The six episodes of the web series explore and discuss basic subjects typical of preschool education, namely creativity, time, love, technology, diet, and dreams, while the television series touches on jobs, death, family, friendship, transport, and electricity. The web series received widespread critical acclaim for its story, production design, psychological horror, humour, hidden themes, lore, and characters. The television series was met with similar acclaim.
Premise
Each episode revolves around three characters: a yellow childlike humanoid with blue hair and overalls, an anthropomorphic green mallard duck[a] with a tweed jacket, and a red humanoid with a mop-like head. Their names are never explicitly stated in the series but are often referred to as Yellow Guy, Duck and Red Guy respectively. The characters never refer to each other by name, but by pronouns. Yellow Guy's father, Roy, also occasionally appears.[3] An episode typically goes with the three main characters meeting one or several anthropomorphic characters, who begin a musical number related to a basic concept of day-to-day life with an upbeat melody, similar to that of a Sesame Street segment. As each song progresses, it becomes apparent that its moral or message is nonsensical and self-contradicting, and that the "teacher" character has ulterior, sinister motives. The climax of each episode is typically a plot twist involving escalating psychological horror which culminates into gore and graphic violence. Later in the series, the characters begin questioning the nature of their reality and the bizarre messages of the teachers.
Cast
Baker Terry as Yellow Guy, Duck, Tony the Talking Clock, Shrignold, Steak and Lamp
All episodes were written by Becky Sloan and Joe Pelling, with Baker Terry co-writing each episode starting with "Time". "Time" is co-written by Hugo Donkin.
The group of three are sitting in a kitchen. A singing sketchbook opens, singing about being creative. They do child-like activities, such as imagining clouds as different shapes, and judging colours. Many of Yellow Guy's ideas are told to be non-creative by the sketchbook. The climax is an exaggerated description of creativity, where the three do deranged acts such as baking a cake with internal organs or covering hearts in glitter, with shaky camera shots and frantic music. The video ends with everyone sitting at the table, everything restored to normal. The sketchbook tells them to "never be creative again" before shutting herself closed.
Note: This episode was uploaded under the title "Don't Hug me I'm Scared".
The main characters are waiting for their TV show to begin. A talking clock named Tony comes alive to teach the characters about time. During his song, the characters constantly question time and its reality, annoying Tony. He accelerates time during the climax, causing the characters to age rapidly and decompose. The decomposing is revealed to be part of a television show they were watching, with Tony telling them "everyone runs out of time" as the TV returns to static.
The group is sitting at a picnic, where Duck kills a yellow butterfly. Upset, Yellow Guy runs away into a tree where he meets a butterfly named Shrignold, who sings to him about love, including that true love is kept for one's "special one." After an unrelated story about "Michael, the loneliest boy in town", Shrignold and his cult reveal that they worship a statue named Malcolm, who they feed gravel. As the cult tries to coerce him into abandoning his identity to find solace, Yellow Guy wakes up from his dream in a tree. Red Guy and Duck find him, offering him their last boiled egg as an apology. A disgusting caterpillar-like creature pops out of the egg, calling Yellow Guy "father" before being promptly squashed by Duck.
The characters are playing a trivia board game, where they are stumped by the question "What is the biggest thing in the world?". A singing computer named Colin appears, presenting himself as clever and helpful due to him being digital. Afterward, he asks the group many questions in the style of a computer setup, as the increasingly annoyed Red Guy tells him to "shut up", before slamming his hand on Colin's keyboard. Enraged, Colin glitches the screen, before transporting the characters to the "Digital World". Colin shows them the three main activities they can do: looking at various charts, "Digital Style", and "Digital Dancing". These three activities are repeated rapidly until a room is filled with corrupted and distorted dancing clones of Yellow Guy, Duck and Colin. Red Guy attempts to escape the room he is in, exiting to a room containing a film crew in spandex suits filming a crude replica of the main cast. Red Guy says "Wait, wha-" before his head explodes into glitter abruptly at the sound of a clapperboard.
Red Guy is absent, and though Yellow Guy and Duck seem to be aware of a change, they cannot clarify what it is. Anthropomorphic food start to sing about being healthy, but deliver bizarre and nonsensical advice. The song is repeatedly interrupted by the telephone ringing. After Duck answers it, he becomes fearful and attempts to escape. He awakens in a dark room, where an anthropomorphic can disembowels him and eats his organs, as the anthropomorphic food continues singing to Yellow Guy back in the kitchen. The episode cuts to night; Yellow Guy is bloated with blood and feathers covering his mouth as the phone rings once more. The credits show Red Guy walking away from a telephone box.
