SF Debris / SFDebris / Charles Sonnenburg - One Man's Attempts to Make Videos While Fighting the Universe Itself

BlancoMailo

BlancoMailo

True & Honest Fan
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Nov 24, 2018
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I know I've seen a few other Kiwis mention being fans of Chuck's, however, I couldn't find a discussion thread, though I guess that's not too surprising since, unless you ran into this guy's content around a decade ago on youtube or happened to notice it promoted on the Channel Awesome website a few years back, there's a good chance you wouldn't have just run into him or his work on your own.

For background, Chuck's a former school teacher who's been reviewing science fiction for well over 20 years at this point, first in text and then in video - to this day, he puts out 3 reviews a week, covering anything from books, tv, movies, video games, animation, etc. In 2011, he had to purge his entire video catalog from Youtube and move exclusively to his own website due to multiple copyright strikes from CBS over his Star Trek reviews. A few months after, he also stopped posting the 30 second still image with text trailers to his latest reviews when another another wave of copyright strikes began hitting even those. For most, this would have been ruinous but 8 years, 6 video hosts, and several web hosts later, he's not only still around but now making $5K a month on Patreon and even posts the occasional background/mini-review video on his old youtube channel again. I'd say a fair chunk of this is also thanks to him not preachily shoehorning politics into his reviews the way so many others do these days and just being a fairly normal guy.

His current review categories (in the order he lists them) are:

On top of his reviews, I think where his content really shines is when he has time to create his miniseries documentaries, my favorite is:

Rise and Fall of the Comic Empire - Detailing the rise and collapse of the comics industry

I also enjoyed Hero's Journey - Which described the inspiration/creation of the first Star Wars movie, (and was followed by Shadow's Journey and Hermit's Journey to round out the trilogy.)

At this point, I think he has somewhere around 800/900 videos that are freely available. Also, to give you an idea of how dedicated his audience is, in order to bring in more money during a financially difficult period about 5 years back, he opened his paid review requests to animation/anime but had to close it after about 2/3 years when the queue had hit a 6 year backlog and was still growing.

Website: https://sfdebris.com/index.php
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/sfdebris
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sfdebris
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sfdebris
RSS: https://sfdebris.com/tools/rss.xml
 
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This may seem a bit rude but does SF have the 'tism? Every time I watch his videos his voice reminds me of Mr. Enter who has prime puzzle piece pitch. I don't know, the inflections and general monotone are somewhat distracting to me. Maybe that's just me though, his content is prime 'playing in background while working on work' material, especially his Star Trek TOS stuff.
 
d12 said:
This may seem a bit rude but does SF have the 'tism? Every time I watch his videos his voice reminds me of Mr. Enter who has prime puzzle piece pitch. I don't know, the inflections and general monotone are somewhat distracting to me. Maybe that's just me though, his content is prime 'playing in background while working on work' material, especially his Star Trek TOS stuff.
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I do like SF, but I have to agree there's something a little off about his voice. It is by no means enough to ruin his videos, but I think it takes some getting used to. I haven't watched too much of his recent stuff, but he always struck me as a decent reviewer. His reviews are usually an easy to digest length and there's enough of them where you can throw it on as good background noise. He also tends to keep his focus on the review, only going off on tangents if it does somehow relate to the episode/for some kind of punchline, but there's no sperging out or drifting too far away from the review.

I'd also give him props for being a pretty fair reviewer. I might not always agree with him, but I appreciate he doesn't only do negative reviews and even when he is focusing on some of the lesser quality stuff, he'll point out if it does get something right.
 
I stopped watching him awhile back when he started doing anime/my little pony reviews and I could clearly see that his heart wasn't in it. I'll have to look at his stuff again. I loved all of his Voyager reviews and his little pet nicknames for the crew members, as well as his behind the scenes knowledge.
 
I've been watching Chuck's stuff for so long it took me a year or two to realize that many freaking videos is actually not normal for a reviewer. He's got to be the most consistent content reviewer on the internet, which is a rare feat considering, you know, everyone else on this site. I've gone from really disagreeing with some of his videos to realizing that this dude somehow has that much fucking space in his head to cover all of this madness.

d12 said:
This may seem a bit rude but does SF have the 'tism?
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Galaxy-brained might be the best term in this situation. I like Star Trek but I cannot for the life of me quote Star Trek, Doctor Who and Comic Books off the top of my head at the same time like he can.
 
He's one of the few reviewers I will still go out of my way to watch, but I wish he would go back to reviewing Trek every week. Seems like he only does Trek once in a blue moon now, and half the time it's STD.
 
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Schedule for the next month is up:
7-Oct • Babylon 5: Soul Mates
8-Oct • Babylon 5: All Alone in the Night
9-Oct • Babylon 5: Hunter, Prey
12-Oct • Discovery: New Eden
14-Oct • Gravity Falls 1-4
16-Oct • Planetes 1-4
19-Oct • Alice
21-Oct • Gravity Falls 5-8
23-Oct • John Carpenter's They Live
26-Oct • The Squire of Gothos
28-Oct • Gravity Falls 9-12
31-Oct • X-Files Halloween Special
2-Nov • The Guyver
4-Nov • Gravity Falls 13-16
5-Nov • Gravity Falls 17-20

UnKillFill said:
He's one of the few reviewers I will still go out of my way to watch, but I wish he would go back to reviewing Trek every week. Seems like he only does Trek once in a blue moon now, and half the time it's STD.
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At the very least, I wish he would do a bit less of the animation but it seems like he's trying to plow through that years-long backlog of animation/anime (which, along with the annual pony shit that he always sounds embarrassed to be reviewing, I think is a large result of the Linkara audience bleedover). I can understand him cutting the star trek down to once a week though, some one on the old version of his forum a few years back listed all of his star trek reviews and estimated that at the rate he was going, he would probably have run out of new episodes by now. I think he's trying to hold off on recycling the old reviews for as long as possible (though he's already redone several).

