or jade winning over the other person it's about these two coming together and finding common ground and trying to find some peace there and meanwhile taking the lead for the wii is the direct opposite situation this game is so complicated and so long and even if you know what you're doing it is a four to six hour play through situation which is a really long amount of time to invest into a point-and-click adventure for the wii because it's kind of like hey my arm is getting tired can we just stop and i know what you guys are thinking quentin you sat through five hours of victorious themed content what are you a [ __ ] loser one thing i tried to do while i was playing this is kind of put myself into the minds of the people working on this game because i was just thinking about it and it's like video games based on tv shows and movies used to be everywhere and i mean everywhere every time like a kid's property came out for that was a tv show or a movie it was like guaranteed guaranteed that there was going to be an immediate video game adaptation i mean think about like dreamworks right think about like dreamworks movies from like 15 years ago i mean i'm talking about like like b-movie uh shrek over-the-hedge megamind every single one of those movies had like a shitty like ps2 shovelware game that came out immediately i think while the movies were still in the theater somehow and nowadays this just isn't a thing and mostly for good reason but i find myself just relating to these developers so much and here's why these were fully grown adults like these were adult men and women who were forcing themselves to become hyper invested in pieces of children's entertainment which were not really culturally relevant and they had no reason to watch otherwise and that's what i do and the vibe that this video game it gives me is that there was someone who worked on this title who probably also worked on the connect game who went like totally overboard with their research for that i'm talking about someone who watched like every piece of victorious media ever made in preparation and then one day someone goes hey did you know they're ending that show like they're filming the last season right now and he goes i am not going to get to the end of this and find out that i memorized all of this useless information for no reason so we're making a new game we're making a new one and we're putting it out this year and we're gonna pick we're gonna pick a specific point in season three where it's set there's not gonna be no character creation screen it's not gonna be no dancing game because i'm gonna put in every piece of information that i have learned about this show into this game and it's gonna be set at that point in season three that we choose and it's gonna be [ __ ] canon i am making the ultimate victorious gaming experience and this level of detail is evident from the moment you boot up the tutorial level in the opening section of the game tori is in detention with jade who talked her into skipping class and the door to the detention room is being guarded by none other than otis which begs the question who is otis well remember way back in season 1 episode 3 when hollywood arts had a cop security guard well otis is a reference to that security guard a character at the school so obscure that he hasn't been seen or referenced in almost 40 episodes although it's worth noting things are a little bit confusing here it's very clear that otis role in this game is an allusion to the character from episode three but that character was named derek and was played by robert christopher reilly otis actually originates from an entirely different episode as he was melinda murray's security guard whom tori sneaked past and that character was played by rodney j hobbs who also voices otis in this game out of universe i'm presuming that this character was supposed to be derek but they couldn't track down the actors so they went with a similar security guard that's pretty easy to mix up in universe i'm guessing that odos was fired from his job after melinda was injured on set due to his negligence and maybe tory hooked him up with the new job at hollywood arts but either way i feel strongly that the creators of this game intended we would notice this and start a massive fight about it because this game is a shitstorm of continuity and in jokes and it only gets deeper from here so after tori and jade get out of detention they wander the halls and find psychoids putting up posters for his next big play a very non-vampiric adaptation of romeo and juliet prepare to weep for the most famed of star-crossed lovers man i love the theater tori says she wants to try out for the lead but jade says to get real as obviously she will be getting the part and jade honey have you looked at the poster that mr cykowitz just put up he might have a bias tori tori i take it you know all about the greatest play ever written cats the next day tori meets up with psykowitz and manages to pass a pop quiz about shakespeare which allows her to audition for the play her script however is blown through a window throughout all of the school but once she gathers all the pages trina offers to help her read lines i just described like three levels one of the things i respect the most about this game is its ability to come up with b plots that feel entirely authentic to the source material while still seeming to be original for instance early in the game if you talk to robbie you'll discover that he's become depressed because he thinks he needs a new talent consistent with him bombing as a stand-up back in season 2. if we find a magician's hat and then give it to him this will inspire him to begin training in the art of magic something that becomes a long-running joke throughout the rest of the game and again as far as i can tell the game developers made this up despite it absolutely feeling like something that could happen in the show paradoxically i think some of the side quests get kind of pedantic and start to really weigh the game down in the third section you're trying to convince beck to feel sad so he can connect to romeo and nail the audition so you run all over town trying to find something