Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared

[colinr0380]

The YT shorts of Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared are great. The songs are incredibly addictive - and now I know which colours aren't creative and which foods aren't good for my or-gans.

I came to the realisation that as with the three characters in the We Bare Bears show expressing different aspects of personality that I feel much the same way about the three characters in Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: the red string guy is the laid back, disaffected and cynical person that I like to think I could be; the yellow dumb guy is probably who I actually am; and the annoyingly punctilious green duck is probably how I come across to others!

I'm very much enjoying the TV series spin off (lore expansion?) of the original series of shorts and especially the clash between the superficial attempts to keep the subject of each episode (so far about "Jobs" and "Death") straightforward and simple to fit with the children's programme format of the show only to have the subjects be too emotionally complex and complicated to remain as sunnily superficial as they get presented as being in the musical numbers! Such as the way that the talking briefcase in the Jobs episode jauntily whisks our hapless trio through various job options until abandoning them inside a rather depressing factory, which may be the most existentially terrifying moment of realisation that this is your life now that I can only compare to that devastating final shot of Il Posto! (Although I suppose it was better to have been abandoned in a generic factory instead of on the moon just a scene beforehand!)

Also the show seems to understand and comment on that ironically symbiotic need for workplace accidents to happen in order to justify all of the Health & Safety training that goes on! (Its similar to how you cannot have the police without criminals). And that lanyards are the office worker equivalent of an explosive shock collar fitted to a criminal to keep them in line! And that the final wage at the end of it all is probably not a living one and ironically does more damage than it is worth!

It is also extremely quotable too with lines that are wonderfully poetically dumb in how they use the language:

"He's one of those ones with one of themselves"
"Attention freaks. It's me"
"What did you say to me? Are you going to publish my novel? Then LEAVE ME ALON-!"
"Hey! My thing that I did"
"If you are having trouble coping at work please ring the below number... or the above number... or the diagonal number"
"My hand... my child", "Oh, my lanyard... and my weight gain"

I also like that at least the first two episodes have a mid-show break for the yellow dumb guy to break the fourth wall and ask about what the topic of the episode means to the audience. Which in the first episode is the cue for the urinal to nip out for a smoke break in the middle of the monologue, but in the second episode after Duck finds out that he is dead in the "Opinoin" newspaper and goes through with a funeral, the yellow guy just has to ask the searching question of "What do you think happens when we die? Do we ever come back?" only to get a detailed response from his talking bedside lamp that only leaves him even more dumbfounded and raises even more questions!

The digressions in the Death episode are great, including the blunt shutting down of an about to commence Identity Card-focused episode and the funeral preparation song that gets confused mid-way with a recipe for cooking Shepherd's Pie! The episode also turns around another moment when the blunt reality of a situation drains all the initial fun from the set up of the funeral preparations as poor yellow guy is unable to cope with grief after Duck's 'death', with the attempts to replace Duck doomed to failure. Similarly Duck has a bit of trouble adjusting to having to permanently lie still and untalking in a box and constantly annoys the demonic talking coffin he is ensconced within (who at the beginning of the episode emerges out of the floorboards in the same manner that Frank was resurrected in Hellraiser)!

I also like that the wide-eyed excitement about going out on adventures that the blob of protoplasmic plasticine replacement for Duck expresses in their big musical number immediately gets shut down for going back to the very British status quo of just sitting quietly at home and not proactively going off and finding something to do ("Just sit here and stuff will happen. Something normally happens"). Knowing your role in proceedings and not breaking the boundaries of the world by being too independently inquisitive (especially when there are more than enough anthropomorphic objects already jostling with each other in order to be the subject of this week's episode) is of overriding importance, and eventually the blob gets forced from being its own thing into becoming a Duck lookalike by red guy, whilst yellow guy still unhappy with the situation takes the shovel into his own hands.

Some quotes from this episode:

"Now which one of you is dead?... Yeah, well you were my second choice"
"I guess it's just going to be me and you from now on"; "Yeah, until the other guy comes back"; "Yeah... actually I don't think he is going to come back. I think he just stays in the hole"
"We don't talk about that area"
"I dug the old one back"

And especially the wonderful slam of Aardman Animation in the "Urgh! Claymation!" comment as yellow guy reveals his prejudices about the potential new member of the gang! Which only gets underlined by the parody Wallace & Gromit characters on the TV!

