the way it's so easy for red guy to be the one who relies on consistency and takes what is given and makes the most of it but he isnt
the way it's so easy for duck to be the one who wants a change of scenery and be desperate to see what could be more, but he isnt
the fact that red guy is a bright shade of, well, red, but is laid back, soft spoken most of the time and is the one who tries to be the trio's peacekeeper
and how duck is dark green but is the most violent and bloodthirsty of the main three
I wrote a video essay script for a class. Tagging @littlemoondarling Here it is:
Visuals, text, [length/minutes]
Loop the DHMIS series opening over and over
Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared is a tv series based on the viral internet videos of the same name. It is known for its surreal horror, zany humor, and medium blending in a package of a supposed kids show. From puppets to animation to live action. The original YouTube series could be considered a quintessential part secret-kids-media-not-what-it-seems-not-clickbait genre of horror, like Five Nights at Freddy. While I subscribe to the theory -
Game Theory’s DHMIS original series videos thumbnails float across the screen
That the original series was about the corruption of children’s television by executives and advertisers, this new series seems more interested in the characters. It also has more to say about a wide variety of topics. This leads to today’s video: Family.
[ 1.2 min.]
Switch to a frame of the family song from episode 9
Loop to job montage from episode 1
Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’s world is a broken, nightmarish world where things don’t make sense wrapped up in bold, primary colors. It is through this usage of surrealism, that it points out the hypocrisy of real-life societal systems. Things may not be this way one-to-one, but it sure feels this way. For example, in episode one, Red Guy snags an upper management job and ends up not having to do anything, like picking up trash, because the trash bin does it for him. Or how the Duck doesn’t mesh well with the workplace,
Loop Care Hound song visuals
so he gets sent to the ‘care hound’, fed a song that makes no sense, fed some pills, and when none of that works, gets confronted with this:
Show Care Hound
And gets turned into a happy little office drone. Now get back to work!
[1.2 minutes]
Back to family song
In episode 9, DHMIS applies this level of fantastical lampooning to the concept of the family, or more specifically, the nuclear family. At the start of the episode, our three intrepid heroes try to open a family bag of chips. Then, these two:
Show Todney and Lily
Proceed to interrupt them and claim they can’t have those chips, because they aren’t a family. The protagonists proceed to argue against them, saying that they either fulfill parental roles (even if they can’t agree on who the dad is), that they all live together and share the same lawyer, and Yellow Guy even has a biological dad.
Show Roy
These two don’t like those arguments, and say that a family requires “a full set”. They proceed to sing a weird little song on what supposedly makes up a family, like having a landline. They song is supposed to spell out FAMILY, but actually it spells out this:
Frame where Duck spells it out
[1.2 minutes]
Go to clips of T&L’s house
Anywoo, the twins take the three to their house to meet their family. Red Guy tries to find his own family, AKA people who are red like him. Duck goes back and sings about he doesn’t want to be in a family (he secretly does). Yellow Guy gets coerced into being the twin’s family mother so they could qualify for a family discount for a tub of chicken. Yellow Guy’s father, Roy shows up to save the day and is implied to eat that broken nuclear family. The gang reunites, and open their family sized pack of chips, only to see that there are only two left.
Intersperse with clips of mentioned plot beats
There are many things to take away about DHMIS episodes, just look at the vibrant theory community surrounding the show. From the way I see it, this episode is about the pitfalls of not only striving for a nuclear family, but also performing as one.
Photos of TV nuclear families
Todney and Lily’s designs call back to an American TV era starting in the 1950s, of shows centered around a traditional nuclear family. Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Brady Bunch. Breadwinner husband, stay-at-home wife, 2-3 kids, and a house in the suburbs. According to PBS’s The Rise of American Consumerism, the traditional nuclear family structure had its boom in the 1950s, with the baby boom and post-war economic opportunities. And within that boom came consumerism, AKA the way to do a nuclear family ‘right’. According to the article:
“Consumer spending no longer meant just satisfying an indulgent material desire. In fact, the American consumer was praised as a patriotic citizen in the 1950s, contributing to the ultimate success of the American way of life.”
If you wanted the ‘right’ domestic life, you had to have cars, TV, fridges, toasters, vacuum cleaners, and of course, traditional gender roles.