Miller said:
I find it weird that he likes STD.
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I would say 'like' is a bit strong, he tears into it a bit at the end of his review for season 1 starting around the 20:15 mark.
 
BlancoMailo said:
Some one on the old version of his forum a few years back listed all of his star trek reviews and estimated that at the rate he was going, he would probably have run out of new episodes by now. I think he's trying to hold off on recycling the old reviews for as long as possible (though he's already redone several).
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There are:
79 TOS episodes
22 TAS episodes
176 TNG episodes
173 DS9 episodes
172 Voyager episodes
98 ENT episodes
29 STD episodes
10 STD Short Treks (He has given a few of them full reviews)

That's 759 episodes... Assuming he only did one review, once a week (preferably on Saturday)
That should take him at least 14.5+ years to get through all of that...
My Google fu says he started in 2008... So he would still have 3ish years worth of Trek episodes left, assuming he had been doing one a week (Which he hasn't been...)
And that's not even counting both more STD, and the entirely new shitty Star Trek Picard Series which debuts soon...
 
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d12 said:
This may seem a bit rude but does SF have the 'tism?
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He use to hang out on a forum about debating, scientifically, who would win in a fight between Star Trek and Star Wars.

So, yes.

I really enjoyed his stuff, but kinda fell off when Channel Awesome kinda soured the whole "nerd does amateur reviews online." Still, really enjoy his interpretation of Captain Janeway as a psychotic.
 
Polyboros2 said:
He use to hang out on a forum about debating, scientifically, who would win in a fight between Star Trek and Star Wars.

So, yes.

I really enjoyed his stuff, but kinda fell off when Channel Awesome kinda soured the whole "nerd does amateur reviews online." Still, really enjoy his interpretation of Captain Janeway as a psychotic.
Click to expand...
Kate Mulgrew's interpretation of her was that she was bipolar and about 70k light years away from her meds, so ...
 
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UnKillFill said:
There are:
79 TOS episodes
22 TAS episodes
176 TNG episodes
173 DS9 episodes
172 Voyager episodes
98 ENT episodes
29 STD episodes
10 STD Short Treks (He has given a few of them full reviews)

That's 759 episodes... Assuming he only did one review, once a week (preferably on Saturday)
That should take him at least 14.5+ years to get through all of that...
My Google fu says he started in 2008... So he would still have 3ish years worth of Trek episodes left, assuming he had been doing one a week (Which he hasn't been...)
And that's not even counting both more STD, and the entirely new shitty Star Trek Picard Series which debuts soon...
Click to expand...

You're right, he's not doing one per week anymore, he adopted the current monthly schedule (not taking into account any of his irregular breaks) a few months ago, which as far as Saturdays go is:
Week 1: star trek review
Week 2: star trek review
Week 3: star trek review
Week 4: movie review (and a youtube "mini-review" upload of one of his old star trek reviews without any video footage in it to avoid copyright issues)

To put out some numbers on my end:

As of right now, he's done 503 star trek reviews (I just copy/pasted the titles of his sidebar list and removed the individual show headers), averaging about 0.8 per week since the creation of the youtube channel on January 21st, 2008 (I don't know the exact date he started posting video versions of his written reviews on youtube). This doesn't take breaks or videohost/webhost downtime into account, which have cost him at least a couple of months total, I think he took over a month off after the heart attack, for example. Years ago, he used to do post 2 star trek reviews per week (on Wednesday and Saturday), which would give a little over 7 years worth of reviews had that rate continued, he stopped that a while ago though.

As of now, he has 256 star trek reviews to go, at his current rate of 3 star trek reviews per month, it would take slightly over 7 years, without interruption, to finish off the current supply, not taking future STD or potential Picard episodes into account.
 
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Looks like another busy end of the year:

  • 2-Dec • Clone Wars: Darkness on Umbara
  • 3-Dec • Clone Wars: The General
  • 4-Dec • Clone Wars: Plan of Dissent
  • 5-Dec • Clone Wars: Carnage of Krell
  • 7-Dec • Hard Time
  • 9-Dec • Doctor Who: Face the Raven
  • 11-Dec • JLU: Patriot Act
  • 14-Dec • Dark Crystal
  • 16-Dec • Doctor Who: Heaven Sent
  • 18-Dec • SG1: Forever In A Day
  • 21-Dec • Discovery 4
  • 23-Dec • Doctor Who: Hell Bent
  • 25-Dec • Christmas Show
  • 28-Dec • Bound
  • 30-Dec • B5: There All Honor Lies
  • 31-Dec • B5: And Now For A Word
  • 1-Jan • B5: Knives
  • 2-Jan • B5: Convictions
 
Yeah, does the "busy end" involve reuploading the older vids? I want to watch his video setting clips of janeway to "still alive" again
 
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