PointlessHub

Instead of Alternate History scenarios, Cody takes on a more traditional genre of content where he takes a look at various films released during his childhood or related to something he grew up with and analyses them with deadpan humor.

Includes examples of:

• Adaptation Distillation: Cody cites Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole as the first time he saw this trope in effect; having grown up reading the original Guardians of Ga'Hoole book series, he was left disappointed after his first viewing of the film as a child, particularly towards how much the film had cut and condensed the books' narrative. Following his second viewing of both the movie and book series, he actually came out thinking that the adaptation ended up better than its source material, thanks to this, as the books meander around quite a bit (especially the fifth book, which he describes as a book where nothing happens until the last few pages). Having to cram six books into the runtime of a single movie streamlined the story quite a bit, although some things went completely unexplained in the process.
• Adaptation Explanation Extrication:
  • Planet of the Apes (2001) keeps the same dynamic from the classic movie, where humans are treated as animals and pests at best, despite uplifting humanity from non-sapient to practically modern people with a Stone Punk culture in an attempt to make a point about discrimination. Cody thinks the change undermines the entire setting by raising too many questions about why the humans haven't revolted and used their massive numerical advantage to overthrow the apes.
  • He thinks that Transformers: Rise of the Beasts must be really weird to someone who doesn't know about Beast Wars, as the movie does very little to explain why the Maximals are so radically different from any other Transformer shown up to that point.
  • He is quite amused that Dragon Ball Evolution forgot to explain much of anything about the Oozaru, meaning that if you don't know much about Dragon Ball the movie's climax involves the main character turning into a giant monkey out of absolutely nowhere.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: invoked
  • Considering that Vice President Raymond Becker in The Day After Tomorrow is a clear pastiche of Dick Cheney, Cody implies that the film's claims of the President getting killed during the disaster weren't entirely true and suggests that "Liquid Cheney" (Cody's nickname for Becker) had him killed so he could become President while using the blizzard as an excuse.
    Cody: Our film ends with a monologue from Liquid Cheney, now President of the United States after Liquid Bush died in the blizzard... [ominous extreme close-up of Becker smiling] So we're told.
  • Cody doesn't think that Dr. Lanning in I, Robot killed himself for the sake of a convoluted clue to give to Will Smith; he thinks that Lanning was fully aware of the upcoming robot uprising, how U.S. Robotics will fall apart because of their robots, how he would be crucified for being the pioneer of the robotics that led to this, and thus had Sonny kill him to escape responsibility.
  • In the same film, Cody points out that while it tries to portray Del Spooner as just eccentric and paranoid, he would technically be legitimately insane by the rules of the movie's setting. In an early scene, Spooner assumes that a robot running with a purse in a world where no robot has ever committed a crime means this robot has to be a purse snatcher; his subsequent decision to both run down the robot and draw his weapon in preparation to execute it is so off base, even considering his distrust of robots, that Cody compares him to a real-life cop shooting a food delivery drone. Or someone accusing Alexa of stealing their car.
  • Ready Player One (2018) generally portrays James Halliday as a friendly Eccentric Millionaire whose biggest flaw was his obsession with pop culture, ruining his social life. But Cody points out that the man can't exactly be called a good person, not only having made billions off an Allegedly Free Game through an extremely predatory monetization system (involving notably Real Money Trade for items that you can permanently lose on death) but also having clearly turned a blind eye to the highly illegal actions IOI had been taking in his own game (that he could have shut down at any time, given that Wade does exactly that at the end of the movie).
• Allegedly Optimistic Ending:invoked A common trope of Roland Emmerich that Cody tends to poke fun at is how they end on triumphant notes with booming orchestral scores… for the main characters, at least, while glossing over how billions of lives have been wiped out, and society as it had been is over. Notable examples include Independence Day (where it’s stated in supplementary material that the aliens wiped out half of humanity), 2012 (which had every continent except Africa overtaken by The Great Flood), and especially Moonfall (which implicitly resulted in the Earth turning into an inhospitable hellscape).
• Animation Bump: As the The Transformers: The Movie review also doubles as a review of the original cartoon as a whole, Cody can't exactly avoid talking about the spectacular jump in animation quality from the show to the movie. And some of its unfortunate consequences, pointing out that said massive upgrade had nasty effects on the Nostalgia Goggles of some fans, who now remember all of Transformers: Generation 1 looking like the movie and not its much, much worse usual standards.
• Apathetic Citizens: Discussed in the Moonfall review, ironically about the movie's complete inversion of the trope. Cody is confused to see that a random alert message about the ridiculous scenario of the moon falling out of orbit was taken completely seriously by the world, causing mass panic. He believes that if that happened in real life, most people would instead ask, "Why is this nonsense on my feed?" and swipe it away.
• Artistic License: Discussed in "When Hollywood Made Two Asteroid Movies the Same Year". While he agrees both movies aren't quite accurate, he feels Deep Impact's more subdued flaws are actually more problematic than the ludicrous nonsense found in Armageddon, because they go against the movie's more nuanced and realistic take on the concept, whereas Armageddon aims to be a crazy action romp and the liberties it takes only enhance that. For instance, the Armageddon asteroid is obviously way too big to make sense in the context of the story, but considering it's also covered in Spikes of Villainy, radiates pure darkness and actively tries to kill the miners that land on it, the goal behind it is clearly to make the situation as dramatic as possible, not to be scientifically accurate.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: Cody theorizes that picking the relatively obscure Detective Pikachu of all things to be adapted into Pokémon's first foray into live-action movies was a deliberate attempt to avoid this. In his opinion, any adaptation of the franchise runs the risk of highlighting that, at the end of the day, it is all about its cute mascots violently fighting each other, and all the problems that come with that. The anime avoided that by being, for the most part, a comedy full of Amusing Injuries and keeping the battles relatively stylized (as opposed to that bit in Pokémon Origins where Blue's Squirtle tries to bite off Charmander's throat) but bringing that to live-action immediately gives the combat an uncomfortably realistic slant and makes the Willing Suspension of Disbelief a lot harder. Therefore, he thinks Detective Pikachu was chosen for being one of the few parts of the series that still has a plot but isn't primarily centered around Pokémon battles, allowing it to keep a lighthearted tone despite the realism.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Nearly every line in Cody’s sponsored ads is delivered in a very stilted manner.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The introduction to the Transformers: Rise of the Beasts video.
  Cody: Robots. Animals. Two things kids think are really cool. So what if we combine them? And that is how we got Zoids. Gotta love Zoids. We need more Zoids. Oh yeah, and Beast Wars existed too. Probably should've led with that.
  • The Kong: Skull Island review introduces the Kaiju genre as one man suddenly getting the idea of making a monster flick where, instead of the usual creeping around in caves and castles, the monster is big enough to threaten a whole city. And so was born... The Pet (1921). "That movie with the giant monkey" was still a few years down the line.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment:
  • Cody describes War of the Worlds (2025) as a true piece of modern art. Because most people hate it and it was probably made as a tax write-off.
  • He can't possibly believe that someone could be disappointed by watching Dragon Ball Evolution... because you can absolutely tell how terrible the movie is by the poster alone.
• Better by a Different Name:
  • Cody openly calls Ready Player One (2018) "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory with VRChat."
  • While ranking the Transformers movies, he mentions that his feelings on Bumblebee soured a bit after he realized it was pretty much just The Iron Giant with a bigger brand attached to it.
  • He starts describing Pokémon Detective Pikachu as a detective story set in a city where unlikely species can coexist, about a Naïve Newcomer and their much savvier new partner teaming up to investigate a mysterious purple substance that causes said population to go berserk, which is eventually revealed to be caused by a seemingly nice politician who turns out to be Evil All Along... before realizing he's just talking about Zootopia. He's even more shocked to realize that the plot is actually based on the game's, which was in development before Zootopia was released, meaning that for once it looks like it's actually just a coincidence.
• Bookends: The video on Transformers (2007) has Cody talk about how Hasbro originally intended to make a G.I. Joe movie circa 2003, but after the US invasion of Iraq made a film where the US military were the heroes feel in bad taste, they decided to shift gears and make a Transformers movie instead. This comes full circle with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, currently the last live-action Transformers movie, which ended with a blatant Sequel Hook teasing a Shared Universe with G.I. Joe.
