Trivia / Black Friday

• Blooper:
  • The digital ticket recording included Lauren Lopez having her elf ear fly off into the distance during her dance as Jingle in "Deck the Halls (Of Northville High)".
  • Given that it's a live show, it was probably unavoidable, but unfortunately the close-up nature of the filming of this show means you can prominently see Tom sneaking onstage during the second half of "Deck the Halls (Of Northville High)".
  • Angela Giarratana briefly loses her hat in "Deck the Halls (Of Northville Heights)" and has to grab it and put it back on.
• The Cast Show Off:
  • In the big dance number at the climax of "Deck the Halls (Of Northville High)", the three strongest dancers in the cast — Lauren Lopez, Robert Manion and show choreographer James Tolbert — take center stage, even though in-universe there's no reason for "Chris Kringle's" backup dancers to be a rando student with no speaking lines and an elf nobody else can see.
  • Along the same lines, at the climax of the actual show, during "Wiggle", the Wiggly cultists shout "JAM!" and Robert Manion and James Tolbert's nameless characters do an impressive dance exhibition to pay tribute to Linda.
• Creator In-Joke: Word of God says Santa Claus Is Goin' to High School, like the Show Within a Show Workin' Boys before it, is an ancient in-joke from college about an intentionally terrible idea for a movie that predates the formation of Team Starkid.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Despite all the criticism from fans as noted on the YMMV tab, Nick and Matt Lang have been very clear when asked that Black Friday is their favorite work they've written so far and they hope to build on the new direction it sets for future Starkid productions (depending on how you feel about the show yourself this may verge into Magnum Opus Dissonance). Lauren Lopez and Joey Richter, two of the performers who've been with the troupe since the beginning, likewise say that the Hatchetfield series is the Starkid project they've enjoyed working on most since The Trail to Oregon!. Along the same lines, Nick Lang has politely but firmly shut down fans asking about a return to pop culture parody musicals (especially a return to Harry Potter), saying he's pretty strongly decided that genre is played out.
• Dawson Casting: For the first time, averted for a Starkid show. Hannah is played by an actual 13-year-old actress (although she turned 14 during the run of the show, which led to Nick Lang joking she would have to be recast). This isn't unusual for theatre in general but is for Starkid, which started as a college troupe known for raunchy humor, and is probably due to the fact that Hannah's age and innocence are played very straight compared to past child characters. Note that Hannah was originally said to be nine years old in the preview, and was officially aged up to make her match her actress' age, although she does act childish for her age due to her disability.
• Deleted Scenes: While no scenes were deleted between the live show and the YouTube recording, the controversial choice to film the YouTube version in a much more cinematic, close-up style did mean that various Funny Background Events viewers of the live show or the digital ticket enjoyed were missing from the one most people saw:
  • In "Feast or Famine", Gary Goldstein tries politely glad-handing and smooth-talking his way past Lex to get to Frank and the Wiggly doll he's holding — right after having been thrown violently in their direction after a vicious wrestling match — to no avail (shortly before he gets pulled away and switched out for Sherman Young, whom we can see doing the same thing in the YouTube version).
  • "Feast or Famine" also features Linda Monroe delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to the Crazy Homeless Man, only to tear open his coat and realize he doesn't have a Wiggly doll at all, causing her to casually walk away like nothing happened. Humorous Foreshadowing for Gary and the baseball cap guy doing the exact same thing to Ethan, only because they're quite a bit larger and stronger than Linda, this isn't Played for Laughs at all and leads to Ethan's death. Is also Hilarious in Hindsight in that this seems to be Easily Forgiven by the homeless guy, who ends up one of Linda's cultist worshipers who literally kisses her toes during "Adore Me".
  • Possibly the biggest one is the "butt-wiggle" from "Wiggle", where the cultist played by James Tolbert starts wiggling his behind in time to Linda singing "Wiggle wiggle wiggle", which merited a spontaneous burst of applause from the audience.
  • "What If Tomorrow Comes?" throws in the detail of various characters who — unlike Paul — are wearing wristwatches glancing at their watch at various points in the choreography, which didn't make it into any of the shots used in the recording. This is part of a general theme in the final dance that doesn't quite come across in the YouTube, that the characters are moving in surreal, mechanical/unnatural poses, as though puppets controlled by an outside force, before they blink, glance at their watch, and/or otherwise "wake up". (Which has fueled a lot of Wild Mass Guessing.)
  • For the first few performances, including the one that was recorded for the "digital ticket" version of the show, the Ted costume from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals was still in storage, meaning that Joey Richter instead shows up in "What If Tomorrow Comes?" as the movie theatre kid (canonically named the Obnoxious Teen). This means it wouldn't really make any sense for him to be holding Charlotte in the final moments of the show, but he still is holding hands with the Hot Chocolate Boy, igniting Ho Yay speculations among the fans. Notably, this ending also has Paul share an actual hug with Bill, his best friend, which was replaced by a much more ambiguous interaction with his frenemy Ted in the final version.
