Dorkly / Lowbrow Thread - A once great animation videogame channel that it's in permanent decline.

Nicholas II of Russia

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This is a thread to talk about Dorkly, a videogame animation channel that once upon a time was one of the best animation channels on Youtube. But over time, it has been a sharp decline in the quality of their videos. There has been talk about them going into bankruptcy a while ago, it has been referenced once in their supposed last animation videos, saying that they can't even rely on Patreon because many of their fans are jobless.

I unsubscribed from their channel a while ago, because I dislike how their videos are now. It shows their disinterest in trying something new given how much are over-relying on Pokémon now. Including the "If Pokedex Entries Were Literal" series, which I consider one of their most lazy and worst series that they've done in their channel, because the majority on the sketches are either shitty parodies or puking how self-aware they are about the absurdity of the trope and overexplaining the jokes, and to be honest, that's literally all of the videos now in the channel when they're doing parodies, but in the past, they had better writers, that could do a charming subversion parody without just spewing exposition on why the premise of a game is ridiculous. There is one entry about how one character shows up on a blank screen and explains why the joke planned for the sketch isn't funny because the Pokémon in question (Seaking) isn't funny.

It is sad their sharp decline in quality because the old videos were truly funny, but it's what happens when you fire your talented staff and replace it with people that can't write for shit. And it shows their lack of money when the channel now relies on compilations of old videos and having the one person they can count on (the VA of Mario, who is in my opinion overqualified and deserves a lot better than being stuck in this channel.) to do videos anymore. They should've stayed in bankruptcy, rather than letting the corpse of the channel be toyed around.

Anyway, what are your favourite Dorkly videos? What is your opinion about their current state?

Sonic for Hire is still the best series done in that channel btw, even though they didn't technically make it.
 
"DUDE WHAT IF VIDEO GAME LOGIC, BUT IN REAL LIFE?????????"
CtrlAltDel_Ethan_Lucas.png
 
Won't comment on the current state of Dorkly,
but I'll openly declare my admiration for their voice actors.
I was looking to get their names after rewatching Sonic For Hire for the Nth time,
still can't find who is the one that does The Agent voice.





You can practically trace the channel's downfall after that guy left.
More than likely some of Machinima drama must have affected many of them.

From CollegeHumor's Wikipedia.jpg
Crafty stuff turned into shit grift to maximize revenue?
Who would have thought.

I feel sad for Mike Parker (Tails); the guy has an awesome vocal range,
but unfortunately with Lowbrow understaffed, that comes as a disadvantage.
Michael William as Sonic's voice is already a classic.
 
The first few Kevin the Assistant videos were great. I would make him super preganant any day.

 
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The first few Kevin the Assistant videos were great. I would make him super preganant any day.

The first Kevin the Assistant videos are good. But it also points out one of the main problems I have with Dorkly while making their parody videos.

They don't make jokes about the tropes and subvert the genre of the videogame they're parodying at this point, they just point out the absurdity of the plots of the videogames and they insist every time to make it as realistic as possible. And making it so many times it just stops being funny, because is one big repetitive joke if you put all of the videos together.
 
I still have a soft spot for Sonic for Hire, but other than that I stopped watching Dorkly/Lowbrow many years ago. But I have some good memories of them for sure. Morty Kombat and the video game lawyer were always great from what I remember, Mega Man Dies at the End and Pokemon Rusty were pretty good, the Mario parodies were very hit or miss. More recently, Lowbrow has been doing some art streams with someone drawing whatever they feel like while two or three voice actors talk in-character. It’s something good to have on in the background.

I think I dropped Dorkly when they did a video about a presidential election between Peach and Bowser… no points for guessing what that’s supposed to parallel.
 
More recently, Lowbrow has been doing some art streams with someone drawing whatever they feel like while two or three voice actors talk in-character. It’s something good to have on in the background.
I think that those VA are way overqualified for Dorkly now. They're great voice actors but they are wasting their talent on Dorkly only, especially the VA of Mario, which I think is one of the best Mario voices I've ever heard.
 
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I used to watch that channel. I looked it up and I guess I had unsubscribed at some point. I think I must have outgrown that kind of humor or the novelty simply wore off.
 
Back in my teens I thought Sonic for hire was fucking amazing. I go back and watch some of it and it kinda still holds up. Though my tolerance for dorkly or anything "video game parody" has gone down over the last few years. Dorkly and Mashed have this thing in common where they'll hire talented Voice Actors or Animators but the video itself will be fucking garbage. Mashed has the best looking video game parodies but the skits for the video is so try hard.
 
Robot Chicken cornered the market for "dood what if vidya but fart and weed" a long time ago.
Funny that you mentioned Robot Chicken, because I think one of their animations is a literal copypaste on a Robot Chicken skit they made years ago, and some of the comments point this out as well. They even use the same character for the skit, Kano. Only in an inverted role.




And of course, they do this skit by trying to overexplaining it to make it as realistic as possible.
 
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Imo the best thing they ever made was the parody tmnt theme song. It was actually pretty catchy.

But dude I used to marathon Sonic for Hire all the time, and I think what made it kind of better for me is that Sonic's voice actor only ever voiced Sonic, so they never overused his voice. Not the same with the guy who does tail's voice tho.

I wish they'd done more long form stuff like Sonic For Hire, Megaman dies at the End, or Morty Kombat. Cause the lazy animation is easier to forgive when the characters and jokes are more important.

But circa...after the first time Sonic for Hire ended their content started to suck balls. Robot Chicken comparisons have been made but the difference is that when Robot Chicken ran out of lazy pop culture jokes they got really ambitious with the animation and characters, Dorkly just got lazier.
 
The pokemon stuff was good a few years ago but became cringe fast.
They all started to do nothing but those "if pokedex were literal" at some point. But wasn't that thanks to them getting fucked by Facebook over inflated likes? I don't know the full story there.
 
I was searching for a bit one of the new Dorkly videos to find one video that can somehow summarize all of the problems with the channel as a whole. And I think I found it, and it is a compilation video.


This video is perfect, because it encapsulates all of the problems that I can think of Dorkly:

  1. Sketches where they only explain the joke over and over again, with the VA sounding totally uninterested while saying their lines.
  2. Aggresively meta jokes that aren't funny anymore. Kevin the Assistant, while funny in the first videos, it falls to the former point. It doesn't even try to be funny, it just explains jokes and tries to apply logic to videogames, which again, is not handled with a witty twist.
  3. Painfully predictable punchlines.
  4. Weird or gross sexual jokes.
  5. I can't stress enough the aggresive meta humor. Just telling one of your characters that its destiny is to save the youtube channel doesn't make it better.
  6. The majority of the jokes consist with the same fucking premise: "Hey, this is a messed up thing that happens in our world, and it's illogical! Why does it happen in our world?" "That explains why x thing is a thing that happens in our world,, let's make this as disturbing as possibe for a cheap shock factor." Over and over again.
  7. Trying to live to the success of one of their "succesful" series, in this case, Pokémon Rusty, and make one of the characters the exact opposite of what it is in the series.
I swear, try to watch this video and tell me if you even grin in some of the parts, because good lord these sketches are horrible.
 
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