Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/1990

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1990

Part of the great timeline rebuiild Pup t 04:18, 31/07/2009

I'm going to try and take a shot at doing this one. Look out for it soon. Sequence 11:16, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Humour:	4	Before I get into this part I'll preface it by acknowledging that making one of these articles humorous is extremely difficult as the range of possible jokes you have access to is extremely limited. This of course being limited to mostly one liners that need to make sense given the context of the event that occured. So with that In mind I'm going to be a bit easier on it than I would otherwise. Intro - Taking a quick look over at Wikipedia I can see this article was modelled very heavily on that one. The alternative articles at the top of the page work alright for the most part, although you might need to make an edit to the break dancing page to include the move 1990 in it just to make it fit in (you can do that down the bottom of that article). I would also switch the TV line with the MCMXC line as it is one of the more absurd redirects and it would probably look better being next to the other absurd item. You might be able to fit in a joke about the fact that it started on a Monday and thus gave people a long weekend because of it News Years day and then people taking Tuesday off as well because they were still hungover or something. The part regarding the fancy year of the decade of the millenium blah blah could probably do with a better punchline. The current one just seems a bit meh. I'd go for something like, "not like that is important" or "although it isn't like that impresses anyone" or something like that to play off the fact that you have made it sound so impressive. Nice part about global warming. Events - This is the main part of the article and thus where you hope to get most of your laughs. I only smiled a couple of times (one of them being about Collingwood not winning the grand final in a hundred and fifty years, although that's because I'm an Aussie), also part of the humour was only derived from noting the differences with the wikipedia article. As I said in the preface there isn't really that much that you can actually do here though, which is part of the problem. The one part that I think does have the most room for exploration is the bit about the Cold War. Currently you've just replaced "Country X revolts/declares independance/mergers/etc from/with Country Y" to "Country X does something with the Cold War". I'd try taking the cold war and making a comparison to some other sort of fight/conflict, preferably a trivial one such as a school yard brawl or a divorce. There could be a couple of other paths to take it in. That's the only real overarching comedic technique I can see that you can use, although you would have treat this one pretty cautiously because if you don't do it well it could just turn into a stale joke. Births - The main joke here is about how the most famous people born in that year are chess players. It isn't really all that funny though. You've kept things pretty much factual (albeit with commentary) for the rest of the article, but this is the place where you could probably start bending the truth. Making up fake professions (things like 'Grave Digger' and 'Couch Potato' for example) for the people is one place you might want to take it. There might be others so you should try different things and see what you think people would find the most amusing. Deaths - Uh yeah...there is hardly anything here. I guess you can just apply the advice for the Births section to this.
Concept:	4	It's a year. There's a lot of years on Uncyclopedia already so it isn't exactly a new concept. There also isn't that much room for trying out different things. Nonetheless it's decent enough as it lets you put down enough material, I guess you would call it average.
Prose and formatting:	7	Pretty good overall. It is almost entirely in list form but this one case where it is meant to be, and the additional commentary keeps it from looking too "I writted a funny list hah hah". The pictures are also well laid out. A few things to note though: There were a couple of miscapitalisations, e.g global warming doesn't get capitalised. Basically if it isn't a name or at the beginning of the sentence don't capitalise it. This happens a couple of times in the article. July 26, there is a part that says hold hold where only one hold is needed. April 7th, isn't properly linked to its article. The article maintains a relatively encyclopediac tone throughout its length except for one part on November 29th where it breaks the fourth wall. You may want to look at whether you think that works best like that or if there are alternative ways of writing it that don't break the fourth wall (I think it would be pretty easy).
Images:	7	There are a lot of images (12) throughout the whole piece which is good because there is always something to catch your eye. I think you really need to make good use of the images because this is the part where you will have the most creativity in what your humour can do. Pisa tower, I'd probably change the caption to calling the Leaning Tower of Pisa, seeing it standing straight even though it's name says it is leaning would make a better juxtaposition I believe. Oil slick, pretty decent, caption is alright. Pale Blue Dot, nice use of flash, although the caption could probably be better. I didn't really get the joke, which means that other people may not get it either. Morgan Freeman, you might consider changing this one. It ties into your March 26th line, but that's an extra part that you added, and people won't get the joke unless they have seen Driving Miss Daisy (or looked it up on Wikipedia or course). You could try swapping it out with a picture of George Bush awarding a medal and a caption about appearing very much alive for a dead man (although that would mean you might need to change out your later one of him to something else). Or you could try using a picture of Bob Hawk, he isn't as well known as George Bush though so that might not work so well. The hubble telescope is probably the funniest one. I like the work done on it. The picture of the Eurovision winners wasn't really funny. It was just a picture of their album with the words winners of the song contest under it. You might be able to replace it with a picture of Drew Carey and a caption like "Thank god this guy wasn't appointed the Archbishop of Cantebury" or something along those lines. It's up to you though but I would advise you change either the caption or the whole picture to something else. The Three Tenors, Seinfeld jokes never get old, ever. The George Bush one had a nice pertinent caption. The only thing is you might need to change it if you do change out the Morgan Freeman one. Perhaps a funny photo of a sheep casting a vote could be photoshopped or something in it's place? The moon one was the cold war photo and although the picture of a vending on the moon is funny it would seem to work better in the article on coke (#makes a note to self to photoshop a picture of a coke vending machine on the surface of the moon). It's not a bad photo, but there are a whole heap of things you could do in regards to the cold war, so let your imagination run wild. Mike Tyson plus ear, pretty good cultural reference to him biting off that guy's ear. No problems. Margaret Thatcher, the caption is alright. There are probably a bunch of other things you could write that are better though as 'Big Brother is watching you' jokes are a little stale. Garry Kasparov, I liked the caption. I'm a sucker for puns.
Miscellaneous:	4	I use this section as a 'would I email it to my friends to read' part. At the moment the article isn't particularly strong, and unfortunately due to it's limited concept there isn't all that much room for growth. So at the moment I probably wouldn't email it to them.
Final Score:	26	As an article about a year it is certainly quite good within it's own framework, especially when you compare it to other year articles that haven't been fixed up yet (1994, the previous version of 1990). With a bit more polish it could probably turn into a pretty reasonable article, although I doubt it will ever be able to achieve featured article status (again this goes back to it's self-imposed constraints). Still, a good effort considering what you had to work with and particularly considering the dreck you had to cut out at the beginning. If you want to talk or discuss about this more feel free to make any comments on my talk page.
Reviewer:	Sequence 12:45, 2 August 2009 (UTC)