• Broken Pedestal: Cody sounds a little lost and confused when he discovers that Guillermo del Toro was the one who came up with some of the more divisive elements of Pacific Rim: Uprising, thus implying that Only the Creator Does It Right is not in effect here. Even more so when Cody reads about del Toro's original plans for his sequel, in which the message was an unironic "Humans Are the Real Monsters".
  Cody: You know... sometimes things just aren't meant to have sequels.
• Call-Back: When predicting that he'll probably just die from falling down the stairs, Cody replays the opening scene of his Revenge of the Fallen review where he does exactly that (though he survives there).
• Characterization Marches On:
  • Cody points out that the effects of The Transformers: The Movie on Optimus Prime's characterisation impacted not only the rest of the original series but also the entire franchise. During the first two seasons, Optimus was more of a bruiser: he could be quite hotheaded, regularly dispensed one-liners, and was seen doing silly things like surfing or playing basketball. After his death and rebirth, with both Hasbro and the writing staff having realised just how much respect Optimus commanded, this was all but gone, and he was now the solemn Big Good everyone knows him as today.
    Cody: (about Season 1/2 Optimus Prime) This Optimus would have 100% called Megatron a bitch.
  • In his Transformers One video, Cody points out how Sentinel Prime was originally presented in the franchise as Optimus' predecessor, with little other characterisation beyond that. However, after Transformers: Animated introduced Sentinel as Optimus' smug rival, each iteration of the former has seen arrogance gradually become a defining character trait of his (even driving his motivations as the twist villain in Transformers: Dark of the Moon), further contrasting with his humble and noble successor. All of this culminates in the Sentinel we see in Transformers One; a proud, showboating, deceitful Transformer who betrayed the Primes for the sake of power and publicised himself as Cybetron's last Prime and sole saviour until the heroes expose him.
• Character Perception Evolutioninvoked:
  • Discussed about Zilla. Cody understands why fans dislike the monster and finds the mindset behind its creation to be disrespectful as hell towards Godzilla. However, Cody thinks that Zilla can genuinely work as an antagonistic monster towards Godzilla on his own, proposing that Zilla be portrayed as an Evil Knockoff that is Godzilla's direct opposite in every way. He also discusses the idea of a "Mankind vs. Zilla Army" scenario proposed by the plot as being rather interesting.
  • Cody agrees that thrusting Rodimus Prime into the leadership position after hundreds of children saw him unintentionally cause Optimus' death was a bad marketing decision by Hasbro (albeit because they didn't think children would get that attached to a toy robot). However, with the hindsight that Optimus survived and around 4 decades of him in the spotlight, he sees Rodimus as a breath of fresh air, especially with the unique struggles of leading the Autobots with his doubts about whether he can measure up to Optimus' legacy, on top of maintaining peace in the galaxy.
• Continuity Snarl: His retrospective of Cloverfield starts with him laying out the film's famous ARG and how it was built up as "the true story"... then segues into him learning that the film's screenwriter, director, and producer have all made claims that wildly contradict the ARG, as well as each other (and not just on small details, but on things like whether Clover is an alien, what caused its rampage, whether it survived the events of the film, and how it relates to other members of its species), and the fact that the ARG itself contradicted the film due to dates not lining up, not to mention the various quasi-sequels.
• Corrupted Character Copy: In his review for Transformers: The Last Knight, Cody points out how Cogman is this to Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey: both are firm and serious butlers portrayed by Jim Carter, but while Carson was the professional but caring head servant of the Abbey, Cogman is a self-proclaimed sociopath. This is Deconstructed, as Cody makes it clear he does not appreciate the writers' attempt at black comedy at the expense of a symbol of high-class refinement.
  Cody: Lady Grantham would be appalled.
• Could Say It, But...: He talks about how ALLEGEDLY Nicola Peltz was only in The Last Airbender and Transformers: Age of Extinction because of her billionaire father Nelson Peltz's clout, including some favours the producers of the former film owed him. Cody then subverts this by outright saying that it's very likely the case.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Transformers: Dark of the Moon is probably one of the darkest and most violent entries in Transformers media... which is exactly why Cody likes it ironically, because of how utterly gratuitous it all ended up being.
  • The Transformers: The Movie is in a similar boat, suddenly unleashing Characters Dropping Like Flies on a series that up to that point was pretty big on Nobody Can Die. The contrast is so ungodly stark that Cody can't help but think that having them be in direct continuity just doesn't work (like how, for instance, weapons that were usually treated like peashooters are now suddenly lethal) and makes the cartoon retroactively look even sillier than it was.
  • Cody highlights how Clash of the Titans (2010) was definitely this compared to the 1981 original, describing the latter as "dreamlike" whereas the former was as if someone grafted a Call of Duty game (complete with Alex Mason himself) to a Sword and Sandal epic.
• Deadpan Snarker: Cody rarely raises his voice when matter-of-factly describing some of the more ridiculous parts of the movies he's reviewing.
• Death of the Author:invoked Discussed in his review for Cloverfield. Cody was a huge fan of the ARG created to market the film up to its release date, but later found out that J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves had different ideas about Clover's origin than the marketing team, so the film's backstory had multiple contradictory takes from its creators. Cody prefers the backstory set by the ARG, as it's what he grew up with, even if it also has major continuity issues with the final film (the film marks its events as taking place in May, but the ARG insisted that it took place in its January release month).
• Downer Ending:
  • Played for Laughs in the Transformers (2007) review, where the recap abruptly comes to a halt after Sector Seven raids Sam’s house, with Cody then stating that everyone got sent to Guantanamo, and Sam ended up being converted to Islam by radical extremists.
  • Lampshaded in the ending to "When Hollywood Made Two Asteroid Movies the Same Year", where Cody revealed that he planned to end with a look at Greenland but backed out upon realizing that after discussing two movies that were generally way more light-hearted and optimistic, capping off by discussing a more cynical movie will leave a bad taste in his viewers' mouths. Then he realises that he's doing that anyway and abruptly ends the video.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Cody describes this as one of the main reasons The Transformers: The Movie has a reputation for being so traumatising for children. Media retiring beloved characters will usually be done with major fanfare, whether it be a Dying Moment of Awesome, an eulogy, the impact of their death on the rest of the cast, etc. But Transformers The Movie, being an attempt to discontinue an aging, outdated toyline with no regard for prominence or history, murders so many classic characters so unceremoniously that it ends up being a more brutal take on the hells of warfare than a lot of actual war movies.
• Dueling Works:invoked The main topic of discussion when he covered both White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen. A later video on Deep Impact and Armageddon covers a similar topic with the twist that, unlike the White House movies, these two have fairly different takes on their nigh-identical premise of "humanity tries to prevent a giant meteor from hitting our planet".
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Cody acknowledges this in the pinned comment for "Deadliest Warrior: Real History For Real Men", explaining that he made the video on a history-based subject to ease his familiar audience into the other types of videos he planned on making for the channel.
  • Discussed a lot about the original Transformers: Generation 1 cartoon, which Cody describes as the writers throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. What results is a bunch of batshit episode plots that made Cody's viewing experience of the show completely unpredictable.
• End of an Era: Cody proposes that his review of The Last Airbender be the last video ever discussing and/or making fun of it before he joins other Avatar fans in mocking the new live action show.
• Ending Fatigue: Discussed in the Sharknado video, with Cody pointing out how each movie has a three-act structure for approximately the first half, before suddenly going into a fourth act that mainly serves to set up a much larger and sillier finale.
• Everything Is an iPod in the Future: I, Robot leans hard into this aesthetic, so hard that Cody thinks it ironically ends up blatantly dating the movie to the early 2000s.
• Fanon Discontinuity:invoked
  • For Cody, the ARG timeline is the Cloverfield backstory and any contradicting statements from J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves are to be disregarded. He admits this is less because of quality and more because it's the version he always knew, but uses it as a broader statement about how in a continuity as messy as Cloverfield, ultimately the only thing that matters is the version you prefer in your head.
  • Cody agrees with Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki's mindset of disregarding Godzilla (1998) as anything related to its namesake and more as its own standalone Kaiju film.
  • Much like his fellow Pacific Rim fans, Cody would much rather pretend Pacific Rim: Uprising never existed.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: In-universe, Cody is not a fan of Black Noir having gaslit Homelander since it removes anything that made the latter remotely worse than the other supes, and robs him of the agency that made his TV incarnation compelling.