[3.2 min]
Go back to family song and family rules frames
DHMIS criticizes these arbitrary rules for familihood through this twisted sort of nuclear family and the junk they consider to be quintessential for a family, even disqualifying the actual family members. I mean, it’s the 2020s, how many of you guys have a landline?
Go back to episode climax
The climax, where we learn the family’s nefarious plans, can even be a commentary on how our societal systems reward traditional family structures, while leaving those who aren’t in nuclear households in the dust.
Stock footage of homes
For example, home ownership. According to the Tax Advisor, the number of people cohabiting together is increasing, but because they don’t have an official document stating they’re married, home ownership tax laws become infinitely more complicated. And let’s not get into taxes in general for nontraditional families.
Episode ending footage
You can even take the ending, in which a family sized pack of chips only yields two, to be a commentary on the rising costs of living and supporting a family, even when it is nuclear. According to CNN, the average cost of a middle-income household to raise a child to age 17 has soared to over 300000 dollars thanks to inflation. Given the current economic situation, we’ll probably see more households with nontraditional living structures will probably increase as time goes on.
DHMIS opening footage
So what does DHMIS say about this? Well, it’s quite simple. You shouldn’t need to kidnap people or give your blood to a tree to be a family. Sometimes, all it is, are three people who care for each other, stick together, and share a lawyer.
[3 minutes]
[total time: 9.8 minutes]
Works Cited
Kelly, Claudia. et al. “Tax Issues for Nontraditional Households.” The Tax Adviser, 1 Apr. 2017,
thinking about yellow guy/David/Leslie's dead kid theory and I think it puts on a whole new perspective on the transportation episode. I wonder if it supposed to represent a memory of Leslie and David driving to Mulhoven. The interaction between Red Guy and a Yellow Guy sound very much like a parent who is trying to adjust a kid to a big move by telling them about all the cool stuff they'll see. I find it interesting applying the theory and seeing symbolism I can extract!!
if the clump didn't start living in the house willingly (lets say they just popped into existence), that makes them much like a museum display of taxidermied lions grouped together in a single case, made to pose like a family. could they have known each other in the past? did they even come from the same place? how did they end up there? is it even acceptable to just group animals that never knew each other like that? under free will, what would those lions think? would they hate, or love each other with minds of their own put to life?
i guess they're also alike to orcas taken from different parts of the world to be held captive, made to perform. randomly mixed, making them unable to communicate with each other and have the stress of captivity increasing chances of violence towards one another within the tank.
That one time, Oatly (the alternative milk brand) released a series of adverts that took very strong inspiration of Becky and Joes wonderful work... and didn't even give proper Credit.
The creators of dhmis take five screenshots (one from each episode of the TV show) and explain the thought process behind them :)
There’s something quite unnerving about a lot of kids TV shows, whether that be the larger than life primary coloured creatures, the bizarrely off-kilter humour, or the often inexplicably surreal scenarios the characters find themselves in. And it’s precisely this premise that Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared takes and runs with.
Helmed by creators Becky Sloan, Joseph Pelling and Baker Terry – who also voice some of the puppets – the darkly comedic show first launched as a YouTube series back in 2011. Taking a satirically educational-cum-existential nightmare format, the short episodes quickly garnered a cult following. Starring Yellow Guy, Red Guy and Duck as the main puppet protagonists, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared juxtaposes the apparent innocence of colourful kids TV with fever-dream horror, often switching between the two with hilariously unsettling rapidity.
Fast forward to now – over a decade since the show first etched itself into our minds – and Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is back with a whole Channel 4 series. Expanding on the YouTube shorts, the six half-hour-long episodes amp up the charmingly unhinged reality and surreal situations that Yellow Guy, Red Guy and Duck find themselves in, learning about everything from jobs to family, death and more. Think Sesame Street as a warped acid-trip with a healthy dose of Cronenberg-tinged visceral body horror.
With the new Channel 4 season out now, Sloan, Pelling and Terry talk us through a series of snapshots from the series, giving some behind-the-scenes insights into the creation and incredibly crafted detail of the cult series. Read on for easter eggs, filming techniques and some, er, interesting fan art.
1.
Jobs
Joseph Pelling: Even though this is the first image we’re going to talk about, it’s probably the last thing we shot. Some of these more stylistic images, where you have the backgrounds become graphic flat backgrounds, we shot them using back projection. Which is fun, because it’s quite an old-school technique but it fits. It’s very theatrical and doesn’t lend itself to realism in any way. So for us, it’s a perfect tool because we were lucky to be working with this format where things don’t need to look real.