that will make beck sad and it turns out the thing that'll make him sad is a cd that jade has borrowed meaning that it was one foot away from him the entire time back this is [ __ ] if i wasn't so insanely good at parkour i would be so mad right now anyway skipping through a lot of filler jade rips up tori's script tori has to find it scattered throughout the school again she tapes it back together and then she does the audition the next day psykowitz comes in and announces that he couldn't choose between tori and jade and thus they will have an audition off where the guys in the class will vote to see which girl they like the most beck andre robbie and that other one sinjin and here's where we really diverge from the ds game so at the beginning of level one of chapter two we try to talk to andre but find that he is totally unresponsive it turns out the jade has given andre the gift of a brand new pair pad and he has become totally absorbed and addicted becoming mentally incapable of interacting with the real world we find out that jade has only bought pair pads for all of the boys and everyone believes that she has done this for bribery or worse hypnotism now this is the kind of boomer [ __ ] that i look for in my teen sitcoms tori eventually is able to click on the right series of objects and plays a guitar so badly that it offends andre into consciousness now totally awake tori asks if she can have his vote and andre says that he'll vote for her if she can do him a favor after he got his pair pad his grandmother ran out of the house and is hiding somewhere on campus if she can find her and convince her to let him keep the pair pad andre can go home we find miss harris in a bush by the outdoor cafe and attempt to sway her opinion eventually we make miss harris a fake pear pad out of cardboard which she believes to be totally real she says that she loves it and andre can come home the next level is set at the karaoke doki from the season one two parter and features sinjin having become a pair pad zombie as well in the story trina is trying to do a stand-up routine at an open mic but is bombing because she's run out of jokes tori agrees to help presuming that this will somehow help her get to senjin she's given a joke book by mr psykowitz and delivers this to trina who tells a joke so funny that cat spits all of her water all over shenzhen frying his pear pad sinjin immediately blames tori saying that she broke his pear pad and now she has to fix it we dry it out using a hair dryer from tory's house and then we get andre to power it back on at school sinjin is happy and agrees to vote for tori at the auditions next we have the robbie zombie level which is easily the trickiest so far since he has been given his pair pad robbie has become obsessed with a mobile gaming app which he has been playing for 12 hours straight much like i have been playing the rpg action adventure game rage shadow legends every day for nearly two years with thousands of champions new exclusives coming out every single day and hadoop system which will never be implemented for once tori is totally stumped on what to do as robbie is such a unique person we asked sinjin if he would be willing to hack the game and shut it down from the inside but this is something that he immediately turns this down on i would never violate another man's gaming experience that's just wrong however i think the solution to this one is rather obvious i mean what is missing from this picture what is missing from this image of robbie right here it's obvious right rex the puppet clearly robbie has become so immersed in his pear pad gaming experience that he has forgotten about rex and has left the puppet somewhere around school so all we have to do is find rex and bring the puppet to robbie and this will wake up the subconscious part of robbie's brain which is rex as we've all agreed and look right here there's a backpack sitting by the lockers in the hallway i wonder what's going to be in there if we investigate [Music] i was running out of air in there dory you may have saved my life you see there we go now we got rex and we can go over to the other side of the school where robbie is and yeah uh rex is alive i'm glad we all had this talk for the rest of this level we get to carry rex around and you can use him to click on stuff and he'll say things and it's very overt that rex is just capable of talking and existing on his own without robbie being around look sinjin it's rex uh hey rex hey yousef what's up beanpole whoa how is he talking what do you mean yeah it's my guy what do you mean uh nothing never mind we take rex to robbie and despite our best efforts we just can't wake him up that way wake up you idiot pow bam die alien scum but there's a backup plan robbie is easily distracted by dancing ladies so tori gathers up cat and trina and they all dance right next to him causing him to drop his pear pad oh man i dropped my pear pad i guess the internet was right they do spontaneously combust tori asked robbie if you'll vote for her at the auditions and while he's hesitant rex answers for him course you will you idiot because i say so and because you left me in that backpack that smelled a stale sandwich oh sorry rex robbie agrees and then offers to show you his latest magic material in yet another rhythm game which ends in rex floating up from robbie's magic hat in an incredible spectacle the next level is called beck the zombie and is easily the weirdest one in terms of direction at the start of the level two weird things immediately stand out to tori number one jade is acting extremely nice and cordial and number two beck is not a pad zombie he hasn't been sucked into an app or lost his free will he's totally the same old beck unchanged except in one small way he believes that jade is trying to turn over a new leaf and didn't gift the pair pads to bribe anyone but just to be nice jade is nice now you just have to learn to be nice back despite the fact that nothing about the situation seems to affect tory in any way and the fact that she easily has enough votes now to become juliet tori becomes obsessed with proving to beck that jade is still a bad person this entire section