[What A Disgrace]

A great write up of the show. I've watched all six episodes, and I think with time it might surpass the original series of shorts in my mind - at the very least, none of the episodes are bad, whereas I really dislike the third short. I'm surprised that YouTube isn't absolutely ablaze with analysis and interpretation videos.

[colinr0380]

Episode 3 is the “Family” themed episode, which gets kicked off by an attempt to open a pack of ‘warm lasagne’ flavoured crisps. In keeping with the jostling for position to control the message of the week the bag of crisps initially triggers off a “Healthy Eating”-themed apple until it gets eaten in the middle of its opening bars of its song by Lily and Tommy, two worryingly close children from the image on the front of the “Family Size” crisp packet, who proceed to teach our three friends about what being a family means, and how our three friends are not allowed to open that crisp packet because they are not a real family. Although whilst the family theme takes precedence, it does take a disturbing detour into an amusing “family tree DNA-test” episode at one moment, which seems to be an opportunity to give that recent genealogy fad a bit of a kicking too!

I really like the dank-1970s styled family home that Lily and Tommy live in, with its interstitial chapter breaks occurring over borders of stained lace tablecloth and dingy looking tapestries, as well as songs about the crucial importance of having a landline in order to be able to call yourself a real family.

That brother and sister are very incestuously disturbing, especially in Lily’s sudden movement and breathless way she says Tommy's name in too intimate a manner for comfort! And Tommy’s boss-eyes that roll in different directions and inability to carry a tune doesn't help proceedings to seem less weird. But isn’t it just asking for trouble to put the sibling who has a proven track record of wetting themselves into the top bunk? Unless your family secret is that you want it to rain indoors, of course!

It seems that throughout the entire series that the main trio are constantly being targeted for co-option by the message-giver of the week and whatever issues they have with each other (such as whether they are an actual family or not, and the yellow guy’s hovering at the margin’s father), the characters trying to teach them a lesson are often even more messed up and lacking in what they are taking great pains to lecture the friends about. That becomes even more painfully clear in the next episode, about “Friendship”, but its pretty clear here as well in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style ending of the yellow guy 'winning' the audition for the new mother to the family, and getting pushed into doing the frazzled run-ragged matriarch role of desperately phoning up a fast food place (on a landline, of course!) to quickly feed her ravenously demanding family!

Speaking of which, they are really doubling down on the Wallace & Gromit slams by showing another clip of the “Grolton & Hovris” television show! Which seems to have expanded out into a KFC-style Grolton branded chicken bucket franchise operation (I dread to ask what meat the “family tub” contains!)

Quotes for this episode:

“That’s not a family, that’s just a dad!”
“I’d like to meet the guys like me who like one of me”
“It looks too thick to be a liquid but.. too… wet to be a food”
“Now I get to move across the family bridge, and mingle with the Cousins. Yay!”
“An Uncle is just like an extra-cheeky father but weaker, and in the distance. You don’t mind it when they stay, but you’re not too sad when they leave. Uncle Terry will be sorely missed.”

___
“Your podcast made this place go sad”

Episode 4, "Friendship", is really scathing about the idea of self-appointed mentors who have the temerity of (literally!) putting words into other people’s mouths as, when yellow guy cannot remember the password to get on the computer for the yearly allocated “internet day” and gets a barrage of bleeped verbal abuse from his friends as a consequence, that veers the internet episode off course (although not entirely, as the computer manages to maintain its presence here despite being sidelined) into the sudden appearance of an eagle-identifying-worm who insists on teaching about the proper ways of being a friend.

Unfortunately the worm-eagle is so annoying and overbearing that he has ironically driven all of his friends away, and once he gets inside yellow guy’s head he proceeds to co-opt and ruin even the sunniest group of imaginary friends until they all escape, with even yellow guy going deeper into another layer of brain to try and also escape, Inception-style.

This seems to be quite a timely episode about being at the mercy of outsiders who play on fears (in this case yellow guy's fears of his friends not liking him) and amplify them to achieve their own ends. As well as the suggestion that the people who confidently foist all the answers onto others (or rather transform somewhat universally understandable at base ideas about respect and tolerance into aggressive untolerant programs of action, mostly in the form of patronising and ironically disrespectful lectures and training programmes) are probably the most screwed up of all, and know the least about the subject they are talking about! I also like that idea that such people insinuate themselves into the thinking of others, like a kind of parasite! Such as yellow guy’s imaginary friends actually validating the worm’s self-identification as an eagle by parroting back the comments he had made earlier, which shows how the idea has lodged itself inside his brain and throws Warren the Worm for a loop in actually being validated in his lifestyle choices for maybe the first time ever!

