SMG4

Luke Lerdwichagul (born May 24, 1999), also known as SMG4, is an Australian Super Mario 64/Garry's Mod/SFM YouTuber who makes animations. He has over 3 Millions of Subscribers, being one of the most popular animators on YouTube. He's the founder and the CEO of Glitch Productions.

Why He's Amazing

 * 1) The animation can be so weird and awkward, it's funny.
 * 2) Instead of Mario being the standard happy-go-lucky hero, SMG4 instead makes him a comic relief character.
 * 3) He mocks off on today's trends:
 * 4) *In a 2018 video, "Mario Battle Royale", Master Hand says it was just made to "follow trends" like Fortnite.
 * 5) *In the video "The Day SMG4 Posted Cringe", he made fun of the infamous Hit or Miss memes from TikTok.
 * 6) *In a 2020 video, "Mario is Cancelled", he satirizes cancel culture and Twitter in a very unpredictable manner. Mario is cancelled and everyone views him the wrong way.
 * 7) In addition to mocking current trends in his videos, some videos even have Mario travelling into different video games and content; the "If Mario was in..." series are very entertaining and funny.
 * 8) Likable original characters, like Bob, Meggy, Desti, Saiko, Tari, Shroomy, Fishy Boopkins, Axol, Swagmaster, Chris, Whimpu, Rob, and Melony. Even some bad characters get good character development.
 * 9) SMG4 also inserts himself as one of the main characters in the series, who is an accurate and faithful fictional representation of Luke Lerdwichagul himself.
 * 10) In addition to being a comedic YouTuber that makes funny SM64 Machinima videos, his videos have also proven to have a good sense of writing and plot creativity. Especially in his later videos.
 * 11) *SMG4 cites a YouTuber named MarioMario54321 as his inspiration, who is known for making storybased series with his SM64 videos (e.g. OiramOiram54321 and the Dark Star X). It shows in SMG4's videos.
 * 12) While he's mainly a comedic YouTuber, he can still have a good sense of drama scenes, especially in the Anime Arc.
 * 13) One of his videos, “Mario Simulator Interactive”, was very ambitious and creative as viewers could interact with the video ala “Choose your own adventure” style.
 * 14) His videos have subtitles and if you turn them on, there are funny jokes mocking subtitles.
 * 15) Lots of funny sound effects are used in his videos.
 * 16) The Retarded64 series was hilariously funny as it was meant to be stupid for all the correct reasons.
 * 17) He's always called one of the best SM64 animators on YouTube, his bloopers were funny and his animation skills were also top-notch.
 * 18) "Mama F***er!"
 * 19) His gaming and memes-reviewing channel, Hobo Bros, was also entertaining.
 * 20) Great voice acting in his crossover with merging live-action and SM64 together.
 * 21) War of the Fat Italians in particular is a staple series of SMG4's channel. The earlier WOTFI episodes served as the Food Battle of SMG4. After a while, they put a different twist to the formula and let the audience decide what challenges the pair are up against.
 * 22) * In WOTFI 2018 and WOTFI 2020, SMG4 also put a brand new twist to the series to where the battle is up against an arc villain giving the challenge, instead of Mario vs. SMG4.
 * 23) The Waluigi Arc was fantastic for a number of reasons.
 * 24) * It's the first time that SMG4 portraits Waluigi as an actual villain, and not as a comic relief character. Mainly because of the fact Waluigi is going to remain an Assist Trophy character instead of an actual playable character like his brother Wario.
 * 25) *During this arc, Mario cared about Luigi. The same can be applied for Wario caring about Waluigi, as he was his own partner for his own scams.
 * 26) *The introduction of Tari, a female cyborg, and an original character who portrayed as the likable coward everyone can relate to.
 * 27) *The T-Pose Zombies concept, a mix between a zombie and the T-Pose combined to a really funny joke that is a very well handled plot device.
 * 28) *"The War of the Fat Italians 2018" is the end of the arc. It's also the first time that Mario and SMG4 didn't actually want to fight each other.
 * 29) Because of how much everyone praised the Waluigi arc, there were more arcs that were also as good.
 * 30) *The Rapper Bob Arc.
 * 31) *The Anime Arc.
 * 32) *The YouTube Arc.
 * 33) * The Genesis Arc.
