158 - Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared
Added 2024-10-02 06:00:07 +0000 UTCThe lads grab their chicken picnics and get creative as they dive into the madness and glitter of THIS IS IT’s 2010s horror musical sensation: Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. Topics include the virality of the pilot, DIGITAL STYLE, and how to fully express your creativity when you’re trapped in a house of nightmares.
Media Referenced in this Episode:
Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared (THIS IS IT, 2011-2016)
Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared (Blink Industries/Channel 4, 2022) available on Channel4.com
“The creators of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared offer us a glimpse behind the puppets” by Liz Gorny. It’s Nice That. September 23rd, 2022.
TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.com
Commercial: “Skin” // Music by Donovan Eyre // Book and Lyrics by A.J. Ditty // Featuring A.J. Ditty as “Red Guy/Yellow Guy/Duck” and Donovan Eyre as “Boneman/Skinman”
Comments
i’m realizing now that i was one of those 12 year olds who was utterly enraptured by the original video and how much it’s really had an impact on my taste in horror wrt very surrealist/meta shit
Theo D
2025-06-30 04:35:54 +0000 UTCThank you so much! I've tried to figure out what The Puzzle Place was many times over the years. It's one of those half remembered things that I think about a lot.
Keith
2025-03-09 00:43:55 +0000 UTCI didn't know that Sam Campbell worked on the Channel 4 show, but it totally makes sense knowing his style of humor. Between this and his show at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it's no wonder he ended up on the UK version of Taskmaster.
Vesperus
2024-11-12 20:00:07 +0000 UTCThe thing about not taking pictures of "dead" puppets made me think of that Ewan McGregor interview when he talks about playing against the Yoda puppet and how it would sort of slump over and "die" between takes. It must be an even weirder sight to see if it's a very realistic puppet.
Ronin Fredricson
2024-10-29 16:41:55 +0000 UTCyes!!! i was just about to bring this up. an absolute classic
Benalish Transexual
2024-10-05 07:35:12 +0000 UTC*just saw someone else already linked this
Benalish Transexual
2024-10-05 05:53:10 +0000 UTCAlso i came across this series when i was maybe in my early teens? maybe a bit later. I remember it was still coming out at the time. I don't handle gore well and i'm pretty sure it traumatised me pretty bad but i kept coming back to it and fixating on it in this way i have a habbit of doing with media i really connect with. I have this thing where certain sensory moments get stuck repeating over and over in my head like a broken record. (like the neurons in my brain just really fire on something and it wants to keep repeating it over and over). It happens especialy with media that has kinda music-like audio elements to it, or kinda rhythmic pacing, and it happened allot for me with this series. Like obviously this series is musical, so
Benalish Transexual
2024-10-05 05:47:02 +0000 UTCthere's a video essay i really recommend by patricia taxxon talking about this series from a specificaly autistic perspective, especialy in terms of all that stuff you were talking about with being corrected on arbetrary societal expectations, and going through school as an autistic person etc. link: (assuming it's all good for me to put this here?) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ7cStxqgFE
Benalish Transexual
2024-10-05 05:46:58 +0000 UTCHaving never heard that word out loud before, only read it, I have to confess that I haven't been able to stop thinking the phrase "we live in a satiety" for days. Excellent episode as always, I hope to God this isn't the first time I've commented, xoxo
Jon
2024-10-04 22:51:35 +0000 UTCi also have this very clear memory of being on tumblr when the second DHMIS came out. people had already been anthropomorphizing the notebook from the first one, so of course they immediately did the same with the clock and started shipping them. i have such a clear memory of scrolling past this drawing of the notebook straddling the clock while he cupped her ass, and she was saying, teasingly, "whoa there, friend, you might want to slow down," and he was saying "but there's a time and a place for fucking around." strange times
Peter Paul Rubens' Muse
2024-10-04 15:21:58 +0000 UTCAnybody who likes the media as an advertisement about Skittles thing of Skittles Commercial: the Broadway Musical and likes videogames should check out Darkened Skye.