feels like it's written by someone who doesn't like tori and wants to highlight that she's not a good person which again implies that whoever made this game is apparently a really big fan of this show sir tori barr is a miniature recorder from andre and tries to coerce jade into breaking character on tape much to no avail after this fail she meets with senjin who has his own plan you could just do what i do i'm going to regret this but what is that i just record jade saying lots of things then edit it so that she says how much she loves me that's creepily brilliant just get her to say i bribed everyone with a pear pad she wouldn't say that she just needs to say the words bribed everyone and pair pad in any order i'll do the rest sinjin you're a genius and so tori begins approaching jade and baiting her with various questions and items all to get her to say the specific phrases that she needs to falsify evidence against her during this brief section of the game the other characters in the level will suddenly change their tone to that of fear tori are you sure that jade's the mean one wait you don't have to make me angry now do you i gotta be honest with you tori you're scaring me right now you eventually piece together enough audio you show it to back and he immediately calls you out on your [ __ ] that sounds like some good splicing by senjin and then the level ends literally the only point of this was making tory look bad next we have the final level of chapter 2 where cykowitz asks you to gather all of your friends to do a test before the audition this involves going around the school and doing favors for people so they'll be able to help you out now my favorite thing about this level is that the game developers didn't want to add walking animations so instead the characters just yeah literally whenever someone goes somewhere without you they just start waving and then fade into nothingness literally they peace out tori the accident wasn't your fault you have to move on you do the audition yet again and this time it's the balcony scene and while my wee lags the cutscene tories announced the winner however the next day psykowitz comes in with some bad news despite all their hard work the play has been cancelled and while all of the kids want to know why their teacher is too broken up to explain it any further we go into the hallway where kat tells us that jade might know why the play was canceled we asked robbie where jade might be and he makes an admission he accidentally used his magic to banish jade from reality right really yeah apparently robbie's magic has gone too far this time and jade is just gone we asked him where jade might be and he notes that he's heard theories about quote dimensions that exist on top of ours i take this to be a clever fourth wall joke as the game often takes a bird-eye view of events and thus the universe on top of robbie's would logically be my living room this once again implies that we're not quite back in kansas but maybe i should have guessed that when i pulled rex out of a backpack and he offered to end the game early for me incredible speed running tactic anyways we find some glitter for robbie and he does the same magic performance on us sending us to the janitor's closet jade reveals that she's hiding there to make robbie anxious as a joke and she does know why the play was cancelled after all it turns out that the gang were so caught up about the casting that they forgot to sell any tickets and so vice principal rob riggle canceled the show vice principal rob riggle by the way is a character going to meet in season 3 he's in a single episode that's not his real name it's just what i call him tori decides to try and sell the rest of the tickets starting off with a bake sale that causes a strong number of tangents before she throws a party with a memorable number of throwbacks and eventually she's able to literally just give them all away she summons vice principal rob riggle who says he will only meet with her after she passes out three random detentions to her friends after we do so riggle is enraged to find out that we've been attempting to continue the play against his will as we learned that he actually cancelled it because romeo and juliet is overdone tori explains that they've modernized the text and to prove this they do another performance set to a rhythm game specifically the final scene of the play what the heck romeo was dead oh he must have poisoned himself and he drank all the poison that totally sucks maybe there's poison left on his lips this is the greatest suicide themed rhythm game i've ever played so yeah the play is on but a brand new series of issues suddenly arise psychowitz gives jade the stage manager role and she gives jobs to all of the wrong people down to having trina be in charge of music when psykowitz hears this he immediately gives the stage manager rule to tori instead and she fixes everything and this continues throughout the rest of the game as tori tries to prepare for her part but continuously has to do everyone else's jobs instead trina gets put in charge of concessions we make the drinks robbie gets put in charge of set decoration we gather tools and materials for him andre gets the music role we have to instruct all the members of his band what kind of music to play jade eventually decides to make peace and works on the fog machine for the play but accidentally stains the costumes which cats spent so much time making they're able to use the fog machine to get all of the costumes back to normal around this point is also my personal favorite rhythm game the one where jade shatters the fourth wall and begins making fun of you for playing the game what's this oh some sort of game so am i just supposed to stand here victorious let go of the buttons this is the best you can do oh is that your score opening night comes but one final thing goes wrong there is a sudden electrical shortage and the smoke machine breaks vice principal rob riggle announces that it was sabotage and that it was either jade sinjin psychois andre's grandma or the school cop it's the cop it turns out it was the school cop and he admits that he accidentally broke the fog machine and