• Descended Creator: As in The Trail to Oregon! and The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, Jeff Blim is both the songwriter and plays a major role in the cast. But also, for the first time in this show longtime Starkid choreographer James Tolbert joins the cast as an ensemble member and playing Xander Lee.
• Defictionalization: Starkid put in a bulk order for the plush Wiggly props used for the show and made some available for sale at the merch table. Just like the in-universe Wiggly dolls at Toy Zone, the real Wigglies cost $49.95, are available in extremely limited quantities, and can be bought only on a first-come-first-served basis with no online preorders. The "SOLD OUT" sign got as much use in real life as in the show. The real dolls are just regular plush toys with no "tickle-me" function, but since the in-universe Wiggly's ability to speak seems to be supernatural in nature that's probably for the best.
• Follow the Leader: Starkid fandom had a minor eruption upon discovering there was a mainstream film starring Bruce Campbell, Devon Sawa and Michael Jai White also called Black Friday in production in 2020, a year after the Starkid musical's release, with a plot that sounded extremely similar to a mash-up between the plots of Black Friday and The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals (retail workers at a toy store besieged by Black Friday shoppers driven mad by an alien virus). Nick Lang pushed back on this, gently pointing out that many works of fiction have drawn on the idea of violence on Black Friday before and people stumble on superficially similar plots when writing all the time. (It didn't help that Devon Sawa chose to troll Starkid fans by joking about the movie also being a musical and stringing them along about its similarities to the Starkid show, which he hadn't actually seen.)
  • The director of the film Black Friday eventually addressed this, saying that although the Starkid musical and his movie are superficially about the same thing he promised they would be very different, with the movie being a Bloodier and Gorier violent action movie of the kind Bruce Campbell is known for. He also pointed out that the script for the movie Black Friday was first written in 2013 and picked up in 2016, and that no one in the production had heard of the Starkid musical until this story went viral.
  • The end of the "feud" on social media was director Casey Patrick Tebo saying he'd watched Starkid's Black Friday, liked it a lot and would love to put a Wiggly doll in the movie as an Easter Egg, though it's unclear if that actually happened.
• Good Luck Charm: The original Wiggly prototype doll featured in the livestreams before the show was hidden onstage as one of these. Offers some Fridge Horror — "Wiggly is always watching!" — from an in-universe POV, especially since the prototype was significantly creepier than the mass-produced versions used as props.
• Irony as She Is Cast: In the last Hatchetfield show Jon Matteson played the Only Sane Man struggling to avoid assimilation by a supernatural force only to become that force's avatar in the end. Now? He plays the supernatural force from the outset.
• The Other Darrin: The sickness that swept through the cast (see Troubled Production) left Dylan Saunders unable to perform his starring role as Tom one night, forcing songwriter Jeff Blim (the only other person who knew all the lyrics by heart) to slot into that role, thus having him carry the burden of two major roles (Tom and Gen. MacNamara) in one show. (Presumably this means the Man in a Hurry's character, who's in the same line as Tom in Act 1, had to be dropped and his critical lines given to other characters.)
• Playing Against Type:
  • Jaime Lyn Beatty is the most notable example, in that she's usually cast as a tragically unhappy woman with the voice of an angel, whereas her character this time is a thoroughly unsympathetic man with an unbearably screechy voice.
  • Joey Richter has, in fact, played a Satanic Archetype before in the sense of actually playing Satan in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, but for Starkid fans who know him through his work on YouTube the deadly serious menace of Uncle Wiley was a big surprise. ( Although for Tin Can Brothers fans, Owen in Spies Are Forever comes pretty close.)
  • Kim Whalen mostly is playing to type as Becky, but when Becky suddenly transforms into a Femme Fatale temptress a la the Other Mother from Coraline in "Do You Want to Play?" it's a pretty big — and scarily convincing — shift.
  • Jon Matteson hasn't had a YouTube audience long enough to have a type exactly, but he's definitely very much thought of by Starkid fans as a relentlessly positive All-Loving Hero type, which is why the sheer sadistic malice he brings to the voice of Wiggly astonished many people.
  • Similarly, Lauren Lopez has almost always either played goofy comic relief or sympathetic Deadpan Snarker type characters. Linda Monroe, a sadistically cruel Rich Bitch villain, is a type she hasn't played since Little White Lie (and Linda is far more genuinely scary than Tanya Freemont was).
• Production Posse: Team Starkid is one in general, but this show in particular will bring back the exact same team as The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, with Jeff Blim once more writing the songs and with all of the cast members returning.