And there is also the idea (taken to the extreme in the accident escalating into chainsaw violence that plays out in audio form under the end credits!) that any group of people are going to have disagreements and occasionally say rude things to each other out of frustration or annoyance, but there may be a difference between familial, friend and other social group behaviours (where there can be some give and take in cutting comments and where you might be left out of the e-mail back and forth fun, but they will be there and prove themselves for the truly important things such as looking up your medical issues on the stilted Northern equivalent of Web M.D. for you, or using their special gouging tools to dig that brain-worm out) as compared to the actions of outside institutions that get put in place to stop any potential for any disruptive or awkward situation from occurring in the first place. Which ends up feeling even more disturbing and insidious in how almost excited the institution (or representative: the show hedges its bets a little by having Warren the Worm be a character who has been thrown out of the "OK, Stop!" organisation for being too much for even them!) is in pre-empting the inevitable abuse that, much like the Health and Safety training turning into a cathartic gory accident in the first episode, needs to occur in order to justify the existence of the organisation countering it.

More quotes:

“Oh, I can see you are right in the middle of something, mate. A string of vicious personal attacks!”
“OK, Stop! Good friendship is about respecting what everyone wants to do, not just doing your own thing the whole time”; “But it’s my… brain…”
“So, um, you said you had some follow up questions? About my podcast”; “I didn’t say that”
“I’d like to go on the Dark Web, and look at a picture of a skeleton”

I also like that the yellow guy has appropriated the “He went on fire” comment from the siblings in the previous episode in the: “He’s some sort of Freelancer”; “Freelancers deserve to die”; “They go on fire” exchange! Yellow guy seems to be the most prone to being influenced by what he sees and hears!

[colinr0380]

"I don't like my window. When I look out through it, it looks back through me"

Episode 5 and 6 are the episodes where the characters are straining to break out of the boundaries of the show, but only discover what lies on the fourth wall. It has been hard not to call the earlier episodes 'Lynchian' but these two episodes especially move out of the stage set and contextualise the characters into assuming different roles, usually accompanied by some drastic tonal shift such as driving somewhere or the electricity cutting out!

Episode 5, "Transport", is all about Red Guy's frustration with the same four walls (which is a theme we've seen earlier with Duck's desire for having something to do, which leads to the Job episode, or Red Guy's overwhelming desire for a 'proper' family) leading to him demanding to go somewhere, which conjures up a leaky and poorly functioning grandfatherly train who wisks the friends off on a magical mystery tour of all different kinds of transport until all of the transformations between vehicles ("I'm not morphing, you're morphing") gives it a seemingly fatal heart attack. Which Red Guy uses as an opportunity to commandeer the car that they have been left in and crash it through the wall of the house and into a never-ending road diorama.

A lot of this feels about pragmatism versus realism. To Red Guy just escaping the stifling confines of home for somewhere different and going on an adventure is good enough to be worth potentially never seeing home again, and despite the best efforts of the Sat Nav (who is the minor and quickly dismissed supporting character of this episode) trying to not so subtly guide back home again, he does take them somewhere different. He even manages to convert Yellow Guy to the exciting possibilities of a whole wider community of characters that exist inside a village rather than just a single house (which may be a reference to that original abortive attempt to turn the shorts into a series as a US co-production from a few years back, before the creators felt that the claustrophobia was a key aspect to the success of the premise. This Channel 4 series was apparently also written during the pandemic lockdown too, which likely helped to recapture that confined feeling) But then the brutal reality hits that there is nothing out there worth escaping the children's show for, only a scrapyard where the three friends sit around a burning tyre fire much as they did around the kitchen table, and do much the same things only in more straitened circumstances. Until the blunt hand of the overseer comes in to perform the inevitable reset for episode 6.
___
Episode 6 is "Electricity", which after a mysterious piece of correspondence called a "Bill" is discovered, brings the electricity meter to life to teach everyone about the essential need to use electricity in daily life. Only because the electricity meter is an evangelist for the usage of electricity things quickly overstep the bounds of being essential and into transforming everything from breadboards to chairs into having electrical components! Which makes it very funny when Duck has an anxious reverie about whether this means his beloved shredder uses electricity too, only to be bluntly shut down by the electricity meter saying that yes, it does, now lets move on shall we in what may be the best musical number of the series! (I like that it is done to a Kraftwerk-style Autobahn beat!)