jade is given detention what what did i do anyone else have anything to say no no mr robot uh-uh this matter is settled the play is saved and we repeat all of the previous romeo and juliet rhythm games but now in sequence and with proper costumes and sets i'm totally dying that's it that's the whole game it's hard to explain it just in the description there but i actually really did enjoy playing this game i don't know maybe it's that it made me kind of nostalgic because i do kind of miss that like genre of early 2010s like tv related video games that kind of fit into the continuity and almost served as like an extra season of material to kind of throw into the middle of your binging experience it really makes me think like the adventure games i don't know how many of you were around for that but that was a big part of the early 2010s for me so i don't know i had fun with this one i think the only unkind thing that i would say about the wii version specifically when compared to the handheld counterpart is that the ds game is just paced like a regular episode it's so short and quick and it has a bunch of natural beats that again do feel like kind of swapping back between a plot and b plot and the wii game just doesn't [ __ ] stop it ain't got no breaks it's just going and going and going and going and going and going it is so long that it's kind of ridiculous uh speaking of that sentiment uh on the topic of this intermission i feel like i went a little bit overboard with this one just a smidge just a smidge too far with this specific intermission that's the thing about this project i keep using words so much that they lose meaning like mini series yeah it's 13 hours long no but it's a mini series that's how i feel about this intermission where it's like like is it really a break from the main content of the of the video when this intermission is now probably longer than like my season analysis for the previous season you know what i mean like intermission come on but hey you know i figured we've been here a while and you guys are probably kind of comfortable with hearing me talk about this specific arena of conversation and i figure if you've watched this far you'll probably watch me talk about just about anything so i thought we could round this out by talking about uh some of my other video game interests starting with this so the very first video game that i ever played was jack 2 for the ps2 and in my opinion jack and daxter is one of the greatest video game sagas ever told in the digital age so um there's so much to say about jack and daxter it's very contentious because it has this massive tone shift in between the first and the second game which a lot of people find to be a little bit off but obviously because i started i don't know in the fact hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to victorious season three now typically in these very recent videos i've been kind of starting from the beginning of every season and reviewing everything completely chronologically but this time i want to shift things up a little bit so we can begin on season 3 episode 7 april fool's blank those of you who've been paying attention will know that this is the anticipated april fools episode which is not intended to be canon now um this episode is mostly just weird and boring but it's notable to me for two main reasons reason number one is that this is the introduction of the third and final victorious universe and reason number two is that this is the final icarly crossover in the series until after the series ends now you'll remember that the icarly april fools episode which aired right before this was a parody of clip show episodes with most of the segments being surreal takes on different iconic icarly moments and episodes well the victorious episode is actually quite different being more of a uhf style compilation of movie and tv show parody some of which i personally don't understand or recognize which makes me believe that the kids at home really didn't understand what was being made fun of here so yeah let's go ahead and get into this one at the start of the episode tori bursts into mr psykowicz's class very late trying to play an april fool's joke before she's shut down by her classmates who say that no one at hollywood arts really plays april fool's gags and that it's mostly for kids tori tries to argue that april fool's prank should be something that creative people enjoy before cat snaps and tells tori to let mr belding finish his class now as screech was saying a world without pants is like a donut [Laughter] mr belding then steals torrey's purse and runs away at which point mr psykowitz reappears and affirms that no adult but her is into april fool's day cat blows a trumpet in tory's face and drake bell runs in and picks her up off the floor he then sees the camera and runs away classic drake bell rushing to high schools to pick up teenagers these jokes are so easy that they make me mad cycloids makes a really unfunny pun and then he blows up by the way the title sequences for each of these april fool's episodes are both entirely unique with odd graphics and details randomly inserted in at one point we see the icarly gang flying to the future through the opening credits once again implying that even within this universe icarly and victorious co-exist ah dory's got a big head that's so funny after the titles tori is hit on by a very sensual sinjin and then andre approaches and announces that america is now at war with switzerland and that more importantly they're going to have a pop quiz before he's shot by an arrow to the knee why do i suddenly feel like playing skyrim andre is dragged away by union soldiers and tory rushes to class meanwhile kat is in a wizard of oz parody where she appears as dorothy gail and gets a concussion causing it all to turn to color tori then shows up as glenda the good witch are you a good witch or a sandwich god damn it this episode is so funny jade then shows up as the wicked witch of the presumably unionizing makeup department because kat has stolen her ruby pair phone this skit is all visuals and no content you can just kind of look at it for a second and get why people remember it what