Dergon
2024-10-04 14:52:47 +0000 UTCtomska mention!!! man this episode is throwing me back to middle school. i should finish the DHMIS youtube series, i never watched past the computer
Peter Paul Rubens' Muse
2024-10-04 14:12:57 +0000 UTCIt's a really interesting point you made about the idea of a young adult's first encounter with the weird or subversive. I watched DHISM for the first time (except for the first one) after hearing this ep and it reminds me a lot of how I felt as a young adult seeing Too Many Cooks and Unedited Footage of a Bear, or playing the original Stanley Parable mod. I think there's a certain tone of, like, didactic avant-gardism that works like this represent, where the work starts somewhere extremely familiar and really hammers the familiarity with it, and then plods very deliberately through subverting it, so that if you're new to subversion and abstraction you can follow the process and develop and appreciation. Too Many Cooks and DHMIS get lumped with creepypasta-style internet horror like FNAF or Marble Hornets, but Too Many Cooks prepared teenage me to later grasp a David Lynch film or a Oneohtrix Point Never record in a way that Marble Hornets definitely didn't. I totally agree that it feels like they wrote the TV show, especially the finale, with this kind of artistic didacticism in mind. I sure hope it works for some kids, it feels like we live in a time where people don't have a lot of paths out of the literal, as evidenced by this show's very fan response
Elah
2024-10-04 01:07:49 +0000 UTCThe DHMIS crew also made the series of Trollli gummy candy commercials where the candies sing and beg to be eaten https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2Cy-H0ZQm4
John Leavitt
2024-10-03 23:12:57 +0000 UTCThe Space Jam song has been stuck in my head for like 6 hours now and it's AJ's fault
Donald
2024-10-03 18:26:40 +0000 UTCSome of the more scientific bits were insane and very late 00s. Who can forget the theory of "the pyro in TF2 is trans" which was done entirely because apparently the bone of his finger was slightly bigger than rhe others which somehow correlates to transness? Luv me science
Josephine
2024-10-03 16:06:06 +0000 UTC"Get Yourself Some Skin" is a children's death metal banger.
The Common Florida Birb Guy
2024-10-03 13:47:09 +0000 UTCevery week without fail I think "wow that's the most incorrect the first-and-only-podcast bit could ever be" but this one might actually take the cake. which would be fitting for the crimes thing i guess
Elah
2024-10-03 02:54:15 +0000 UTCRed guy’s unenthusiastic singing is cracking me up.
Elizabeth Power
2024-10-02 21:00:41 +0000 UTCJust the little audio clips of whatever this show is scratch the right part of my brain to make it feel so unsettling that I never want to watch it. However, you nailed matching the (digital) style with the commercial.
Elizabeth Power
2024-10-02 20:51:28 +0000 UTCAbsolutely. Fandom is one of the most widely accepted and illiterate ways of engaging with art and media, so you get all these hyperspecific and easily commodified phenomena that assign a spoiler the same moral weight as someone shooting your dog.
Grouchiest Marxiest
2024-10-02 20:30:45 +0000 UTCPoint of correction for the lads, Mr Blobby wasn’t a children’s character, he was from a prime time show prank segment. Various mid tier British celebrities would get invited onto Mr Blobby’s fake children’s TV show, and he would be chaotic and annoying until that person eventually broke, got genuinely angry, and then the prank would be revealed. Obviously this only worked for one season so after then he just started turning up on other segments of the show (Noel’s House Party) and become…inexplicably popular, which is how we ended up with a song and, briefly, somehow, a theme park. There is an old camcorder recording of a walkthrough of one of the attractions on YouTube and it’s honestly horrifying and looks like it escaped from an SCP vault.
Amy Godliman
2024-10-02 19:54:10 +0000 UTCI think it's also at least partly to blame for today's insane spoiler culture. Like, getting upset an ad for a new video game was "spoiled" or the obsession with experiencing everything as "purely" and "untainted" as possible.
Dergon
2024-10-02 19:53:48 +0000 UTCone thing i want to point out is that matpat and his game/film theory channels were insanely popular among zoomers, and played a very significant role in proliferating the "miss the forest for the trees" level of fan theorizing we see today. what started as "hey wouldn't it be funny if we calculated the monetary value of minecraft diamond armor" is now unfortunately the source point for an endless and fruitful river of poor media interpretation skills. if it's not what you want it to be, now you can just make it be what you want it to be!