That song is deceptively key to everything that occurs afterwards too, from how Yellow Guy is being used as the punching bag throughout it, to the eventual crucial role that the shredder plays in the surprisingly tragic climax! Unfortunately post-song the electricity meter accidentally reveals the concept of batteries in order to explain how it can run whilst being unplugged, which prompts that episode's by now standard stream of consciousness-turning into body horror ramble that brings proceedings to a screeching halt by Yellow Guy (in the previous episode it surprisingly occurred during the opening credits sequence!) as he reveals that he runs on batteries too. And we see those grimy, never been changed batteries inside his Cronenbergian chest cavity, which Duck quickly (and rather presumptiously!) takes the initiative of swapping around with the electricity meter's high energy ones!

That both ruins the world, as the electricity starts to go all wonky, and turns yellow guy into the normal brain functioning person he was probably meant to be all along. He begins to explore his world now that it "doesn't hurt to think" anymore, and even pre-emptively shuts down the talking safe trying to give the other friends a bad lesson in taking out Insurance, so that it has to slink away, thwarted in its ambitions! But Yellow Guy is too smart for his own good and even his friends do not like the idea that Yellow guy may suddenly know more than them. (I was thinking a lot about that Simpsons episode HOMR during this, and especially the similar sense that they both deal with the idea that knowledge can be painful and ostracising, whilst ignorance can be a tragic form of bliss)

This leads to the most delightfully Lynchian moment of the episode where Yellow Guy, whilst looking searchingly at his reflection in the mirror, sees the fourth wall for the first time through the reflection (and then amusingly ignores the suddenly appearing anthropomorphic mirror popping up to desperately teach him a lesson about how to use mirrors properly!) and that it has a staircase on it. So he leaves the other two to their energy collapsing home to explore whatever lays upstairs...

SpoilerShow

...which turns out to be different versions of his two friends, themed for older children with mascot characters talking about rocks and equations instead of pre-school concepts. And then further layers of even more advanced characters. But none of these layers feel like a place that the Yellow Guy can linger in and I think we as an audience are meant to miss the simpler, graspable pre-school puppets as compared to some of the wilder designs of the characters above (a comment on education being a transitional thing, but maybe there always being a sense of nostalgia for those foundational early days of learning?), who seem more callous somehow in how knowing they suddenly are, experimenting in worrying ways rather than simply passively absorbing information being thrown at them.

Eventually Yellow Guy gets to the attic room of the house and has a 'Neo meets the The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded'-style scene of engimatically discussing the nature of his world and free will with a mysteriously puppet-like woman tending a miniature dollhouse of the house, who asks Yellow Guy to help her clean up and then gifts him a mysterious book with symbols on it that correspond to the events of the previous episodes of the series. Is this Yellow Guy's mother-figure to complement his mysteriously looming at the edges of the show father that he seems to be unable to keep from conjuring up? Whether she is that or not, as Yellow Guy leaves with the book a further staircase up (to the next level of reality?) gets revealed in the background, but otherwise goes unnoticed.

And then once Yellow Guy returns to the dark pre-school level of consciousness he is immediately set upon by Duck to swap the batteries back again and turns back into the dumb guy. Who in the ultimate tragedy can only think of one thing to do with the book he is holding, which is to feed it into Duck's beloved shredder! As the camera does an impossible Trainspotting 2-style CGI-pull back from the friends celebrating the destruction in their kitchen (distending that fourth wall again into not existing anymore), we are left to wonder if destroying the book was probably for the best anyway. As with Red Guy's attempts at bluntly leaving in the previous episode leading nowhere, Yellow Guy's inquisitiveness getting paired with the newfound brains to be able to do something about it similarly leads to an understanding of the world that does not provide a way of changing it in any meaningful way. Instead he is gifted the scripts of the show of his series to that point, as if to show how constrained he is within his boundaries of existence, and all he can do is go back down like Moses from the mountain to depress his friends by sharing that revelation with them. Only his friends prevent him from doing so and drag him back into their gang, and we end with the characters celebrating the destruction of their own show by feeding it into the maw of a mechanical grinder that turns something potentially profound into just more televisual confetti.

