honestly I absorbed so much of the channel awesome story from both living it & obsessively following the change the channel events I could probably do you a thread on the whole history of the site

okay so there are basically 5 eras to Channel Awesome, they don't fall into "years" and I'm loath to ascribe something like a "Golden Age" to this particular group so let's call them Phases

Phase 1 is from spring of 2008 to 2009, this was back in the "what is Internet?" age, like if you've ever seen the FIRST Nostalgia Critic video it's NOTHING like his later stuff, it's a manic review of Michael Bay's Transformers

there are no clips, it's only like 2 minutes & very high energy, this would basically become Walker's "bum reviews" format, and it's about Transformers because it's 2008 and making fun of Michael Bay is the height of wit

Walker didn't hit on his actual schtick for a few episodes till TMNT, the '90s movie, which is where he hit on editing clips summarizing the movie in with overreactions & skits, which was at least pretty novel

this was also when he was really riding James Rolfe's fame by playing up a Wrestling style feud between them but also expanding the site, like this is when they had a contest to find the "Nostalgia Chick"

he also branched out to other characters like "That Guy With The Glasses" a random early net type character who says horrible things in a sedate manner that was good enough to name his aggregate site after

yeah the way the site worked was that you got the promotion of working together as a group in exchange for exactly nothing, nobody received extra cash for the ad revenue & you BARELY had control of when your video was going up or if it'd get promoted

these were the absolute wild west days of the site too when there was a thriving forum community & an entire written essay/blog style review section that nobody remembers now? anyway, ALL of this was hitting at basically EXACTLY the right time for '90s kid nostalgia to bloom

if you grew up in the '90s, like I did, and had vague memories of Fern Gully, Kazaam, Batman & Robin, Pagemaster or SNICK this was targeted exactly at you, especially because you were probably a high school junior at the time which is the perfect age

anyway, Phase 1 concluded in April with the advent of the Anniversary Special, the first of 4 annual crossover events that featured every producer who'd joined the channel coming together in Chicago to not see any revenue from the final product

the Anniversary Specials Era was probably the most successful for the site, the formula was locked & loaded, the biggest producers like Linkara, Lindsay Ellis, Angry Joe, MarzGurl, Brad Jones, had all been brought in, the site was at its most well defined & well regarded

of course it turned out a lot of that was a farce as behind the scenes they were descending into all kinds of chaos with one of the site managers turning into an obsessive abuser, which is why I didn't want to ascribe this era too positive a term

this was also the time when they were launching the bulk of their failed spin-offs like Inked Reality (a comic reviewing collective that went nowhere) & a show intended to review Chicago area bars?

this was also when they launched Blistered Thumbs, a sort of all-purpose gaming website looking to compete with the likes of IGN and led by Angry Joe, gaming review stuff was a big part of this era & attracted one new producer Justin Carmichael...we'll get back to him

this was ALSO the time when a lot of producers seemed to have a sensed the site wasn't actually as useful for them as they were being led to believe? Cinema Snob, Phelous, Nostalgia Chick, & Linkara all launched parallel ecosystem type sites

oh and spoony, forgot him, in any event the entire bottom fell out of this era VERY abruptly in 2012 with To Boldly Flee, the anniversary special that killed the Nostalgia Critic and ended Phase 2 pretty decisively

aside from the ludicrous degrees of unprofessionalism that were apparently common on these shoots (including MULTIPLE injuries) Walker apparently basically sprung it on the assembled cast that the NC was gonna die & his ending would imply all THEIR shows were ending too

this launched us into Phase 3, the shortest of them all, the Demo Reel phase

Demo Reel was an incredibly short lived scripted series run by Doug & Rob Walker out of their purchased Chicago studio with their new rotating cast of 2 additional actors, it's largely & correctly regarded as absolute trash

now, it has been suggested that the reason for Demo Reel relates back to one Mike Michaud, who is about to become very important to our story