am i supposed to do now well you are in a restroom you could well victoria justice in an interview years later described this as the funniest episode of the show the crew inform the actors that andre is late to his next scene and they all break character he eventually arrives and is served food by fancy waiters they then call in children whose only job is to feed victoria justice directly by hand robbie runs in causing the children to recognize him and begin screaming he then declares that the hollywood volcano is about to erupt and asks that he and tory spend their final moments making out after a commercial break beck runs in and says that the hollywood volcano has retired and moved to florida meaning that they're all saved jade enters the hall and discovers that tory is still in a bad mood and threatens to tickle her no don't i'm not in the mood a tickle session then commences and as they reset tori says that she just thinks april fool's day should be different causing jade to say that it's just the same and there's nothing she can do about it mr psychowitz is attacked by a lobster from the amanda show and tori films it with her paraphone don't get me started on pair phones and aspect ratio again after the lobster leaves they all rush into the janitor's closet which leads on to the icarly set where spencer is hanging out by himself presumably because he was the only cast member not taken into the future by future episode spencer tori then appears on a game show that i've never heard of because i'm not a million years old i'm sure this is such a detailed parody i'm sure all these references to who these celebrities are is really funny if you've seen this this old show before i'm gonna presume this is a really good this is good i'm guessing tori has to fill in a blank in a sentence and if anyone on the panel wrote the same thing as her she wins five thousand dollars she doesn't guess correctly and is attacked by the throwback lobster over and over and over again in a segment that isn't as funny as they think it is we suddenly cut to the next scene where we meet tori's rarely mentioned neighbor mr drysdale why does that sound familiar mr drysdale says his wife has a problem with him that he talks too much and he never dances so the gang find a solution they put on music and sing a song in his face until he also dances with them the dancing lobsters and gibby's decapitated head join in and then they all die then they get back up and do an outro to the episode mimicking how snl does their typical sign off there you go that's the whole episode you know looking back i'm kind of surprised that these april fools episodes didn't become an annual tradition in sitcom culture i mean it's only extremely annoying and really unfunny and difficult for kids at home to grasp in any reasonable way and with that ladies and gentlemen i can now confidently say that we've made it back yes back to our true home back to nsu prime as a reminder pretty much everything we've talked about in the last hour and 53 minutes has been non-canon and because of that everything else we have to talk about from here on out is exclusively canon material and that is especially true when it comes to our continuation of victorious season three anyways this video is over now as i'm recording this i'm realizing that for most of you at home you don't really need a rationalization as per why i'm splitting this video into two parts but i'm just gonna go ahead and give you the story anyways i always intended that victorious would be one singular video that would cover the entire franchise from beginning to end and would kind of cover my personal growth as i got more into it as we went along but about a week ago i sat down and i did some realistic math and i realized that if victorious really did turn out to be one video it would probably be about eight to nine hours long and so i did this poll on twitter that was kind of like hey would you guys click on an eight hour video and basically enough people said no that i was like okay let's split this thing in two and it's funny to think about because when i compare the icarly videos to the victorious videos in my head a big difference is pretty early on with the icarly videos i knew what the difference between them was going to be i knew what the contrast was going to be i knew like the thesis statement of part two and the thesis statement of part one i don't have that with victorious so i don't really know where our journey is going to go where our story is headed how victorious part two is going to be different from victoria's part one and in a way that's exciting to me but if i were to make a guess about what i think the big noticeable difference is going to be i think in victorious part 2 i am going to say the word i carly significantly less often because i think by this point victorious had outgrown just being a sister show to icarly which is what makes the ultimate fate of victorious all the more tragic in a way and look if you guys feel like the video games intermission segment wasn't a strong enough segment to end this video on or if you think it went on too long or is boring and this and this and that i just want to say look that was intermission quentin i had no idea that was going on so yeah it's time for the part of the video that you can probably mute and still know what i'm saying if you don't want to miss the second victorious video or the salmon cat video or the numerous other exciting mega videos that i have coming up in the next few months then you gotta make sure you gotta go down to the description and make sure you're subscribed and set that bell to all notifications because then youtube will tell you when i post the next video and otherwise you're gonna have no idea when i post because the algorithm can just be so random about this stuff so i implore you guys please subscribe because it really gets me excited to keep working on this stuff and i'm always so excited to see the support and the comments and the love that you guys give whenever i get one of these stupid videos out with that i've been quitting reviews and that's all yeah hey did you hear that david schwimmer drowned what [Music] huh [Music] you