  • The full cast has been announced and is the full cast of TGWDLM plus Curt Mega, Kim Whalen, Dylan Saunders and an as-yet-unannounced child actress as Hannah. This is technically Curt Mega's first Starkid show, but he's collaborated before with Starkid-adjacent troupes the Tin Can Brothers and Shipwrecked Comedy, appearing alongside Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez in Spies Are Forever and Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party. (He was introduced to Starkid by appearing alongside Darren Criss on Glee.) Kim Whalen is a Starkid newcomer but is known to them socially as Curt's spouse, and Dylan, of course, is a founding Starkid member for whom this will be his first show since Twisted.
  • As of July 2019 Mariah Rose Faith will unfortunately have to bow out of Black Friday thanks to being cast as Regina George in the touring production of Mean Girls.
  • Starkid had to quell the feeding frenzy over the announcement in July that Hannah had not yet been cast by saying that they don't hold open auditions, preferring to work with people they know and trust, and this especially holds true when specifically casting a child actor. Kendall Yakshe, the eventual casting for Hannah, is one of Curt Mega's longtime acting students.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: People upset that Jaime Lyn Beatty was Out of Focus in this show and didn't have a lead role or a solo should know that this was partly because she was busy, with her wedding taking place on August 31, 2019 (one month before the show opened) and developing her own one-woman show at the same time, Little Mermaid, Big Issues (a Starkid-style parody of The Little Mermaid, which ran alongside Black Friday at the Hudson Theater for one weekend in November).
• Romance on the Set: For the first time, a Starkid show contains a married couple in the cast — Kim Whalen (Becky Barnes) is married to Curt Mega (the President).
  • Additionally, Joey Richter (Uncle Wiley) and Lauren Lopez (Linda Monroe) were together at the time and are now engaged.
• Schedule Slip: The scale of the production meant that releasing the final filmed version of the show took much longer than typical, including doing several reshoots to get closeups and effects that weren't possible filming live. As a result, the show didn't go up on YouTube until February after the live show had closed in early December — moreover, after the release was announced for February 2020 it was released at the very end of February, at 10:00 PM Pacific time on February 29, 2020 (meaning for half the United States and most of the rest of the world it was already March). Nick Lang even admitted this was a What Could Have Been compared to releasing it on a Friday night, timed so that the premiere stream would end at midnight just as the show ends at midnight on Black Friday.
  • It was later revealed that this was due to Nick and Matt's attention being split between Black Friday and preparing for the launch of Royalties on Quibi, which led to mixed reactions, especially since Quibi flopping as a platform and being shut down less than a year later means that Royalties is now a "lost series" that can't be legally streamed or downloaded anywhere online.
• Troubled Production: The live run of Black Friday was beset by illness among the cast; Robert Manion posted publicly about the stress doing the show while sick put on his health, and the evening performance of Black Friday on the actual Black Friday was the first canceled live performance in Starkid history (as a consolation for ticketholders an informal cabaret performance was held with the remaining cast members that night).
  • Sadly, this carried over to the YouTube recording of the musical, despite the creators combining recordings from multiple live shows and doing reshoots afterwards to fill in gaps. Even from people who absolutely loved the live show overall, there's been many comments that the actors' voices aren't at their best, especially when singing parts that weren't written taking their natural range into account, and this may have led to the sound quality itself being subpar (the levels on different people's mics are often mismatched, possibly to accommodate people whose volume was limited due to illness). A lot of fans who normally think the energy of the live recording always beats the studio soundtrack album are now saying you have to buy the album if you want to really appreciate the music from this show.
  • Nick Lang has come out since then and spoken out about their cast getting older and being less cavalier about risking their health — plus the wake-up call to the whole industry that was the COVID-19 Pandemic — means they'll have to be much more careful in the future, like making sure everyone has adequate dressing room space (as opposed to the "romance" of squeezing all the men and all the women together into one tiny space) to prevent contagion, and having proper understudies and backup plans for actors experiencing illness — even if this makes the show more expensive or shortens the run.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Lang Brothers have revealed Black Friday is in fact an older idea than The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and predates the idea of a single "Hatchetfield series" continuity, which would also make it an older idea than Nerdy Prudes Must Die, the first Hatchetfield story idea. It was originally developed as an "episode" for Lauren Lopez and Julia Albain's longrunning comedy project "The Moms", and would've originally been a much more straightforward Retail Riot comedy about these Midwestern mom characters losing their minds over a Flash In The Pan Fad children's toy. The Hatchetfield universe partially developed from this idea exploding past its initial boundaries to become part of a sprawling Cosmic Horror story.
  • The Starkid fandom were extremely hyped to see newcomer and fan favorite Mariah Rose Faith take a lead role in this show... before she got snatched up to play Regina George in Mean Girls (an even faster and more sudden loss than when Darren Criss got taken away by Glee).