• Flanderization: Discussed in the Sharknado video in regards to Finn, who started as a pretty normal guy in the first movie, but as the series progresses, he pretty much becomes an impossibly badass shark-slaying warrior, to the point of becoming his entire personality. This is best exemplified in the opening of Sharknado 2: The Second One, where it’s revealed that Finn ended up being credited as the sole saviour of Los Angeles, even though he didn’t do all that much in the first film’s climax.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: One of his biggest peeves with Independence Day: Resurgence is humanity reverse-engineering just about everything they could from the aliens... but not their Deflector Shields, despite those being perhaps the reason the alien invasion was so hard to deal with and disabling them was the most critical point of the first war.
• Four Is Death: The Transformers: Age of Extinction review opens on a long speech about the horrors of the accursed number 4, especially in the context of movies.
  Cody: Halo 4, Spyro 4, Indiana Jones 4, Toy Story 4, Matrix 4, Sonic 4, Phantom Menace: Episode 1... Star Wars 4. [...] The trilogy is just a perfect system. Beginning, middle, and end. There's nothing better than a trilogy wrapping everything up with that final movie. That final scene is that last note in a musical piece. Everything has built up to that conclusive, beautiful chord, to leave a feeling of finality. And then one of the fingers slips and hits an awkward minor key right after. That awkward minor key? That slip-up? That's the fourth entry.
• Franchise Killer: Discussed in regards to Transformers: Age of Extinction as an odd take on the idea: while the movie itself was successful and the franchise kept going after it, it soured the public on the brand so thoroughly that every Transformers movie that came after it either underperformed or bombed.
• Fridge Brilliance: Cody ends up finding an example in Godzilla (1998) of all films. He initially dismisses Zilla’s Adaptational Backstory Change of being created by France’s nuclear program instead of the US program as being a chance made by the US to downplay their history with nuclear testing… and then he finds out that France did a lot more testing (particularly in the Pacific) than the US did, with their most recent nuclear test the time occurring only two years before the film’s release, with Cody coming the conclusion that France would be more likely to create Godzilla than the US.
  Cody: Is this movie more accurate?
• Funny Background Event: His entire review of Moonfall has him on the titular moon, and throughout it, it's getting closer and closer to the Earth until by the end it's very much on its way to make impact just like in the film.
• Gender-Restricted Ability: Invoked. As a child, Cody was once devastated by a kid telling him that only girls could be waterbenders, completely forgetting that there were many male waterbenders in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
• Hard-to-Adapt Work:invoked. In his Fantastic Four (2005) video, Cody describes the difficulties early comic book movies faced in adapting the more "unhinged elements" of the source material, particularly when audiences in the 2000s were still relatively unfamiliar with these properties. This is especially true for Doctor Doom, "the definitive comic book character" in Cody's words; the Arch-Enemy of a team of American Celebrity Superheroes being an Eastern European Science Wizard in power armour who commands an army of robot duplicates of himself is an absolutely absurd thing to drop on the viewers, especially when it cheerfully confirms that magic exists in what is otherwise a purely Science Fiction story. All the aspects that make Doctor Doom so beloved in the first place (like his over-the-top demeanour, complex backstory and motives, and extensive set of abilities) are also ones that are near impossible to fit in the limited runtime of an action movie focused primarily on the Fantastic 4, so liberties have to be expected. But even then, Cody thinks that the film's take on Doom - essentially Spider-Man 1's Norman Osborn played by a much less charismatic actor, with no tragic Split Personality and a way more contrived descent into villainy - was pretty lame.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Season 3 of The Transformers manages to pull one of these by complete accident. Rodimus Prime spends most of the season feeling inadequate as the new leader of the Autobots and unworthy of carrying Optimus Prime's legacy, but slowly grows into his own as a hero... only for Optimus to come back and Rodimus to immediately and happily relinquish the Matrix back to him, so he could go back to being a regular Autobot. As Cody points out, this was mainly caused by Rodimus' real-life status as a Replacement Scrappy, and the writers probably weren't intending the moral to be that some people just aren't meant for great things.
• Here We Go Again!: After concluding his Transformers One video on the Bittersweet Ending of the director Josh Cooley sending a fan (TFHypeGuy) a signed copy of the film's art book as a thank you for being a one man counter to the film's otherwise abyssmal marketing, even as the film itself becomes a Box-Office Bomb and Franchise Killer that seemingly ends the Transformers film series after finally moving beyond Michael Bay, Cody shows a Tweet from Hollywood Handle revealing Bay has been hired to direct another live-action Transformers film for Paramount.
  Cody: Are you fucking kidding me?
• Heroic BSoD: In all the history of bad media he's ingested, the thing that left Cody staring hollow-eyed at the moon on a chair was reading Ready Player One.
  Cody: The book is one of the worst things I've ever read in my life.
• Hilarious and Harsher in Hindsight: invoked The world of Ready Player One (2018) has unfortunately gotten both humorously and disturbingly more accurate as the years went by. On one hand, the Oasis is essentially the pinnacle of the cryptocurrency and microtransaction-ridden metaverse that companies like Facebook have been trying to make a thing for years. On the other hand, its messy, reference overdosed aesthetics have only gotten funnier now that Fortnite has demonstrated that this is exactly what the cyberworld would look like.
• History Repeats: In a very odd twist of fate, Michael Bay ended up being paramount to Cody's relationship with his wife; Transformers: Age of Extinction was where he went on his first date with her, and during their wedding the music being played accidentally changed to Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" from Armageddon.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: During the The Transformers: The Movie review, Cody feigns shock as to how the filmmakers managed to cast Orson Welles as Unicron... before admitting it was probably really easy. At that time, the film was being produced, the legendary filmmaker was a debt-ridden old man living off whatever gigs he could get, suffering from obesity severe enough that fat jokes from his coworkers were downright commonplace. He was in such poor health that, after recording his lines for Unicron, he would pass away the following week.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Cody dislikes seeing propaganda for foreign countries in American films... then bluntly says it's because he prefers regular American propaganda.
  • At the end of the Ready Player One (2018) review, Cody points out that the Turn of the Millennium is now as far away from us as The '80s were to Ernest Cline when he was writing the book, and you can already see people cashing in on nostalgia for the era. Like his own channel.
    Cody: Imagine 2000s nostalgia being used as a replacement for actual personality and substance! Ha ha... uh... fuck.
• I Am Not Leonard Nimoy: It's very rare for Cody to call major characters by their names and not just by the names of their actors, especially if the character in question has a silly name (like Del Spooner in I, Robot). It gets awkward in the Conspiracy Theory review, when he realises his declaration that "Mel Gibson killed Julia Roberts' father" sounds really bad out of context.
  Cody: In the movie. Not in real life. I know, me using her real name is… kinda confusing. Imagine if Mel Gibson method-acted so hard, he headshotted Julia Roberts’ real-life dad just to commit to a movie that got 57% on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Idiot Plot: Cody is exasperated by the plot point of Pokémon Detective Pikachu and the game it's based on, since the big twist is that the titular detective is Tim's missing father. The big issue he has with it is that Detective Pikachu and Tim's father are both played by Ryan Reynolds, and Tim never puts two and two together despite them having the same voice. It would've made more sense if Reynolds voiced Pikachu and then the human form of the father was Danny DeVito, but as is, it was so obvious to Cody that it became a Captain Obvious Reveal instead.
• Incest Subtext:invoked In regular Halo canon, all the Spartans had been raised to see Dr. Catherine Halsey as a mother figure. Which is why "The Package" short in Halo Legends Squicks out Cody because there was undeniable Ship Tease between Master Chief and its Hotter and Sexier depiction of Halsey.
• It's Personal: Cody's review of World War Z is mentioned to be a bit more personal for him due to his love for the book and how the movie disregards much of what made the book interesting to him in favour of a dumb action-thriller starring Brad Pitt.
• In Name Only:
  • Cody suspects that World War Z existed purely to use its source material's title, considering it barely has anything to do with what the book was about in favour of a generic action film. Even Max Brooks is quoted as finding it hard to hate the film when it barely resembled his work to begin with.
