If you're planning on doing a 'inspirations for Amazing Digital Circus'...
And you're planning on mentioning Poppy the Performer:
You are incorrect.
It's Reboot.
It's always been Reboot.
Not that Sub-Williams-Street-level shock-schlock.
The whole fucking setup is homage-de-Reboot by way of Five Characters in Search of An Exit (Twilight Zone). Even the connections to "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" are surface-level at best, in a 'buncha humans trapped by an AI" way, but it ends there.
On the other hand, Caine's adventures are the equivalent of each episode of Reboot's game-cubes (not that one),
Transplanting the characters into new roles in dangerous, frightening scenarios that are meant to be enjoyable fun.
Defeat results in being transformed into a dangerous seemingly nonsapient squiggly THING.. only instead of being nullified if you lose the game, you get abstracted if you lose your grip.
There's more than a little Hexadecimal in both Caine and Gangle.
If you're doing a video based on an homage to 90s animation, it might behoove you to research the first full length all-CGI animated cartoon.
I mean, the Reboot connection is more obvious than Jax being a parody/expy of Max from Sam & Max, and that's blindingly fucking obvious.
"I'm the funny one, Sam."
I wonder what made more of an impact on GooseWorx, a highly re-run animated series that would have been on the air when they were a toddler/young gradeschooler and is also a literal milestone in CGI animation history, or an obscure chunk of sophomoric Japanese shock-art? Hmmm.
And while we're at it. While there's an AI in I have No Mouth and I Must Scream, the 'hell is other people' aspect of No Exit seems far more apt to the scenario they're in, especially in light of its semi-adaptation for the Twilight Zone:
And no, it isn't just that there's a clown.
Those that are younger will know the No Exit concept from The Good Place.
And I think the situation is going to be far more "No Exit" than it is going to be IHNMAIMS, because I don't think there's an 'out' for them to get to. Digital files never get transferred, they get copied.
They're all ghosts of people who haven't even died yet