Note: The creators claim that a phone number printed on the telephone box in this video was being called within seconds of the episode's release, which at first they would answer and pretend to be characters from the show.[3]
Yellow Guy is crying in bed, lamenting his disappeared friends. A talking lamp comes to sing about dreams and drags him into an animated sequence, ignoring Yellow Guy's pleas to stop, the montage as he downs in oil. The episode abruptly cuts to Red Guy in an office, with other workers looking similar to him. He fantasises about a file coming alive and singing a song, which leaves his colleagues unimpressed. At a bar, he performs the Creativity song from the first episode on stage, but is booed by the audience. Seeing Roy in the back of the audience, Red Guy is suddenly transported to a dark empty room. He finds a control panel with monitors recording Yellow Guy being mentally tortured by the lamp. Using the panel, he frantically transforms the lamp into several teachers from previous episodes, as well as teachers that have not been seen yet. After Roy taps Red Guy from behind with a massively elongated arm, Red Guy notices and follows a cord from the machine to a giant plug, which he pulls. The episode cuts to Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck sitting at a table in a kitchen, their colors changed to blue, green, and red respectively. The sketchbook from the first episode opens and sings the opening line to the Creativity song.
Production
Becky Sloan, Joseph Pelling and Baker Terry met while studying Fine Art and Animation at Kingston University, where they started THIS IS IT Collective with some friends.[10][11] They produced the first episode of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared[b] in their free time with no budget. When they started on the project they imagined making it into a series, but initially dropped the idea after finishing the first episode. After the short film gained popularity, they decided to revisit that idea.[12] Channel 4's Random Acts commissioned the second episode. The show attracted mainstream commissioners; however, Sloan and Pelling turned these offers down because they "wanted to keep it fairly odd" and "have the freedom to do exactly what we wanted".[3]
In May 2014, Sloan and Pelling announced that they would start a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to make four or more additional episodes, one every three months, starting in September 2014. They uploaded low-quality camera footage of the characters being taken hostage and held for ransom. A 12-year-old American boy tried to use hacked credit card information to donate £35,000 to the campaign, but he was caught and those funds were thrown out.[13] Their Kickstarter goal of £96,000 was reached on 19 June 2014, and in total £104,935 was raised. YouTuber TomSka became an executive producer on the series after donating £5,000 to the Kickstarter.[14]
In January 2016, Sloan and Pelling collaborated with Lazy Oaf to release a line of clothing based on the characters and themes of the show.[15]
Reception
The series received widespread critical acclaim. Scott Beggs listed the original short film as number 8 on his list of the 11 best short films of 2011.[16] Carolina Mardones listed the first episode as number 7 in her top ten short films of 2011.[17] It was included as part of a cinema event in Banksy's Dismaland.[18][19] In April 2016, the main characters of the series were featured on the cover of the magazine Printed Pages, along with an "interview" of the three main characters written by the magazine's editor.[20][21] All six episodes were included in the September 2016 festival XOXO.[22]
Drew Grant of The Observer described the series as "mind-melting".[23] Freelance writer Benjamin Hiorns observed that "it's not the subject matter that makes these films so strangely alluring, it's the strikingly imaginative set and character design and the underlying Britishness of it all".[24] Joe Blevins of The A.V. Club praised the show's "sense-to-nonsense ratio" and its production values.[25] Samantha Joy of TenEighty praised the sixth episode of the series, writing that it "creates a provocative end to a pretty dark narrative about content creation".[26]
On 19 June 2017, a year after the release of episode 6, Sloan hinted towards additional work into the Don't Hug Me I'm Scared series.[27][non-primary source needed] A teaser trailer titled "Wakey Wakey..." was released on the channel on 13 September 2018, teasing a television show made in a collaboration between Blink Industries, Conaco, and Super Deluxe. The 30-second video gained over two million views within 24 hours of its release and peaked at No. 1 on YouTube's Trending list.[28][29] Details of the plot were released on 3 December 2018 in advance of a 2019 Sundance Film Festival screening of the pilot.[30] The pilot episode ran at 23 minutes, and it appeared in the "Indie Episodic Program 1" alongside other short films.[31]
On 7 July 2020, it was announced that the series had been picked up by Channel 4.[32] The series wrapped up filming by September 2021,[33] and it was expected to be originally released[34][35][36] streaming on All 4 on 12 September 2022.[37][38] However, the series was postponed because of the death of Queen Elizabeth II.[39][40] On 16 September 2022, it was announced that the series would be releasing on 23 September 2022 on All 4 and premiered 30 September 2022 on Channel 4.[41][42]