  • Of course, Godzilla (1998), probably one of the most infamous cases of this, couldn't escape. Cody puts forward the idea that instead of even trying to adapt Godzilla to Hollywood standards, Devlin and Emmerich just wanted to make their own take on Jurassic Park (pointing out its recent release, the much more dinosaur-like Zilla design, and "the entire second part of the movie" where the heroes are locked in a building with the very raptor-like baby kaijus), in the heart of New York, with a T-rex that's big enough to take on the US Army and gives birth to hundreds of raptors.
  • Cody believes that even if you had never seen or read Dragon Ball, you would make a more accurate adaptation than Dragon Ball Evolution. It's so unlike the source material that he doesn't even consider the film an adaptation at all.
• In Spite of a Nail: In the video on The Last Knight, Cody realises that King Arthur still somehow eventually lost England to the Anglo-Saxons (as evidenced by a major chunk of the movie taking place in modern-day England) despite having a major technological advantage due to his alliance with the Knights of Iacon.
• Japanese Politeness: Cody finds the filmmakers of Pokémon Detective Pikachu praising of working with Nintendo so forced that he jokes that Nintendo has a sniper trained on them whenever they give interviews. Then he finds out the distributors, Legendary, originally wanted to make the superhero movie where a guy got Pokemon powers.
  Cody: I don't know, maybe the Nintendo sniper is sometimes a good thing. (statement is superimposed with footage of Ned Flanders gunning down people like Charles Whitman)
• Later-Installment Weirdness: The 300 video had Cody’s avatar being much more animated, including having a mouth that moved along with his words in real time. Cody clarified that the more fluent style was more of an experiment than a permanent change, and sure enough, his avatar returned to its regular Limited Animation in future videos.
• Lighter and Softer: It's his theory as to why the reaction to Fantastic Four (2005) was so virulent, while he thinks the film isn't close to deserving the abysmal review scores it has garnered. The bright, comedic, almost cartoony Fantastic Four released right as the trend was swinging towards darker and more grounded takes on superheroes (coming out shortly after Spider-Man 2, The Incredibles 1, and worst of all a single month after Batman Begins) and it going hard against said trend resulted in a much more vitriolic reception than expected.
  Cody: This wasn't charming, this was dorky. This was Blinx the cat in a world ready for Gears of War.
• Malicious Misnaming: Cody's descriptions of Dragon Ball Evolution's versions of Bulma, Master Roshi, Yamcha and Goku is A goth girl, a middle-aged man, another middle-aged man going through a midlife crisis and a school shooter.
• Misplaced Accent: As a resident Texan, Cody finds Mark Wahlberg unconvincing as the Texan Cade Yaeger, to put it lightly.
  Cody: And like any true Texan, Cade sounds like he walked out of Fenway Park after slamming a few too many Sam Adams.
• Mood Whiplash: The Transformers One review ends on one thanks to some surprise last minute news. Cody writes a bittersweet eulogy for the Transformers movie franchise, commenting that even if the series is probably dead after the commercial failure of One, at least it got to go out on a high note. There's something oddly sweet about such a large franchise ending on the director of the final film personally thanking its biggest fan for all his support. And then it turns out not only is another movie in the works, Michael Bay is coming back to direct it.
  Cody: Are you fucking kidding me?
• Nausea Fuel: invoked One of his many gripes against The Last Knight was that due to the film being shot simultaneously with widescreen and IMAX cameras, many scenes would rapidly cut between wide- and fullscreen shots with no attempt at making them seamless, which made the action scenes nauseating for him to look at after a while.
• Never Trust a Title: "The Best Zack Snyder Movie" (a Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole review) opens on Cody bluntly admitting he lied. The joke actually is a part of the review: when discussing why the movie underperformed, Cody mentions the title being so utterly uninspired, he felt putting it on his own video would drive people away from it.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • Discussed in the Godzilla (2014) review, with Cody citing this as one of the reasons for his disappointment with the film when he originally saw it. Besides making it look like Bryan Cranston was in more of the movie than he was, the trailers made it look like Godzilla was the primary threat responsible for the majority of the on-screen destruction, when it was the doing of the MUTOs, who weren’t alluded to in the slightest despite being the actual threat and driving force of the plot. At the same time, Godzilla was a supporting protagonist in the movie named after him. Understandably, Cody’s hype deflated when he found out most of the movie was focused on the much less charismatic Aaron Taylor-Johnson and what were basically Legendary’s kaiju OCs. However, he later warmed up to the latter upon rewatch.
  • Comes up again during the Transformers One video as a brutal Deconstruction. The trailers were so misleading as to what the film is actually like (primarly because Keegan-Michael Key as Bumblebee is front and center, giving the impression the film is a wacky kid friendly comedy when it's isn't, espeically during the climax) that it not only killed the interest of the general audience, but also other Transformers fans up to and including Cody himself.
• Non-Indicative Title: Naturally, the Clash of the Titans review brings up how awkward it is for the movies to use such a title in the one context where "Titans" are their own distinct class of mythological entities and not just a term for really imposing characters. Clash of the Titans (1981) at least referred to the Kraken as "the last of the Titans" (which is completely wrong) and Wrath of the Titans did actually have the Titan Kronos in it, but Clash of the Titans (2010) didn't even try to pretend to justify its title. In the end, Cody posits the filmmakers just wanted a rad mythological-sounding title and didn't think of the implications... and it's still much cooler than something like "Perseus Unleashed".
• No. Just... No:
  • During his review of Planet of the Apes (2001), Cody starts off calling Mark Wahlberg's character by his real name, but then he decides he should probably call him by his character's name. When he finds out the character's name is Captain Leo Davidson, he decides to nonverbally stick with calling the character by his actor's name, likely because the name is so generic that he figured he couldn't get any humor out of it or because Wahlberg's character is so nondescript that he'd forgot it during the recording.
  • The narration in Ready Player One comes off as both self-aggrandising regarding nerd knowledge and tediously groan-worthy. At one point, Cody lets out a weary sigh of annoyance, and at another point, he's just burying his face in his hands.
  Cody: The entire book is like that.
• No Sense of Humor: Cody accuses Siskel & Ebert of this when they react negatively to the Take That, Critics! caricatures of them in Godzilla (1998).
  Cody: Come on, man. You don't have a sense of humor? I'd be honored.
• "Not So Different" Remark: The thesis for his The Boys comic book review is that for all of its hatred for the superhero genre, it's no less of a power fantasy. It's just that the superhero equivalents are guys in trench coats beating up idiots in regular superhero costumes.
• Not So Stoic: Cody plays up his monotone for humor, but sometimes genuinely can't stifle a laugh when things get too ridiculous, or his jokes are bad.
  • The most his avatar smiles is through 2012, as the stupidity of everything keeps cracking him up.
  • He loses it when he summarises Raleigh's Audience Surrogate role in Pacific Rim as "a blank slate for any dumb teen American boy to imagine themselves piloting a mech with their hot Japanese girlfriend."
  • When mentioning how Shane in Transformers: Age of Extinction barely has any character, he mentions that he does have one trait besides him being a racecar driver and begins to loudly laugh as footage of the infamous "Romeo and Juliet Law" scene briefly plays.
  • Cody briefly explodes in laughter at the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, when Noah is recruited in an Avengers-esque fashion by the mysterious government organisation... G.I. Joe.
  • He especially loses his shit when John Bradley's character in Moonfall asks himself, "What would Elon Musk do?"
    Cody [cackling like a hyena]: What?!
  • He begins laughing after he compares 300's special effects and visual aesthetics to Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, while saying that's meant as a compliment.
  • The appearance of an actual owl named Bubo in Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole caused him to start cheering.
  • Sometimes, however, Cody's stoicism breaks because an aspect of a bad film enrages him to the point of raising his voice. One particularly egregious example is how pointlessly verbose the dialogue is in The Last Airbender with the scene when Iroh is explaining why they're not letting Aang go after the elemental test, being so roundabout that it angered Cody to the point that his character avatar looks like he's about to strangle the characters on screen.
    Cody: Just say he's the Avatar, holy shit!!!
• Older Than They Think:
  • Cody is flabbergasted to discover that not only was Dark of the Moon's idea of bringing Cybertron right next to Earth cribbed from the very first season of the original show, said 80s kid's cartoon showed more realistic and overwhelming consequences to the appearance of another planet in the Earth's vicinity (though it stays silent about casualties and instead focuses on the sheer environmental devastation). And then he finds out The Transformers also included an episode with Transformers in the court of King Arthur long before The Last Knight.
