I will admit, I continue to be a little surprised by who I am able to get for Critical Distance podcast interviews by simply asking. This month I had on Bob Chipman, aka moviebob, to talk about his Game OverThinker YouTube show. Ok, neither he nor James Portnow are exactly huge, but compared to me, wow.
I was told to focus on the historical side of things as what Mr. Chipman does isn’t really criticism, per se. But he is undeniably a big early voice in the now exploding YouTube scene. And doing so lead to some interesting points such as Denis Miller being a big influence on delivery and style with early YouTube personalities. Never would have made that connection, but damn if I don’t see it now.
The whole interview acts something like a refresher course on what the landscape of internet video was like just 8 years ago. It cannot be stated enough how much and in what ways everything has changed. Since I am doing these interviews in roughly chronological order, you can read this interview as the starting place and the subsequent ones as how they changed over time. Give or take an interview with a person doing their own thing.
As for the episode title, the pun already existed. There wasn’t really any need to put the effort in creating a new one.