BrianAlflordIsGoodActually
2024-10-02 19:26:41 +0000 UTCTbh I have to disagree on the theory baking stuff, I ADORE puzzle box bullshit. Buuuut I do think that the popularity of it both encourages people to look for it in media where it's clearly not a factor,and can make creators feel like they need to include it in their work when it's not part of their vision. Like, not everything is an ARG
Madotsuki
2024-10-02 19:16:55 +0000 UTCTom’Ska is friends with Abi. She might be able to link you guys together?
Mariana Trench
2024-10-02 17:55:33 +0000 UTCgotta offer a correction here: Rabbit from “Winnie the Pooh” identifies as Croatian, and he’s actually really touchy about being called a Serb given the prodigious war crimes Rabbit perpetrated under the command of Ante Pavelić. just had to throw that out there.
TchankaSidecar
2024-10-02 17:04:48 +0000 UTCThe interstitial in this one was SUBLIME
Grouchiest Marxiest
2024-10-02 16:34:17 +0000 UTCThe computer song is my Roman empire.
Grouchiest Marxiest
2024-10-02 16:05:45 +0000 UTCAnybody who likes the horror with puppets thing of DHMIS and likes videogames should check out My Friendly Neighborhood.
Dergon
2024-10-02 15:48:06 +0000 UTCThe fandomite push for "lore" in everything and anything is yet another outgrowth of the supermarket logic of capital and should be actively resisted by art and artists if we want our work to be anything besides another corporate IP.
Grouchiest Marxiest
2024-10-02 15:28:25 +0000 UTCTo your point about media dissection, I actually think this is a much older issue than just the internet age. Miguel de Cervantes had to write an ending to Don Quixote so that people couldn't write fanfics about him and claim to be Cervantes. This was a heady and surreal time in Spanish history, with the inquisition, counterreformation, etc. I think those points in time are when people want to "uncover" mysteries the most.
Jordan Y Clementi
2024-10-02 14:57:28 +0000 UTCThis came out when I was about 15 and I loved horror, but was very limited in my access to it (mostly books) I remember watching this and being haunted by the gore in the first episode and refused to watch the others until a few years later
Tyler Jay
2024-10-02 13:39:07 +0000 UTCYessssss the Patricia Taxxon video is so good! I've watched a bunch of the 'lore' videos for both YT and BBC versions, and some of them are just 'is this a metaphor for...?' or 'is one of them really dead?'. Fun to watch but I don't think any of them have much truth in them. Heck, reading that press pack linked in the notes, the creators said they'd put stuff in the episodes just to mess with those types of 'deep lore' people.
Ember
2024-10-02 13:20:27 +0000 UTCOh I'm excited for this. A friend worked on DHMIS!
W. W. Wiklund
2024-10-02 12:56:05 +0000 UTCThe first one came out in July of 2011, so I would've just turned 18 then, but fuck it, that's still a kid in every way except legal category. I grew up on the internet and found sites like 4chan at a very inappropriate age. So DHMIS wouldn't have been shocking in a "I've never seen anything this fucked up before" sense, but it definitely left a mark as something unique and fascinating, and imprinted a taste for media that's creepy in a kind of subversive way. And fairly high expectations for that kind of media, since it gets all the more disappointing if something seems to be going for this kind of vibe but then just doesn't go anywhere. I won't elaborate on this, but anyone who saw the last return of Bray Wyatt (RIP) on WWE programming will know why that'd be brought up in this context. I do enjoy "solving the puzzle box", as it were, but also really lost interest in that for DHMIS when I started learning to appreciate media in more abstract and emotional ways. With that said, my favorite YouTuber take on this series is "The autistic horror of DHMIS" by Patricia Taxxon, which takes a to me very relatable perspective on what the "morals" imposed by teacher characters in the series feel like when you've grown up neurodivergent in a neurotypical normed society: https://youtu.be/EZ7cStxqgFE Highly recommended!
Elaine Åhlfeldt
2024-10-02 11:34:46 +0000 UTCI'm honestly surprised Hulu hasn't picked up the show yet, they picked up mighty boosh.
Mordred Hansen
2024-10-02 08:52:25 +0000 UTC