  • For the Scooby-Doo (2002), Cody lampshades how the plot twist that the Mystery Gang is dealing with actual demons rather than typical crooks in costumes isn't as noteworthy when you remember that the franchise has already introduced real magic and monsters in past entries.
    Cody: It's Scooby-Doo, but this time the monsters are real! Except for, you know, that one time, and the other time^note the werewolf from A Gaggle of Galloping Ghosts was another disguise by the antagonist, and the other time, and that other time.
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You:
  • Cody concedes that The Last Airbender has fairly gorgeous Scenery Porn, particularly scenes in the Fire Nation that were filmed against backdrops of beautiful Southeast Asian temples.
  • Cody has found at least one good thing to say about each of the five Bayformers movies:
    • He believes the first Transformers to be a genuinely well-made and entertaining film, even if it does have some flaws.
    • Revenge of the Fallen had John Turturro as Simmons and a handful of jokes that did land.
    • Cody loves the final act of Dark of the Moon (in a mostly ironic sense), mainly for how ridiculously Darker and Edgier it gets.
    • Age of Extinction had a decent premise (even if it wasn’t executed well) and the Dinobots.
    • Anthony Hopkins in The Last Knight, whom Cody describes as being both the best and worst part of the movie, since he somehow comes off as not even trying while still managing to outact every other character.
  • [[Subverted]] with Dragon Ball Evolution. Cody admits that he always tries to find something he likes in even the worst films he watches, but he couldn't find anything to like about this film.
• Our Slashers Are Different: One of the main reasons he loves Dr. Giggles so much is because the titular mass murderer is just a pudgy, middle-aged man who kills people with medical equipment while spouting doctor-themed one-liners. There's nothing supernatural about him, and he's not even a real doctor. No explanation is given for how this guy is just as much of an Implacable Man as any Stock Slasher, making the entire movie hilarious.
• Perpetual Frowner: Cody's avatar rarely cracks a smile and keeps a deadpan blank expression most of the time.
• Playing Against Type:invoked The proudly self-proclaimed sociopath Cogman from The Last Knight is played by Jim Carter, who is best known for playing the very respectable and dignified butler Mr. Carson in Downton Abbey. Cody figured the casting choice was an intentional joke since Cogman is everything Mr. Carson is not, though Cody himself isn't particularly amused by it.
• Questionable Casting:invoked
  • A running theme throughout the Sharknado video is the film series having “the most baffling cameos ever”, including Mark Cuban as the US President (with Ann Coulter as his VP, no less), Tony Hawk kick-flipping up the Sydney Opera House, Fabio as the Pope, Geraldo Rivera as a blimp pilot, and at least four convicted sex offenders (Andy Dick, Jared Fogle, Matt Lauer, and Anthony Wiener). It gets to the point where Cody struggles to recognise which has-been celebrity pops up next.
    • It gets more bizarre when Dolph Lundgren appears at the very end of the fifth movie as Fin's son from the future...only to be recast with another actor in the next film;
    Cody: They could only afford him for this one scene, and that was it. It's like if in some end credits scene, Ryan Gosling showed up playing the highly anticipated character Glup Shitto, and then they just never mention him again. Actually, I take that back; that would be hilarious.
  • Cody isn't going to get over Mark Wahlberg as a Texan inventor any time soon.
  • Like many, Cody finds M. Night Shyamalan's casting choices for The Last Airbender odd. Cody also points out Shyamalan's rationale for these castings to be even more odd; Shyamalan went full Color Blind Casting and based each element's ethnicity entirely on whichever actors played the main characters.
  • To him, Godzilla (2014) casting Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen as the Brodies feels amusing in retrospect. Not because they're bad in their roles, but because this was right before Avengers: Age of Ultron, so they played a married couple and a brother-sister pair within months of each other, with all the awkward subtext that implies.
    Cody: Their agents worked too hard that year. Or not enough.
  • Matthew Broderick as a Chick Magnet is a rather odd choice in Cody's opinion.
  • Cody does not buy that Arnold Schwarzenegger could ever play someone as normal-sounding as "mattress salesman Howard Langston".
  • War of the Worlds (2025) starring Ice Cube (a man mostly known for his work in Gangsta Rap) as a Homeland Security agent is so spectacularly unfitting that all Cody can say is "we're off to a great start".
  • God, where to begin with Dragon Ball Evolution? From Goku being an angsty teenager to Chow Yun-fat being too young to play Master Roshi, the film is filled with horrible casting choices. Probably the worst, though, was Yamcha being portrayed by a former K-Pop star who was pushing forty. Fine if the movie was taking place during "Dragon Ball Z']s Buu Saga or Dragon Ball Super'', horrible for playing him in a film that's a loose adaptation of the King Piccolo Saga.
  • Zigzagged in Clash of the Titans (2010). Cody is quite amused to see Sam Worthington, the textbook Action Genre Hero Guy, starring in a Sword and Sandal movie; he theorises this was a deliberate move by the filmmakers to go with the film's Darker and Edgier tone.
    Cody: This is not a man who existed before the invention of the M16.
• Realism-Induced Horror: In-universe, this is what Cody thinks makes the Supes better characters in the TV show compared to the source material; by portraying them as realistically awful people and egotistical celebrities, it makes them more effective antagonists. By contrast, in the comic, they act so absurdly evil they come off as "crazy cartoon people".
• Retroactive Recognition:invoked
  • Cody reacts with horror when he realises that Nick Tatopoulos' voice in Godzilla: The Series is Ian Ziering, who would go on to play Fin in Sharknado.
  • Inversely, Cody is ecstatic to learn that David Wenham, who played Dillios in 300, also happened to be the narrator of Deadliest Warrior.
  • When watching Independence Day: Resurgence, he realises Hiller's son is now played by Jessie T. Usher, and goes on to refer to him as "A-Train" for the rest of the movie, while apologising about how he just can't see anything else.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: In his Cloverfield retrospective, he concludes that despite his fondness for the ARG, it seems to have had very little involvement from the people who were actually behind the film's story, and was more likely the creation of an external marketing team. This explains why Matt Reeves and J. J. Abrams have seemingly disregarded it whenever making any kind of Word of God statement as it's likely they aren't even aware of what happened in it, and even if they were, it's unlikely they'd prioritize it over their own ideas.
• Running Gag:
  • "NO, OPTIMUS!"
  • "I'm an inventor!"
• The Scrappy:invoked The Trope Namer of course gets discussed during the Scooby-Doo (2002) review, as his involvement as the Big Bad of the movie makes it unavoidable. It's brought up that despite the current hatred of Scrappy-Doo, the addition of the Kid-Appeal Character did actually revitalize the franchise as it was starting to grow stale, and Scrappy was popular enough to become a mainstay of the series (even as the rest of the gang got Put on a Bus, resulting in Scrappy effectively replacing Fred and Velma for nearly two decades), an extremely rare feat considering this kind of character tends to crash and burn spectacularly. In the end, Cody posits that despite James Gunn's undying hatred of Scrappy (albeit one Cody completely understands, and admits that if he could make a The Fairly OddParents! movie he'd have Sparky the dog killed horribly), without him Scooby-Doo as a franchise wouldn't have lasted long enough to get the 2002 movie... and thus Gunn actually owes his entire career to Scrappy-Doo.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: As Cody finds out in the video on Cowboys & Aliens, Scott Rosenberg, the financier of the original graphic novel the movie was (very loosely) based on (which in turn was based on a script he almost got greenlit by Universal until the failure of Wild Wild West made studios weary about fantastical westerns), allegedly used his money to inflate the book’s sales numbers until it reached best-seller status, thus convincing Universal to take interest in it and give a film adaptation a greenlight. Such tactics included the decision to make Cowboys & Aliens a graphic novel instead of a miniseries (which gave it a longer shelf life), ordering massive quantities of the book for retailers and having them eventually give it away for free just by merely entering a store, and even getting Image Comics to change the legal definition of what constituted a graphic novel according to Diamond in order sell it as cheap as possible.
• Sequel Escalation: Discussed in his review of Roland Emmerich disaster movies; he notes that said disasters have become bigger over time, going from a glacial cataclysm to a global flood up to the moon itself almost colliding with the planet. After reviewing Moonfall he pitches a movie idea that'd escalate things further: have Andromeda and the Milky Way collide a few billion years early.