Channel: Quinton Reviews

Views: 5,580,133

Keywords: Quinton Reviews, Quinton, Reviews, Youtube, discussion

Id: yA-rsBH1NP4

Length: 334min 59sec (20099 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Loong_Sward]

Oh my god it’s longer than the iCarly videos

[u/PotatoesAreNotReal]

The video game section honestly might be my favorite bit of Quinton content ever. I think I laughed out loud more than I have in literally years. That definitely makes me look forward to the Garfield video games video.

[u/OlliverWithDoubleL]

You're a fucking legend dude

[u/e4odeath]

my unmedicated ADHD ass being sucked in to listening to every moment of the video … that is TALENTTTT you possess my man! your videos are always excellent. thanks for all your hard work ! <3

[u/NamanJani]

Another long long documentary!

Thank you, Quinton.

[u/cam5478]

Brother, I dunno how far ahead you were working on this, but I do not feel good about you having about a two month span between a three and a half hour video and a five and a half hour video. If you took zero days off that would have been a required six minutes of fully produced content every day.

[u/trancertong]

an hour 23 minutes in... I don't feel comfortable explaining why but I reflexively paused it because it was so alarming.

This feels like a true crime documentary, it's fucking disturbing. I'm sorry for the kids who grew up on this shit holy fuck.

[u/TaeganTheTiger]

Oh yes, another long Nick show video.

[u/DaemonNic]

I see Quinton has adopted a hard K-type evolutionary model for his content.