I particularly like that the Yellow Guy predicts the plot of the episode when the crossword puzzle about what the "opposite of up" could be prompts his rambling monologue for the episode at the start: "Its when you can't remember that over the top of you there are bigger ones that are bigger and bigger, and over the top of it there is a smaller one of all of it on top of that"

How many times has he regained his smarts and gone up there only to come back down and become dumb again? And where are the other versions of yellow guy in the higher levels? Is he the only one to be able to move between the floors? Have the other versions of yellow guy left his other two friends behind at the older ages or is it more like yellow guy contains all versions of himself combined within a single character, compared to red guy and duck being split apart? (Maybe he has to do the Unfaithfully Yours/Mrs Doubtfire thing of continually juggling between different floors as there are not yet as many spare versions of him as compared to, say, the drawer full of extra Ducks!)

What a wonderful ending! If nothing more is made, that is the perfect way to leave it. Or if we get another series there are still mysteries to explore whilst also having the characters still trapped within their world of patronising object lessons!

[What A Disgrace]

Warren the Eagle is probably the best character on the show (I refuse to deadname the awful bastard). He's just such a thoroughly, unambiguously terrible creature but he's terrible in a fleshed out way that the other puppet teachers don't get - he actually has a back story! And both the voice acting and puppetry really hope to bring him to life. His performance when he sings his song - the way his voice gets caught in his throat, somewhere between almost crying and almost laughing to cope with the pain he'll never realize is self-inflicted - always gets a laugh out of me, as does the way the other characters trash talk him. I also really liked the Brain Friends from the same episode. I could see them being an actual cast of characters for a rather rubbish show aimed at preschool children - but, to this show's credit, they're never aggravating or boring, either. They couldn't help but be rather creative, and even charming, here. A lesser show might have taken a few moments to make fun of the Brain Friends and forget who the real villain is, but this show goes the extra mile I feel.

[colinr0380]

Warren is a great character, although that does get into potentially controversial (and quite tragic) areas of someone wishing to be something different yet being unable to convincingly be able to pull off that transition, instead relying on naming conventions and pre-emptive berating of others for their ignorance (which to be fair all the other mentoring characters do to our main trio, so why should Warren be any different? But, as you say What A Disgrace, Warren with his tragic backstory has not got that unassailable air of smug self-confidence that all the others have, and gives off the aura of despair - and desperately pathetic excitement at the prospect of that "restaurant-style meal" with friends! - that undermines him as a teacher to the extent that even his students don't respect him) to do the work of change for them. I kind of see Warren as someone so insecure about their own identity that they are constantly adopting the faddish trends of the moment, from podcasts to self-help gurus, before inevitably overwhelming them with never addressed character flaws and ruining them, before moving on to the next subject of attention involving changing the behaviour of others instead. Warren may turn up as a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist next time around!

And the questions of how far others are expected to just go along with that shift before the illusion becomes impossible to maintain - not very far in the case of Red Guy and Duck, but it sort of sticks in Yellow Guy's brain palace. Its sort of getting into too advanced areas of teaching about fluid identities for something taking place in a pre-school situation that is ostensibly about the introducing the simplest of concepts for the first time ever. Although even the simplest concepts keep revealing deeper layers within them as the sunny facade cannot completely obscure the darker workings within, but I wonder if maybe Warren would have been better giving his lessons on one of the higher, older aged versions of the friends, levels of the house? But then he might have been in danger of receiving even more pushback to his teachings from the older versions of the characters than with the pre-school ones.

[colinr0380]

With acknowledgement to Fredrik Knudsen's streams that brought this to my attention here's an amusing, unfortunately extremely double entendre-laden, 'real world' accompaniment to the kind of child-focused PSAs that Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is probably riffing on: Don't Put It In Your Mouth.

(I like that it goes from an important message to 'accidentally' telling kids not to eat their vegetables if they don't want to!)

[colinr0380]

A new video has been released to promote the official website for the show. Seemingly no season two of the Channel 4 series is on the cards from the FAQ section, but there is this as a consolation:

Q: What if I woke up one day with a deep sense of sadness about all the time I'd wasted online? What if I started thinking about all the websites I'd visited without even having a clear reason for doing so? What if this anxiety about wasting my time has gradually built up in the back of my mind and morphed into an impending sense of dread and yet, I continued to repeat this same pattern of behaviour for reasons beyond my understanding? Could I still buy a sticker??

A: Yes, official stickers can be purchased in the shop section of the website.