The Annotat Xperiment

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The Annotat Xperiment is a YouTube group that lampoons TV shows and public service announcements, such as Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animated Series, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros 3 and Captain N: The Game Master. It originally began on beeupyou's channel (itself started up by CurtDogg) back when it was possible to include a link in the video description that allowed any registered YouTube user to annotate a video, but the discontinuation of this feature forced the move to the shared channel.

Material they've annotated, in chronological order:

On beeupyou's channel:

On The Annotat Xperiment's channel:

Tropes used in The Annotat Xperiment include:
  • Accentuate the Negative: Kind of the point.
  • Actually Pretty Funny: The typical response when something is genuinely funny rather than amusing.
  • Alliteration: Cheatsy Koopa once says "I'm the Emperor of Eavesdropping!" Every scene he appears in afterwards has at least one annotation with a new alliterative title for him. And every once in a while he seems to be reincarnated into another show briefly.
  • And Now for Something Completely Different:
    • At the middle and end of each season they'll do intermissions, with works like Bibleman and Bouchedags.
    • MK4 - The Annotated Gold had the distinction of being the first to be focused entirely on video game cutscenes rather than cartoons.
    • Annotated Sex Is The Best! was in fact a Web Original parody, and was voted for by visitors to the channel, much to the Annotators' dismay. It's unknown whether they'll ever leave future material up to public vote.
  • ASCII Art: Extremely common in the early days before YouTube began to keep arbitrarily changing the annotation editor and breaking them.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: Irrelevant wanted to see the Nutshack get annotated for months and then it was and all hell broke loose.
  • Behind the Black: Many a speech bubble represents a character speaking from off-screen.
  • Berserk Button: The slightest allusion, be it accidental or not, to any would-be scrappy character from another series causes at least one person to speak of ways to murder them.
    • Each annotator has something that sets them off. Certain things set everyone off, like everyone being in on the plan, except for Megaman in the Captain N season 1 finale, but some get angrier more so than usual for sudden swerves. Someone else gets really pissed when two people are supposed to be good friends and it is strictly told and not shown. (See the Smoke episode of Mortal Kombat.)
  • Bond One-Liner: Particularly cheesy ones would be repeated. These tend to become a Never Live It Down moment.

Sonya: "Haha! Shocking!"

  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: Whenever a character looks towards the camera and pauses, this is invoked. Many of the characters' speech bubbles address the show's content from an unusually Genre Savvy standpoint too. Basically everyone can be Deadpool if the Annotators will it.

"What do you think, viewers at home?"

  • Broken Record: Volume 3 of The Surf Music Could Have Been A Lot Worse made fun of the infamous CD skip at an ill-fated Milli Vanilli concert. The hidden video at the end does more of the same.
    • "...song is for- song is for- song is for-"
  • Call Back: Lots.
  • Cameo: Speech bubbles from characters from previous works show up, usually without a name but instead color-coded, making them almost an In-Joke. Character allusions not from works they've annotated have included as Slowbeef of Retsupurae and Electrical Beast.
  • Censor Bar: This appears any time something appears suggestive.
  • Child-Hater: If an episode has a guest child character, or involves the characters being turned into children, they won't much care for it.
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Mocked. In particular, the final episode with Ryu and Ken in it had an Annotator have Ken say that he was "borrowing" Blanka's technique since Blanka's not on the show anymore.
  • Color Coded for Your Convenience:
    • The speech bubbles, most of the time anyway.
    • Most of the Annotators' notes too, making them somewhat identifiable as to who posted what.
  • Companion Cube: Random black specks on the screen in the Super Mario Bros. 3 cartoon came to be known as Doug the Bug.
  • Crazy Enough to Work: The reason the word "experiment" appears in the name reflects this. Nobody was certain that sharing an account and having multiple people log in and annotate simultaneously would actually work.
  • Credits Gag: Once per series, the end credits of the show will be displayed for everyone to annotate. In Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Annotated Series, the credits were left in every time so they could lampoon the episode-specific credits gags.
  • Dead Baby Comedy: A bit of it, though any literal cases of this are usually lampooning Ctrl+Alt+Del's miscarriage arc. It's become less common in later episodes.
  • Deadpan Snarker
  • Directed by Cast Member: Annotated Daydream; one of the Annotators appears in the video, though he didn't let on until everyone had given him an amusing nickname.
  • Disney Villain Death: A Defied version in Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm has these gems:

Is it too much to ask for a Disney Villain Death?
Okay good I was about to ask why he forgot he could do that.

  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: ASCII penises are often added to alter the meaning of characters' motions.
  • Downer Ending: Sort of. There are lots of attempts to shoehorn one in every time it fades to black. Then they get better.
  • "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Happens a lot.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Played straight most of the time by simple adding "The Annotated Series" at the end of a title, with the notable exception of the Mortal Kombat cartoon and most of the intermissions.
  • Fanfic: Mouse Police: The Annotated Edition included a side story in which Raiden's Defenders of the Realm incarnation, one of the annotators' favourite characters, imprisoned each series' scrappies, forced them to watch it, and broke their wills.
  • Grammar Nazi
  • Heroic BSOD: Sometimes the material is just that bad that some Annotators give up part way, or at the very least are so lost for witty remarks that they instead post annotations expressing their disbelief at the quality.
  • Inner Monologue: Sometimes inserted when a character is just standing there saying nothing.
  • Insistent Terminology: Don't call it a monster, call it a "kaibutsu."
  • It Is Pronounced "Tro-PAY":
    • Bye son!
    • YESH!
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: Avirosb has been recording the annotated episodes in case anything causes their work to be lost.
  • Left Hanging: Street Fighter, in which every unresolved plot thread was listed during the final scene.
  • Leitmotif: If DiC Entertainment replaces a licensed song with the "surf music" these people jump all over it, especially after it played for about ten seconds in the first episode of Captain N following a long absence.
  • Lull Destruction: Expect any scene without dialogue to be filled with speech bubbles.
  • Mondegreen: Usually deliberate. Anything sounding more like profanity than it actually is makes for a common target. It became especially common during Captain N as they often had no idea what Mother Brain was saying otherwise.
  • Men Are Generic, Women Are Special: Often when The Smurfette Principle rears its head the female character will complain about not being allowed to be wacky or not allowed to be wrong like the men or having to be subjected to a Girls' Night Out Episode just to get focus.
  • Mood Whiplash: Pointed out repeatedly for Tricky People, which involved both a singing yellow dinosaur, and uncomfortable scenes of implied child molestation.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000: In text form.
  • Never Say "Die": Repeatedly mocked.