Michaud has always been pretty camera shy so there's not a lot of footage of him, from what I've heard he was the Walker's silent partner in getting their initial site and through their business incompetence Michaud ended up actually OWNING the Nostalgia critic character

now I have no idea if that's true or not, the Walkers have put a lot of energy into casting themselves as good natured bumblers in the history of channel awesome & frankly that seems like a lie given an NC without Doug sounds worthless but it's the story most often cited

anyway, whether Demo Reel was a sincere attempt at a new series or a stealth way to get out from Michaud we'll never know, it lasted for about 4 months before it ended in a dramatic & self-indulgent fashion, as was the style of Doug Walkers wok at the time (and still is)

which brings us to the post-Demo Reel era which might be charitably referred to as The Declining Phase cause this is about where things start to fall apart in a big way

time wise we're now in 2013, the NC has returned to the site, it SHOULD be business as usual but BOY is it not, first there was Spoony- a one time wunderkind of the site Spoony got into a twitter feud with some fellow producers that ended in him choosing to leave Channel Awesome

I don't want to have to relitigate that particular fight especially cause I love the work of all parties involved, suffice to say Spoony said in a commentary not long after the events that he was not forced to leave, it was his choice, and there was no bad blood

SPECIFICALLY what he said was he just realized the site was barely generating any traffic for his videos so why even bother to stay on it? THAT turned out to be a sign of the times cause 1 year later in 2014 Lindsay Ellis & her WHOLE crew jumped ship too

see the big thing was that how people made money online was starting to shift, their video platform Blip was dying & becoming less profitable with Patreon basically right around the corner, things were changing & suddenly the whole IDEA of Channel Awesome was seeming useless

which brings us to 3 major events that complete the phase of decline (this is all in 2014): 1. Blistered Thumbs, their ONLY successful spin-off shuttered, basically closing any dreams of expanding this empire beyond what it was

2. Allison Pregler was very publicly fired from CA over her putting too many mid-video ads in her work to actually make a profit from them and refusing to cave to site enforcer Mike Michaud's bullying on the issue

3. Justin Carmichael's suicide...yeah like I said we'll get back to him, not ready to set off that bombshell yet

so, it's 2015, the channel awesome site is functionally gutted of a lot of its biggest names and longtime talent, Cinema Snob & Linkara being the only 2 real big names outside Nostalgia Critic still on the site at this point, this is basically the long twilight of the site

from 2015-2017 the site limped along, until the spring of 2018, and the 10 year anniversary of the site, see a bunch of the former site producers STILL got emails solicitation from people trying to work with them for their Nostalgia Critic ties

something like this happened in March 2018 to producer Lindsay Ellis who took to twitter to complain, drawing the attention of Allison Pregler who commiserated, this ended up snowballing into a TON of these producers basically reminiscing about how awful TGWTG had been

this eventually crystalized into a giant shared google doc under the name Change the Channel, and this is where the trigger warning goes because yep, NOW it gets fucked up

see 1 of the sections in that google doc was an anonymous part about a fan who was a minor that one of the site producers had apparently been involved grooming & was also NOT the only one this producer approached, all of this was kept anonymous in the google doc

then came the official Channel Awesome response which outted the producer in question as Justin Carmichael, handle Jewwario, the guy who committed suicide back in 2014

look if there's anything that BROKE Channel Awesome, irrevocably, it was this, Carmichael's death had already shattered the community because he was so well liked at the time, this additional revelation of his crimes poisoned the entire enterprise

2 different producers went back to re-edit old videos to remove footage of him from them, people were BETRAYED and angry, by this point everyone not named Brad Jones had left the site in a mass exodus & the very name was like a cancer

which brings us to now, and now you know the rest of the story

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas has said the big reason you couldn't make a doc about this is there's no real throughline and honestly, recounting it to you now...yeah, it's like I witnessed the fall of the roman empire but none of it mattered, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened