I’ve been musing this morning about what bothers me so much about the premature ending of the Hotdaga.
Did Shane just not want to do it anymore? It’s entirely possible I’d suppose. But he seemed to have such fun in doing it. The man is obviously extremely creative and having the outlet of what is basically his own soap opera seems like something he truly enjoyed. But perhaps he got burnt out on it, and decided that he didn’t know where he wanted to go after Gene (Who is French Fries.) was killed. It’s possible of course. But i feel like if Shane just wanted to end it, he would have said something to the fans? True he doesn’t owe us anything, but he seemed to enjoy the fan interaction and feedback and doesn’t seem like the type to just...keep radio silence.
The more plausible explanation (in my mind at least) is that Buzzfeed pulled the plug. Although the animation was simple, animation is still expensive. And we all know that Buzzfeed is a fan of shoe-string budgets for anything that doesn’t pull in 5+ million views a video. And even though the HD is critically revered and beloved by everyone world wide, it probably wasn’t pulling in enough views for Buzzfeed to allow for its continuation. They may also be keeping Shane quiet on this fact, NDA’s being what they are and the fact that he and Ryan are still technically working at Buzzfeed they may not want to be seen as the bad guys on this.
Maybe what with Shane and Ryan having to work to establish Watcher, Shane no longer had time to put into the Hotdaga. It does seem like it took a lot of time and effort. Of course I’m not certain how long they were working on setting up Watcher before it’s launch a year ago. It has been 2 1/4 years since the last Hotdaga episode so maybe it was shelved in favor of Watcher? It could be a case of they knew they were splitting from Buzzfeed so why put the extra effort that the hotdaga required into a network that you wanted nothing to do with anymore and that treated you like shit on their shoe.
Then perhaps there’s the notion that Shane still hopes to get the rights back in order to produce it over on Watcher. This is probably my weakest theory since I doubt that Buzzfeed would let Shane or Ryan have a single modicum of ANY idea they had while at Buzzfeed. And would go after them if they even made something adjacent to Buzzfeed Unsolved/Hotdaga. (Watcher Presents the Hamburger Anthology or Hambology.)
Feel free to posit any theories you may have on the subject. Or if there’s anything I may have missed that makes this all more obvious than I believe it to be, (“You fool, here’s a tweet from Shane explaining that he was so distraught over the Chili Pope killing Gene that he couldn’t continue the series!”)
But for now, the fate of the Hotdaga will remain...unsolved.
