Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara looks at the comic adaptation of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie!
Purchase the DVD at atopthefourthwall.com
Originally uploaded May 26th, 2014.
ORIGINAL INFO: The power is ON! …Perhaps someone should shut that off. It’s running up the electrical bill.
RUMINATIONS: The “another episode of Mobile Suit Gundabridged” thing is a reference to something I had done for April Fools’ Day of that year - an episode of an abridged series that did not exist (featuring some wonderful voice talents from Elite 3, Team Four Star, and Little Kuriboh). It’s never going to get posted to youtube since it’d get contentIDed immediately, but the reason why the reference is here in particular is because I labeled it as a History of Power Rangers episode for the movie. People were actually quite upset that it WASN’T History of Power Rangers, which is understandable since at the time they were coming out so far apart, but I had already stated that I wasn’t going to do one on the movie and I’ve stuck to that. Although it’s also the reason why I incorporated the introduction video into the first season video when I did the re-edit for youtube - people apparently never watched the Introduction video. Still, I figured reviewing the movie adaptation on Atop the Fourth Wall would sate people, since it’s close enough to the movie that it’d be like reviewing it on History of Power Rangers anyway.
Timing wise, May was becoming a big month for me. Aside from a convention or two that I had to do, I had just released the second DVD (hence my shilling of it at the end), but also the brand spankin’ new website. I had used a blogspot for 5 years of the show, but I was never happy with it once the show began to expand. The year before was when I had launched the “Please Let the Ads Play” video, and while people claim that it somehow destroyed me or resulted in a huge loss for me, the truth was that it INCREASED monetizable views - people had actually shut off or whitelisted their adblockers from it, and that was great!
The problem was that in the year since then… viewership was down. It wasn’t because of the ad video (or if it was, it apparently took people a year to realize, “Hey, I’m mad at him!” since there was no immediate drop in viewers), but rather just a changing of the times. Viewership was STAGNANT. It’s building again, but it’ll be much better once we’re all caught up on the reuploads. But no, the stagnation, as I see, has been a result of a view factors:
-No new Channel Awesome Anniversary movies. One of the motivators for me to do my own movie was that the anniversary films gave something for the fanbase to get excited about, to speculate about and get them watching old and new material. With no big event to build towards, people were less interested in binging old content or the like.
-Crappy ability to watch old material. For all the flack Channel Awesome’s website design has gotten (and much of it is deserved), people forget that the old Channel Awesome layout was even worse - essentially just a text link farm aside from the scroller, but with no context for older material if people wanted to check it out. Any newcomers stumbling across the site would be turned off by the layout and head elsewhere, meaning no new viewers coming in to watch my old stuff and get hooked. My own website being a blogspot meant that it wasn’t conducive to watching old episodes or even finding something that looked interesting by scrolling through the list.
-Market saturation. Now online video is different from broadcast television or movies simply because if you don’t want to watch something right now, you don’t have to - there are no competing time slots where people MUST watch my show instead of someone else’s. However, as more reviewers came into prominence, people had less time to watch ALL the shows they wanted to watch. It was already a problem on Channel Awesome (and people say it’s STILL a problem), but now very talented people were coming about on other platforms away from CA and not necessarily seeking out our stuff anymore.
Spoony, the Nostalgia Critic, James Rolfe, and others had grown independently popular thanks to having a place where one could easily find their material and watch it. And since Channel Awesome’s site redesign was dragging its feet (long story there why that took so long to happen), I decided to work on this on my own. Other reviewers pointed me in the direction of The Engineer, a frequent guest and collaborator of Bennett the Sage and occasional voice actor, artist, modeler, and in this case: web designer. Over the course of a month or two we hammered out everything I wanted for the site, I paid him, and we finally launched the day before this episode hit.