
This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and “There’s gonna be puppets in it,” says Sloan.
Dont hug me im scared tv#
But TV is still a different kettle of fish.”Īs for what we can expect in the sixth and final episode, planned to air on (of course) 19 June, they are even vaguer. “It’s crossing over,” says Pelling, “the way people absorb stuff on TV or online. Sloan and Pelling are (perhaps deliberately) vague about whether a more formal TV show could come into being, preferring to drop hints that a musical (“the first ever stop-motion animation musical featuring Dermot O’Leary”) may be on the horizon. “It’s still the most powerful medium we have.” “There’s still scope to do something really interesting with them on TV,” she says. Though she admits the internet has become the “go-to place” for more experimental film-making, she does feel shows like Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared can go wider. The fifth episode, lampooning healthy eating, caused a spike in Google searches for ‘aspic’ … Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. And when I heard they had a clothing line coming out, I was like, ‘What the fuck?’” “The moment I realised it was bigger than the sum of its parts,” says Pegah Farahmand, commissioning editor for Random Acts, “was when I went to a Halloween party with my friends and there was this man dressed up as Red Guy. Still, the way the show has begun to quietly permeate the world beyond YouTube is a surprise even for those familiar with it. The team take great care not to dismiss any of their fan’s musings, which they clearly enjoy a lot, and they avoid answering questions about specific statements they’re trying to make with each episode. “I obsessively answered it for two weeks,” he says. We kept answering it because we felt bad – pretending to be different characters.” In the end, Terry took it home.

“But we put the film online and within a second it was ringing. “You’d have to zoom in to see it,” she says. “The subtler the better too,” says Sloan, explaining how episode five (in which a nonsensical song and dance about food is repeatedly interrupted by the sinister ring of a red telephone) ends with the glimpse of a real mobile number. The team, talking to me in their studio in Shoreditch, London, use this feedback to tease viewers and play with expectations. We inserted a glimpse of a mobile number. Curiouser still are the conspiracy theories to be found in comments, forums and blogs: the date 19 June and background characters like Roy, Yellow Guy’s bung-nosed dad, feature prominently in these, while one fan has written a thesis tying the show to a conspiracy involving alleged Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadžić.
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If Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is weird, the response it has received has been even weirder: YouTube is full of fans with homemade props recreating live-action versions of the show. “We felt: if it’s been born out of the internet, let’s keep it there.” “We wanted to keep it fairly odd and have the freedom to do exactly what we wanted,” says Pelling. Inevitably, the show caught the eye of more mainstream commissioners, but the team refused to be lured.

Peas eat me … in the studio cupboards of Don’t Hug Me. Channel 4’s Random Acts commissioned a second episode a year later and soon a Kickstarter campaign had raised over £100,000 to fund four more. Yet it led to an invitation from Sundance film festival, where it successfully screened in 2012. The first episode – borne out of a desire to poke fun at art school education and “do something with puppets” – was only uploaded to YouTube on a whim. This week, fashion label Lazy Oaf launched a new clothing line based on the series, proving that, yes, there are actually a lot of people out there willing to wear outfits that reference a relatively niche show that starts out like a kids’ educational programme before descending into mind-bending horror, complete with muzak, goggle-eyes and raw meat.Įven its creators seem a little overwhelmed by the scale and commitment of the fanbase. YouTube is full of fans using homemade props to create their own versions of the show It includes the tip: “Green is not a creative colour.” The latest episode, the fifth, lampoons advice about healthy eating and has racked up over 4 million views since it launched three months ago (with a passing mention in the film apparently causing a global spike in Google searches for the word “aspic”).

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The first episode, in which a smiling notebook sings a song teaching the three main characters (Red Guy, Yellow Guy and Duck Guy) how to be creative has been seen 30 million times.

The first episode of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.