Becky Sloan: These bits are probably one of the funnest bits about the show. It’s a chance to dive into these other worlds and other styles. You can go into any different medium – 2D animation, CGI – and be really playful with it.
JP: This is probably too technical, but we did this interesting thing where we had to whip pan into the shots. Because the sets didn’t exist past the size of the screen, we lit the screens with back projection as this illustration. We also had printouts of that same illustration in the foreground in front of the characters so that when you whipped over them, you’ve got this kind of motion blur, in camera, of the same image, but in the foreground. You can use it to extend the set and that kind of in camera Gondry style, [which] is the kind of stuff that we love. We always try to do as much of that as we can even if you can tell it’s quite shonky and fake. It adds to the weird handmade-ness.
BS: The ties they’re wearing all match the colours of the characters, which is pretty cool. The art director went out of their way to do that, which is a nice touch.
2.
Death
BS: Me and Baker were on this set, because we have two sets up and running at the same time. We got really carried away dressing the set with loads and loads of fake silicone meat. Joe was on the other set and I remember hearing Joe over the walkie talkie saying, “We need to rein in the meat”. We were putting it everywhere – on the clocks, on the walls. This image was where we ended up, we needed to actually make it look like they’re cooking a shepherd’s pie not like they’ve like murdered someone in their kitchen.
JP: This was the end of the shepherd’s pie We‘ve Got to Get Things Ready song. Which was a fun sequence in terms of it being a bit in the episode where it’s not necessarily descending into something dark like in other songs or veering off into something more strange… but just becoming more stupid.
BS: That shot made me think of a typical last minute thing with the art department where we were like, “We need two chef hats quick, go find some! Or make one right now in five minutes”. There’s always so much stuff like that – where we forget what we need for a scene or think of stuff on the spot. We were shooting in a studio at Canada Water so luckily there were some nearby shops for people to go out on a mission to find all these random things we added to the list.
JP: I remember when we first started making these. Before we had a whole crew, we’d have maybe one person helping and everything had to be made prior to the shoot because obviously you spend your entire time on set just just trying to film it and puppeteer it. With this, half the stuff that actually needed to be made was being made in tandem with the shoot so we had this amazing workshop of of props and puppets being made right down to the wire.
BS: Every time the art department would be like, “Okay, we’re almost done”, it was a massive to do list and then never-ending stuff kept getting added to it. I remember being like, “We need peas! Punched out some felt peas and carrots”. “How many?” “I don’t know 100 peas?”. It’s quite mad on set.
3.
Family
JP: As an image this sums up some of the scenes across the series where we had to write dialogue and build up character between the three guys. In contrast to the previous two images, we couldn’t just rely on loads of prop based or visual jokes or adding in lots of things, because it’s just too many props. We had to try and write some quite nice weird little claustrophobic scenes. I like this scene where they’re discussing their own TV show, and then Duck comes in and does the three guesses thing. It makes you feel that they have a really horrible dynamic.
BS: It’s nice that every episode starts in that way. A bit of calm before all the chaos, like a typical kid show. The sky outside the windows is real, it’s all in camera in case anyone was wondering. The fridge is riddled with Easter Eggs.
JP: Mainly, it’s just a nice moment between them. And that sets up the theme of the episode being about them. Not really understanding why they hang around together. Because if they’re not a family, then what are they? That idea came from us talking about kid show episodes where you’d have a generic kind of kid show where there’s a bunch of creatures that live together. It’s not really explained why they live together or how they know each other. We thought it was funny that they addressed that quite full on.
BS: Like that Candy and Andy thing we’re obsessed with, the Gerry Anderson show that never made it ’cause it’s so creepy. It features mannequin dolls called Candy and Andy and they have panda bears for parents. It was very inspiring for Lily and Todney… maybe too inspiring. There’s hardback collectible books you can get on eBay. And I bought a few and one of them had the scrawlings of a demon inside, all the eyeballs scribbled out in red.
4.
Friendship
BS: It was fun working with the VFX guys who were doing all these animated bits and writing a list of objects that were a mixture of really random or mundane and a few easter eggs from the show for the people who knew the YouTube series. Some of them are so quick you wouldn’t really even notice it.