 * 34) Made many awesome spin-offs like Sonic the DERPhog, Guards 'n Retards, Ssenmodnar, and a whole lot more.
 * 35) His original song Darkest Hour was top notch.
 * 36) Luke and Kevin (both brother and writer) also balanced out a lot of comedy and drama in their recent videos. Even to this day, they always captured the effort they put into their work.
 * 37) The later seasons of his videos have very good continuity, making them feel more connected to each other as its own series.
 * 38) His first original movie, “Meggy’s Destiny”, was one of his most ambitious projects yet, as it wrapped up Meggy’s character arc as a whole; it was a fantastic conclusion to Meggy’s ongoing dream to win Splatfest.
 * 39) Depending on your views, SMG4 also has made good spinoff series for certain original characters, such as Meta Runner (Tari) and the recent Sunset Paradise (Meggy). Most of these are now located on his Glitch Productions channel.
 * 40) The recent 10 Year Anniversary video (his second movie) is really good for its amount of humor, heart, action, and continuity that paid full respects to the day his first video on YouTube was uploaded back on May 8th, 2011.
 * 41) He's shown to genuinely care for his fans, as shown in videos like the 2020 Fan-written episode and the aforementioned 10 Year Anniversary special.
 * 42) He's shown to be able to take criticism. In a 2015 video that criticized his videos, SMG4 took the criticism well in the comments, even going as far as telling his fans that it's just the creators' opinions and that they should all just respect one another's opinions.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Not all of his videos are good, the examples of his bad videos include:
 * 2) * The Idea Block
 * 3) * Mario Joins the Circus
 * 4) * Meggy's Bootcamp (depending on your view)
 * 5) * Boys vs Girls
 * 6) * War of the Simps (depending on your view)
 * 7) * The Melony Felony (depending on your view)
 * 8) Although a minor issue, he could at least credit some music used in some of his videos like he did before.
 * 9) While this is not a bad thing, but often times the new characters have been in the spotlight more than the older ones (aside from Mario, Luigi, Wario, etc.); some of the new characters themselves have no relationship to Mario, which can cause some plot holes to occur.
 * 10) Speaking of the characters, some of the characters can have unlikeable moments here in there. Some may also have moments of flanderization if not inconsistency here and there, especially in the 2014-2015 and 2019-2021 eras.
 * 11) Some of his story arcs may span on for longer than they needed to. The Anime Arc for example, spanned a total of 12 episodes in 2019.
 * 12) There have been some mean-spirited moments in his videos sometimes, such as in some of his bad episodes (see BQ #1). This even happens in some of his decent videos such as "Mario is Cancelled", where Mario wears a cone hat by the Cancelled Dimension that says "simp", and everyone (including his friends) laugh at him and mock him afterwards.
 * 13) While his sense of continuity in his later videos is clever and well-handled, it might be difficult for some to follow through the later episodes if they haven't watched the earlier episodes preceding them, such as in The Anime Arc, where Meggy turns into a human, and becomes extremely insecure and less confident after witnessing Desti's death; a fan who is new to his videos may not understand these changes unless they've seen earlier episodes leading up to it.
 * 14) Some of his videos are pretty cringy and really stupid (even though that's the point of his channel). Some of the cringy stuff usually serve as bad attempts at humor.
 * 15) While indeed awesome (see WHA #15), most of his spin-off series never get that much new videos recently. Guards 'n Retards is an example of this due to the low amount of popularity. Some series, such as Sonic the DERPhog don't get as many videos as the other ones, and in general, all of his other series, don't really have new episodes in years.
 * 16) *One could admittedly argue however that this may be due to YouTube's much more stricter censorship policies, especially with the Guards 'n Retards series and the Retarded64 series (both of which contain the hard 'R' word/slang, which can be considered offensive to other people). Both got cancelled due to that reason.