• Sequelitis:invoked A common topic of discussion on the channel.
  • Cody thinks Transformers (2007) was the best out of the Michael Bay films, and each following instalment got worse and worse with the notable exception of Transformers: Dark of the Moon (which he loves while acknowledging the very real flaws), from being So Bad, It's Good to some of the very worst films Cody has ever watched in his life.
  • Independence Day is one of Cody's favorite Guilty Pleasures. Independence Day: Resurgence is, in his opinion, complete dogshit.
  • invokedLike many fans of Pacific Rim, Cody prefers to pretend Pacific Rim: Uprising never happened, to the point of at one point trying to join the Play-Along Meme of putting the film into Fanon Discontinuity and refusing to acknowledge its existence.
  • While yet to fully review the games, Cody often mentions his dissatisfaction with how the 343 Industries sequels for Halo turned out.
  • Cody is baffled by the tone shift in Wrath of the Titans, especially in the context of the world literally ending and the Gods dying. This, combined with undoing the ending of Clash of the Titans (2010), the change in Andromeda's character (and hair color), and the more cartoony action, causes him to feel that the subsequent product was less of a sequel to the prior film and more of a soft reboot by creators that had nothing to do with the original remake.
• Shout-Out:
  • Cody derisively refers to The Fallen as a BIONICLE constantly.
  • In the Jingle All the Way video, Cody refers to Myron dressed up as Dementor in the film's climax as "Sinbad Requiem".
  • As a big fan of the franchise. Cody repeatedly references Halo in his videos. Throughout Moonfall he builds up to the revelation that the film is a Spiritual Adaptation of the franchise's backstory about the Forerunners and their relation to humans.
  • His eventual loss of interest in Independence Day is portrayed by his teenage self changing the channel to watch Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.
  • His Planet of the Apes (2001) video has him assume robots do not exist in the film’s world because of a Butlerian Jihad. He mentions this again in I, Robot
  • He references Lindsay Ellis' description of Independence Day and War of the Worlds (2005) as "pre-" and "post-9/11" respectively when speaking about the former film and Cloverfield.
  • In the Sharknado video, Cody states that the heroes' plan to fly a helicopter (a notoriously flimsy vehicle that loses control at the slightest imbalance) into a tornado in the first film’s climax works, barely an inconvenience.
  • Since both Clash of the Titans (2010) and Crash of the Titans have nearly the same name, he couldn't resist the obvious joke.
  Cody: Oh, Crash, you wacky bandicoot.
• So Bad, It's Good:invoked He loves Roland Emmerich's disaster movies because of how corny and clichéd they are, noting several of Emmerich's films as his favourites.
• So Bad, It Was Better: invoked This is Cody's opinion of the post-Michael Bay live-action Transformers. While very flawed, the Bayformers quintet had enough quirks and flaws to give them a unique flair. By contrast, Bumblebee and Rise of the Beasts come off as either "good" or simply So Okay, It's Average for him.
• So Okay, It's Average: invoked
  • He's read the entirety of The Boys and found it to be alright. However, when compared to its adaptation, Cody found the comic to be pretty bad due to the many kinks the show ironed out for the sake of more proper character drama and tension.
  • He eventually found Bumblebee to be decent but with nothing to write home about, bluntly stating that if you've already seen other A Boy and His X movies (especially The Iron Giant, which Bumblebee lifts entire scenes from), it doesn't have much more to offer.
• Something Completely Different: "I Ranked Every Transformers Movie For Some Reason" is different in that it isn't a review of a movie, but rather a tier list of all of the Transformers movies.
• Special Effects Failure: The CGI in Dragon Ball Evolution is so bad that Cody initially thought it was an early 2000's direct to TV film for the Disney Channel, similar to the live action Ben 10: Race Against Time.
• Spiritual Antithesis:
  • Sees Cloverfield as one to Godzilla (1998). Borrowing a few cues from Lindsay Ellis, Cody notes how both films are decidedly obvious in whether they were made before or after the September 11th attacks. Both are American films about a Kaiju attack on New York City and show multiple landmarks destroyed and people killed in the destruction. But while Godzilla plays most of this for fun and comedy, Cloverfield plays the entire premise and destruction for serious drama with direct and conscious parallels to 9/11. Ironically, this makes Cloverfield closer to the spirit of Godzilla (1954) more than the film that shares its name, as both are heavy allegories for tragedies that befell their respective countries.
  • "When Hollywood Made Two Asteroid Movies the Same Year" is almost about this trope throughout:
    • The main topics of discussion, Deep Impact and Armageddon, are both Disaster Movies about an asteroid on the path to hitting Earth and a crew being sent up to destroy it before it can. Deep Impact is a grounded, mostly scientifically accurate thriller that focuses on the melodrama that would occur when faced with a world-ending cataclysm. Armageddon is a madcap adventure with a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits directed by Michael Bay, focusing more on funny, unlikely heroes having to save the world.
    • Regarding Cody's library of videos, he directly contrasts this video on Dueling Movies to his previous video on White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen, as he's planning on highlighting differences more than similarities this time.
    • Finally, he mentions having planned to look at a third disaster movie about an asteroid hitting Earth called Greenland, which he directly compares to Deep Impact as a fascinating antithesis due to changing public opinion on the effectiveness and trust in the federal government. While Deep Impact portrayed a proactive government that was upfront about the disaster to the general public and overall had a bittersweet but optimistic tone about it all, Greenland is highly cynical and portrays the government as being more ruthless in how it comes up with contingencies against the disaster. It's bad enough that Cody realises that discussing it after talking about the other two films would give the video a Downer Ending… which he kinda just did. Cue awkward silence from Cody for a second, and then he begins signing off.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: One of Cody’s major criticisms of The Last Knight is how the central conflict involving the Knights of Iacon and Quintessa is completely unrelated to the Autobot-Deception conflict, resulting in both sides, especially the latter, being Demoted to Extra, even disregarding how the existence of the Knights, as well as The Order of the Witwiccans, pokes major holes in the series’ already shaky continuity.
• Stylistic Suck: Compared to his AlternateHistoryHub avatar, Cody's PointlessHub avatar is rather scrungly and nondescript. His hat looks like it's part of his body.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Carly Spencer's entire existence in Transformers: Dark of the Moon is, as Cody described, the writers crossing out Mikaela Banes' name in the script and replacing it with Carly after Megan Fox was given the boot. Many parts of Carly's character, including her job as someone who oversaw a car collection, make much more sense if it were Mikaela instead of some British girl who used to work at the White House.
• Take That!:
  • Anytime T.J. Miller shows up in a movie Cody reviews, he takes several potshots towards him for his many controversies.
  • He gets more comfortable criticising Nicola Peltz's acting as he uncovers how her acting career was a blatant instance of Hollywood Nepotism.
  • Transformers: Age of Extinction gets compared to Stitch!, because like Stitch! the sequel inexplicably drops the core cast and setting of the previous entries except for the mascot characters, and like Stitch! it is "a blight on humanity that never should have been made".
  • When Joshua Joyce rants about how KSI cannot "make what they want to make the way they want to make them," the cover art for Halo Infinite slowly enters the frame.
  • An example of bad modern CGI Cody brings up is MODOK from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
  • He compares the quality of Sharknado's special effects to an average skit from The Nostalgia Critic. And for added measure, while saying this, he uses a clip from the latter's infamous video on Pink Floyd's The Wall.
  • The video on Jingle All The Way directs a brutal one towards the less savoury parts of the Star Wars fandom.
    Cody: Hey, I know that face! It’s that kid all those nerdy man children bullied into having a drug addiction!
  • Cody often uses the Dark Universe as a punching bag regarding failed cinematic universes.
  • In his review of Godzilla (1998), one of the various things he showcases as proof of the film's Unintentional Period Piece is how Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs supplied a song for the soundtrack (then superimposes a Blipvert of the news article of Combs' 2024 arrest over "Come With Me", complete with Stock Scream).
  • Another moment from his Godzilla (1998) review has Cody talk about how the movie couldn't have been made after 9/11 and mentions this is his Turning Red moment. He then briefly plays a clip from the infamous The Mysterious Mr. Enter review of Turning Red in which Mr. Enter criticises the movie for not addressing the fallout of 9/11 despite the movie taking place in Canada.