JP: It looks quite similar to what we did with episode four of the YouTube series where the digital world is this quite naff looking clunky gridworld.
Baker Terry: In hindsight, we shouldn’t have done that, because it’s very disrespectful to the digital world. It’s more important even than the real world at this point or it is the real world rather.
JP: True, I feel more real online. Another technical thing that we always have trouble with is that we can’t really use green screen or blue screen very effectively, because the characters are blue and green. So we end up having to rotoscope loads of bits which is probably not a problem that most people have on a regular shoot. Duck doesn’t work on green screen and Yellow Guy doesn’t work on blue screen and Red Guy wouldn’t work on pink screen so I think we had to have loads of different strips.
We kept changing all the little jokes in there, that don’t massively change the story, up until the last minute or even after we shot it. Because you can get away with really easily dubbing over characters, especially Red Guy, and we’d get tired of the jokes so it’s quite an irritating process.
BS: Looking at the script for so long, by the time it comes down to filming we’re like this is so not funny anymore. But then to someone who hasn’t heard it before they might laugh at it so sometimes it’s a bit dangerous to keep changing it and you lose some comedy gold.
5.
Transport
JP: It only made sense for us to do this episode later in the series because it’s about one character getting tired of everything, getting tired of the format that he’s stuck in.
BS: This was Red Guy’s episode, wasn’t it? They each have one episode where the story is slightly more focussed on them. This was Red Guy trying to escape their world and failing.
JP: It’s a good example of why expanding the show so it was set within this whole little town of characters, which we had talked about before, wouldn’t work. This kind of episode wouldn’t have worked because the whole point is that he becomes aware that he’s only really able to go from room to room. It’s a good example of why we wanted to keep it claustrophobic.
BS: The train comes out of the fireplace. That still was probably one of the funniest moments for me, that little crappy remote control train coming out of the fireplace. It was going to come out of a mouse hole at one point.
JP: Didn’t someone ask us if it was a reference to a Magritte painting? There’s a Magritte where this train comes out of a fireplace. We were like, yep.
6.
Electricity
BS: Originally they were all going to be rocking out with these colourful electric guitars but then we thought it’d be quite funny if Yellow Guy just has a really shit guitar that’s just made of cardboard and we don’t paint it or anything. I remember giving that task to Beattie [Hartley] in the art department: “you’ve got 10 minutes, I don’t want you to spend any longer on it”. She came back with that and it was perfect.
BT: Lots of the nicest almost unspoken details are from Beattie right? She did so much.
JP: Because we shoot everything with puppets we have all these rigs for the puppeteers. Which means we can’t move the cameras so that we can then get a clean version of the background and paint out the puppeteers. But if you add lighting, it’s such a dangerous thing to do, because you end up changing the background. I’m amazed that we managed to do it on this because it must have been quite a lot of post-production to clean it all up.
BS: Any wide shots like that, where you can see them standing, we have to rig them. It takes quite a long time. That’s one of the unique things about the show. In most puppet shows like Sesame Street it’s always from the waist up. We’ve always been keen to show the floor and do wide shots which is more of a challenge to shoot but that adds to the magic of puppetry.
This isn’t really linked but it’s just quite funny that all the fans are obsessed with drawing the characters as humans and shipping them – which is making them have sex with other characters and stuff. Really sexy drawings of Electracy, it’s so weird.
JP: No, it’s not. It’s great. We love it. Keep doing it.
BS: We love it, it’s bizarre.
JP: I love it. My family loves it.
BS: Yeah, that’s a whole rabbit hole of fun to explore.
Trying to figure out the DHMIS tv show timeline like
So what I do know so far is that 1. Electricity happens before Transport and Death, 2. Friendship happens after Death. Evidence for this being Duck's newspaper, and Yellow Guy's Dream in the opening song of Transport.
This has some fun implications to me with regards to how Duck and Yellow Guy both have ways of remembering things that have happened before- Duck reads about them, and Yellow dreams about them. Its kind of interesting to me bc the popular viewpoint seems to be that Duck is the least aware of what is happening to them, but he's the one who has the paper- granted, I don't think he ever makes his own references to things that happen in other episodes, but still. Also interesting that it doesn't seem like Red Guy directly remembers things either even though he is probably the most suspicious of things and most eager to break the loop.