Character: Destroy them!
Annotation: But don't kill them!

  • Not Bad: At least one commentator complimented Ganon teleporting to his throne, and even more so when he teleported to stand sideways on the wall.
  • Oh Crap: The somewhat unexpected appearance of parts 2-4 of The Nutshack, and later The Little Panda Fighter.
  • Once an Episode: Certain shows get this treatment. "X sez/says", as a tribute to Sonic Says, has appeared in Mortal Kombat animated.
  • One of Us: Sometimes, the people will point out a trope, though they won't always link it.
  • Playing Pictionary: X-Box 360 games in VHS cases in Ctrl+Alt+Del, pizza wheels being carried by the evil army in Captain N, just to name a few.
  • Running Gag:
    • In Street Fighter, "Bathe in Ice Cream". At some point was discredited.
    • "laugh_track .wav not found", among other wav related gags.
      • Similar gags also apply with images, usually with the ".gif" extension.
    • Making a crack about Lilah's miscarriage sometimes pops up.
      • Claiming that everything was made by "Blind Ferret Entertainment."
      • CAD jokes are common in general.
    • If a series has a noticeable catch phrase, a counter will appear every time.
      • If a character has a particularly memorable line, it will be made a catch phrase.
      • "PRECISELY!" From Ratatoing has became this shortly after it was uploaded, but it was used less and less frequently.
    • Street Fighter's use of the same music over and over spurred a "YESSSH!" every time a certain music cue played.
    • The audience booing and throwing rotten food as the curtain came down in the Super Mario 3 cartoon.
      • There was a callback to this during Mortal Kombat while the characters were exploring an empty theatre.
    • The purportedly unlikable Simon Belmont of Captain N often has bad things happen to him for comic relief. When he doesn't deserve them, some variation of "Haha, that'll teach you to (innocent or helpful action)!" will appear.
    • Every time a character looks stoned (i.e. with droopy eyelids), someone would say "420 smoke weed erryday".
    • Since Captain N, whenever a pop culture reference is made, the word "Topical" would appear.
    • URLs to various tropes on this very website.
    • "The joke is Yoshi eats everything" every time Yoshi eats something in Super Mario World.
    • "I fell for hours!" (from Super Mario World) whenever someone is falling for a long time, especially after a Commercial Break Cliffhanger.
    • Duke, the dog from Captain N, quoting the Duke Nukem games.
    • Whenever a mummy appears or someone gets wrapped up like one: "WHERE'S MY SON?!" (From an episode of Super Mario Bros. 3.)
    • Any time a character appears to twitch due to jumpy animation causes a comment to the effect of "I'm having a seizure".
    • "I am pleased by this turn of events" when a character has a happy or content expression in circumstances where it looks out of place and they really should be showing at least some concern.
    • "Paused" or "Loading" annotations when the flow of events is disrupted by slow character responses or other lack of onscreen activity.
    • Most episodes end with a male character being made to ask "I still get laid tonight, right?"
    • "Are We There Yet?" "How many times are you going to ask that, missy?" These two often appear in tandem during any traveling scene, and come from an episode of Super Mario Bros. 3. The second question also sometimes appears as a response to the gag in the previous bullet.
    • When a full moon appears in a shot, it will often be given a face to resemble the moon from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, with an accompanying caption like "Dawn of the Final Day, 24 Hours Remain".
  • Screwed by the Network: The fateful day when YouTube discontinued collaborative annotations. Beeupyou's channel now serves as an archive of past works, with the shared channel being how they now do things, but it took about a month to get it set up while everyone campaigned in vain for the collaborative annotations feature to be reinstated. Also, every time YouTube makes changes to the annotation editor, it's not uncommon to see the Annotators criticise these in the channel comments.
  • Shown Their Work:
    • People will sometimes throw in actual production tidbits into their annotations.
    • "X does not work that way!"
    • During Captain N: Videolympics, Kevin is made to suggest "Swimming gala?" when Mother Brain issues her challenge. The letter "N" on a letterman jacket signifies being on the school swimming team.
      • Naturally they were delighted when the show revealed he really WAS on the swimming team.
  • So Bad Its Horrible: The most mutual agreement for this would be "Bouchedags" and even more so The Nutshack. The latter had an Oh Crap moment from most of the Annotators when the rest of Episode one was uploaded.
  • Sophisticated As Hell: Sometimes there are actual well thought out notes on pacing problems and inconsistent characterization with some swear words thrown in.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Many new series and intermissions will have the main characters' names in the opening credits replaced by the names of characters from the CAD cartoon.
  • Take That: Admit it, of the shows these guys annotate, even when you were a child you thought they were a bit rubbish.
  • Time for Plan B: After many ignored attempts to convince YouTube to restore collaborative annotations, the shared channel was set up.
  • Un Paused: Less common now, but stray frames and sounds from previous episodes or cut credit rolls left in by editing errors prior to upload would be subject to at least one joke.

"Uk!"

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