  • invoked A stealth retroactive one can be seen in his video on The Boys: Originally, the thumbnail for said video had text reading "The Show Is Better". After its fourth season wrapped, the thumbnail was altered thusly: "The Show WAS Better".
  • Cody can relate to James Gunn making Scrappy-Doo the main villain of Scooby-Doo (2002), openly admitting that if allowed to write the script of a The Fairly OddParents! movie, he would 100% find a way to kill Sparky the fairy dog.
  • Cody directly states that the fifth Guardians of Ga'Hoole book, The Shattering, to be a book where nothing happens and rereading it was a complete waste of time.
  • A subtle one, but in the review of Dragon Ball Evolution when Cody mentions he started watching anime in the early 2010's, an image of Sword Art Online appears while the background is just an unhinged scream.
  • Cody compares watching a live-action film adaptation of a cartoon to playing Russian Roulette with a loaded gun.
  Cody: And you're going to be thankful for those bullets because you're watching Underdog.
  • In "I Ranked Every Transformers Movie For Some Reason", Cody comments that, unlike games, movies cannot be patched post-release. Until he is shown footage of the Star Wars Special Edition and amends it to "movies should not be patched".
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: invoked Something that Cody brings up in reviews of adaptations
  • He expresses this opinion about World War Z, believing that the book's plot was a lot more interesting and inventive than the movie, which leaned into a more generic Zombie Apocalypse than anything.
  • "'The Boys' Comic Was Kinda Terrible" acknowledges that a lot of people believe this and say "the book was better", to preface how The Boys is one of the few cases where it inverts this trope by the adaptation is considered by most to be better than the original.
  • The changes Fox made to the world of Dragon Ball Evolution are so unlike the source material that it might as well be its own separate I.P. Cody openly compares it to if The Last Airbender had been about Aang, Sokka and Katara going to a high school in Toledo, Ohio, and nobody knew what bending was.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!:invoked
  • One of the biggest issues with The Last Knight that Cody had was how it was blatantly ripping off whatever was popular at the time, hence a hodgepodge of Genre-Busting where the movie rips off Suicide Squad (2016), Game of Thrones, and The Force Awakens. It even goes so far as to copy the opening battle of Gladiator.
  • Cody figures out that the last two seasons of G1 Transformers fell flat because they were just Star Trek but with Transformers.
  • Cody feels that Fantastic Four (2005) completely butchered Doctor Doom by taking too many shortcuts with his origin story and just turning him into Norman Osborn but without any of the compelling Green Goblin bits.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Probably the biggest issue Cody has with Fantastic Four (2005) is how much they butchered Reed Richards. In the comics, Reed is one of the most complex, intelligent and fascinating characters ever created, fully earning the Mr. Fantastic name despite having the same powers as several other well-known fictional characters like Plastic Man or Jake the Dog. However, due to 2000s-era writing conventions, Reed is turned into the stereotypical nerd who's brilliant at science but horrible with social cues. To make matters worse, the movie goes out of its way to show Reed as factually wrong as often as possible, from miscalculating when and where the cosmic wave would hit, to the space station being able to protect them from the blast. And the one time he uses his scientific knowledge for combat, it's to flash-freeze Dr. Doom with cold water after hyper-heating him in a vortex, something even the scientifically deficient Johnny Storm would've likely figured out on his own.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: invoked
  • Cody legitimately thinks the "humanity turns on the Autobots" plot of Transformers: Age of Extinction was an intriguing premise, and could have worked… had the film bothered to properly address the fallout of Dark of the Moon, particularly how Optimus had contributed to the Decepticon invasion with his misplaced trust in Sentinel Prime. Instead, Age of Extinction, being the Soft Reboot it is, barely addresses the events of Dark of the Moon (with Sentinel not even being mentioned once), and we suddenly jump from humanity and Autobots battling together in a last stand against the Deceptions, to humanity suddenly distrusting all Transformers, Autobot or Decepticon, allowing Harold Attinger to wipe out most of the Autobots with his secret black-ops group Cemetery Wind despite being specifically hired to wipe out Decepticons, all with the US government somehow oblivious to the whole thing. How the film ultimately executed such a promising idea left Cody with a bitter taste in his mouth.
  • Being a fan of cheesy action, Cody loves the Cool vs. Awesome premise of Cowboys & Aliens... but not so much the execution. The movie refuses to commit to the alien part, giving us extraterrestrials that are essentially just barely sentient, generic movie monsters that happened to show up via spaceships rather than Little Green Men with supertech and laser guns. As a result, the film ends up being "Cowboys, feat. Aliens, and he can't say if that's bad or not because the cowboys are by far the best part". He blames that on the movie releasing in the early part of The New '10s, where the trend was towards aggressively gritty realism, making it unable to commit to the inherent silliness of most classic Alien Invasion tropes.
  • One of his biggest issues with Independence Day: Resurgence is that he believes the decision to jump the timeframe ahead and depict humanity as having advanced considerably in the intervening period falls into this. He isn't opposed to the idea, and he even argues it could be an interesting twist to depict humanity as a relative peer power capable of fighting the aliens in a conventional conflict. However, he feels the film executes it in about the worst way possible: humanity is clearly a lot more advanced, but remains laughably outclassed by the aliens in a straight fight. This means that the story plays out basically the same way as the first one, and the only real effect that humanity having future tech has on the film is making its visual direction less interesting.
• This Is Unforgivable!: The biggest sin in Dragon Ball Evolution's portrayal of Goku is that he pays any attention to Chi-Chi.
  Cody: I cannot think of a less Goku moment than him sitting in a classroom, looking over at his crush, and having fantasies about her straight out of the fucking Goofy Movie.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman:
  • It's joked about in the The Day After Tomorrow review, where the protagonist is the only one who predicts the imminent climate crisis thanks to his overly obscure and specific job as a paleoclimatologist. Cody is left hoping Emmerich would make a disaster movie about an invasion of alien muffins starring a specialist in baking science.
  • In a funny meta case, as War of the Worlds (2025) was created during the COVID-19 Pandemic with specific interest in the idea of films that could be produced during confinement, Cody jokes that a Hollywood exec clearly panicked at the thought of the pandemic never ending and immediately contacted the only guy in the industry still trying to make feature-length Computer Screen Story movies a thing, even though his last major job in Hollywood was the notoriously corny Wanted.
• Too Dumb to Live: Hud from Cloverfield is a moron, which Cody argues works to justify the cameraman in a Found Footage film continuing to film everything because Hud is presented in the movie as incredibly socially inept with Skewed Priorities.
• Trolling Creator:invoked Discussed when it comes to Sunbow's actions regarding bringing back Optimus after complaints from parents about how devastated their kids were about his death. They start with bringing him back as a zombie in "Dark Awakening", then announce that the next episode is called "The Return of Optimus Prime", but then don't air that episode until after 20 others air. Cody wonders if the show's writers genuinely tried to mess with their audience.
• Unabashed B-Movie Fan: Cody puts on no airs regarding his love for schlocky B-movies, especially disaster and kaiju films. He's self-described his channel as a monument to the works of Roland Emmerich.
• Undignified Death: Cody wishes to hopefully die like Randy Quaid's character in Independence Day, but also predicts that he'll probably just die from falling down the stairs.
• Unintentional Period Piece: invoked
  • Discussed in his review of Godzilla (1998). Quoting Lindsay Ellis' review of the film, he points out how many details (music, mentions of places long gone from NYC, and especially the overall whimsical atmosphere with many jokes revolving around the United States military accidentally blowing up Manhattan while trying to save it) set the film firmly during The '90s and before the September 11 attacks. He would later contrast that with Cloverfield, another kaiju film with a similar premise but taken in a completely different direction by the impact of 9/11.
  • Same with Independence Day and Independence Day: Resurgence, which he describes as encompassing everything wrong with the Hollywood of their era. And unfortunately for Resurgence, it turns out that the corny as heck, gung-ho enthusiasm and exceptionalism of The '90s makes for a much more entertaining movie than the cliches of The New '10s (such as a more cynical and drab outlook, desperate attempts to set up a franchise that leave the film feeling unfinished, and a general feeling that the movie was designed by executives more than its actual creators).
  • Cowboys & Aliens for Cody is an interesting look at the type of movies that were popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s: Darker and Edgier takes on even the silliest concepts that probably shouldn't have been taken seriously. For a movie with such a comedic title, Cody notes how the movie was ultimately a serious Western drama that just so happens to feature aliens, who were considerably toned down from what people would expect from a film with that title and, ironically, actually brought the quality of the film down whenever they showed up.
  • Fantastic Four (2005) is easily the most 2000s film Cody has ever seen, describing it as "an Xbox in movie form" and admitting to sometimes seeing Chris Evans' Johnny Storm (a sell-out Jerkass who partakes in extreme sports as a hobby) as the embodiment of the era. Cody argues that the movie was outdated even for the time, as superhero movies were already evolving with Batman Begins so its brand of silliness was no longer welcome.
  • Somehow, despite taking place in the future, Ready Player One (2018) is one because of the prominence of Tracer from Overwatch, as she appears four times in the movie. Because of the disaster that was the PR and marketing for Overwatch 2 and the massive drop in the prestige of Activision Blizzard in the years after the film's release and the resultant drop in the popularity of their IPs, it pushed the film in the realm of something that could've only come out in the late 2010s, when Overwatch was at the peak of its popularity and it looked like Tracer would become an iconic character on par with Kratos and Master Chief, instead of the face of all the issues regarding Activision Blizzard's corporate mindset. Cody even predicts that by 2045, the year the story takes place in, Overwatch would become so irrelevant in popular culture that most people who watch the movie will think that Tracer was a character created specifically for the film. And to say nothing of the inclusion of characters from Battleborn…
• Uncanny Valley: The I, Robot review has a field day with this. As pointed out, the robots being given extremely human faces is great to increase their creepy factor and works well with Spooner's initial distrust of them... but also raises so many questions about why would US Robotics go with this design on what is, in-universe, intended to be a civilian product and not a movie monster. The same goes for VIKI, which is so needlessly freaky-looking (being essentially just SHODAN with fancier CG effects), and Cody's surprised they didn't suspect her much earlier.
  • While Ready Player One (2018) did a good job recreating the designs for their licensed I.P.s, the designs of their original characters were hard for Cody to look at, with him saying that they looked like a worse version of the Alita: Battle Angel designs. In fact, he found it to be a relief when the film went back to the live-action world outside the Oasis, so he could have a few moments without looking at the characters' player avatars.
• Uncertain Audience: invoked
  • Cody thinks that the reason Transformers One flopped despite very good word of mouth is ultimately this. Despite being intended as a starting point for new fans, the movie isn't quite family-friendly enough to appeal to an all-ages audience (especially with the "Badassatron" joke front and center of the marketing), failing to capture the family audience and locking its target demographic to the very limited age range of "old enough to swear, but young enough to still want to watch cartoons" and the Transformers fanbase itself, which unfortunately remains very niche (as pointed out by Cody, the massive audience of the Bayformers is primarily the Summer Blockbuster demographic, not franchise fans).
  • Cody believes one of the main reasons why Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole failed is because it's an epic fantasy war movie... starring owls. Even getting around the fact that owls in general are fairly goofy creatures (Cody even saying they’re the bird equivalent of cats), the fact that the film treated itself seriously made it difficult to market, as kids would see it as too boring and unfunny compared to films like Happy Feet (which was made by the same studios, no less, but had the far more marketable concept of dancing penguins), adults would see it as rather lame since it's based on a children's book series, parents would be put off by the dark subject matter and the violence, and book fans would be irritated by all the changes made to the story. Add on the unwieldy title, and it's no wonder it didn't get a sequel.
• Unfortunate Implications: invoked
  • Cody brings up that 2012 was originally planned to get a spinoff series focusing on the survivors attempting to land and reform civilisation to the best of their ability, on the sole continent to survive the flood. Then the project fell through, possibly because someone realised they were creating a show about a bunch of rich white guys colonising Africa.
    Cody: I'm guessing, from the filmmakers' perspective, they were seeing Africa as, like, the Garden of Eden. They really didn't think that through.
  • Cody is more than a little uncomfortable about how World War Z depicted a scenario where Israel and Palestine finally got along and joined together in peace and harmony... only for that peace and harmony to be the direct cause of Jerusalem's destruction at the hands of the zombie horde due to an Israeli/Palestinian celebration agitating them enough to storm the city.
    Cody:... What did you mean by that, movie?
  • Cody sounds noticeably uncomfortable talking about the depiction of the Persians in 300, with him going silent at a shot where the emissary's skin gets artificially darkened after making a threat.
    Cody:... [The Persians] were definitely something.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:invoked Discussed in the Planet of the Apes (2001) review, as Cody cites this as the reason why it’s so hard to take the apes in the film seriously. Whereas the original series had people in unrealistic ape makeup acting very much human, and the reboot series had highly realistic motion captured apes with some human intelligence still acting more like apes for the most part, the 2001 film falls between those two with people in highly realistic ape makeup acting like apes for the most part. And because the apes are still very much human-proportioned, and the film doesn’t have the classic series’ excuse of technical limitations, this results in many awkward and weird scenes whenever the ape actors start going apeshit.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Non-Californians in Sharknado weirdly have a habit of completely underselling the very dangerous hurricane by regarding it as "just a little rain." In response, Cody snarks that the New Yorker who mocks the main characters for their perfectly valid concerns has often witnessed the Hudson River flooding and claims the lives of thousands regularly.
  • More like Unusually Uninteresting Concept, but when Cody was rereading the first six books for his "Gahoole" review, he kept forgetting that the series was technically a post-apocalyptic tale where humanity had gone extinct and owls had taken their place as the dominant sentient species, rather than a standard fantasy story where owls just happened to be able to speak, write and develop civilized societies.
• Villain Has a Point: Cody notes that he completely understands why humanity would turn on the Autobots in Transformers: Age of Extinction, pointing out how Optimus truly was ultimately responsible for the destruction of Chicago due to his misplaced trust in Sentinel Prime. From the point of view of everyone else, Optimus wasn't rectifying his mistake but putting out a fire he caused. So, for Cody, it makes sense that many humans would hold a grudge against Transformers and want them hunted down.
• Vindicated by History:invoked Defied. When The Fantastic Four: First Steps was coming out, there were plenty of social media posts attempting to appeal to nostalgia by claiming the Fantastic Four Duology as hidden gems, only for Cody to bluntly clarify that they were never good.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The status of Noah Ringer, who played Aang in The Last Airbender, is unknown as of Cody's video on it. He doesn't blame the guy, considering nearly every discussion of the film used his face as the thumbnail, and one likely wouldn't want any public presence when your face is forever tied to a shoddy product. His video on Cowboys & Aliens shows a Reddit commenter who supposedly knows Noah claiming that he's become a Taekwondo instructor and isn't too bothered by the hate for the movie, but Cody acknowledges that the legitimacy of this is unknown.
• Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
  • Deep Impact's filmmakers have Shown Their Work and made their asteroid a simple seven-mile-wide object, which, while it doesn't seem too impressive, is similar in size to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and thus fairly realistic. Meanwhile, Armageddon's asteroid is 600 miles wide, which Cody explains would make the asteroid basically a moon, and that Truman’s claim that "nothing will survive, not even bacteria" is an understatement; an impact from an object that size would basically obliterate the Earth’s crust and temporarily turn the planet to liquid.
  • In the world of Dragon Ball Evolution, King Piccolo and Oozaru had nearly conquered Earth 2,000 years ago, almost wiping out humanity in the process, yet nobody believes that this actually happened, not even people in academia. Hell, they don't even believe they existed. This baffles Cody, seeing as we still have contemporary writing from 2,000 years ago, so somebody would've written it down. Even if people didn't recognise Piccolo's historicity, he would've been mentioned in myths and legends from the time. Entire cultures, societies and histories would've been changed by Piccolo, and yet outside of a few sci-fi elements, the world is almost exactly like ours. This only furthers Cody's belief that the world of the film is as shallow as tissue paper.
• You Know Who Said That?: Here and there in the Godzilla (1998) review, Cody describes the film as being "perfectly competent as a kaiju movie", which is indeed the overall take he has on it... until he reveals that this was not his own opinion but a quote from Takashi Yamazaki, director of the critically acclaimed and Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One.