  • This became somewhat more fraught when fans spent weeks fancasting other Starkid members as Lex, most notably Rachael Soglin (based on her performance as a Bratty Teenage Daughter in Twisted), only for Starkid to instead cast newcomer Angela Giarratana. That said, people have been very supportive of Angela's performance in the finished show, to the point of saying they now can't imagine Mariah in the role. (Mariah herself has said that, even though her own YouTube channel is themed around her covering showtunes, she refuses to cover any of the songs from Black Friday because she's a fan of Angela's performance and doesn't want to be seen as undermining it.)
  • The initial livestream announcement mentioned that Darren Criss would be coming back in a recorded cameo playing Santa Claus. That ended up not happening, although few complained about the live musical number with Robert Manion as "Chris Kringle" that took its place.
    • Nick Lang took to Twitter to clarify that this isn't as big of a What Could Have Been as some think — Darren was always too busy to do anything but a brief snippet of dialogue from Santa Claus is Goin' to High School as voiceover, when the plan was to have the movie just be a brief throwaway gag. Expanding the joke into a whole musical number automatically meant that "Chris Kringle" would have to be played by a member of the live cast and there was no place for a recorded cameo.
  • There's been a lot of reaction to the revelation that a monologue for MacNamara was cut from the script that would've revealed he was gay and married to a man.
  • The scratch track version of "The Tickle-Me Wiggly Jingle" was almost completely different, with a much more kitschy Retraux feel compared to the relatively slick, modern version in the final show. It also contained a hilariously cutesy bridge ("To love you, hold you, keep you tight/And love you, hold you, keep you tight/And keep you tight, and keep you tight, and love you soooo...") to the tune of "If I Fail You", which would've made for a huge Mood Whiplash pair of Book Ends for the beginning and ending of the show. Some have expressed regret for the revised jingle being easier to take seriously as a real ad campaign, compared to the exaggerated (and hilarious) Creepy Cute aspects of the original.
  • In general the three songs from the scratch track preview — "The Tickle-Me Wiggly Jingle", "CaliforMIA" and "What Do You Say?" — along with "Deck the Halls (of Northville High)" give off much more of a bouncy "classic Starkid" vibe for the musical, compared to the rest of the songs, which are much moodier, darker and more serious, experimenting with new ideas for Jeff Blim like heavy use of recurring Leitmotif rather than full-on reprises. For those who are iffy about the new direction Black Friday took, it's a glimpse into what it might've been like as a musical closer to Starkid's original tone.
  • It's worth noting that "What Do You Say?", as noted under The Cover Changes the Gender on the main page, was written for an ensemble of mostly women to sing, and even though this kind of inevitably had to change given what the cast list already looked like at that point, it'd be nice to hear that version of the song just from a musical perspective. There's also some stuff that was changed about the way the song is played to make it fit a stage performance — one big loss is that the awkward conversation between Tom and Becky was played extremely deadpan, as though they're talking entirely normally while everyone is singing and dancing around them, and this was lost when the staging included them in the choreography for a more dynamic picture. (The casual delivery of "How are things?" "...Haven't seen it" was the biggest laugh line in the scratch track preview and passes without much notice in the final version.)
  • In the initial conception of the show, the Movie Theater Kid whom Ethan gets in a fight with was going to be Robert Manion's "Hot Chocolate Boy" character from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals. (He's not actually called "Hot Chocolate Boy" — the scripts for The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Black Friday refer to both "Hot Chocolate Boy" and "Movie Theater Kid" as "Obnoxious Teen".) Obviously, since Ethan is also played by Robert Manion, they couldn't be the same character, and the role went to Joey Richter, who does a similar but distinct pubescently squeaky voice for the character. Notable because in early stagings of the show — including the digital ticket recording released before the official YouTube version — Joey Richter plays the Movie Theater Kid in the ending rather than Ted, and the fact that these two characters are holding hands at the end of "What If Tomorrow Comes?" led to the Fanon that they're dating.
  • For those who found the music somewhat lackluster, particularly the complaints about the songs being written in their performers' lower register and not having soaring high notes, it's worth remembering that a lot of this was changed during the run of the show because the illness among the cast meant the high notes were taking a toll on the actors' voices. ("Made In America", for instance, was originally largely belted in falsetto but was changed to reduce the range because it was badly straining Joey Richter's vocal cords.)
  • Lauren Lopez has revealed "Adore Me" was originally written as a song twice the length that was cut down for the show.
  • Jeff Blim likewise revealed that Ethan originally had his own song in the show (titled "Somehow" on the scratch track album) but this was cut for time and only survives in the form of Ethan's Leitmotif that plays over his heart-to-heart talks with Hannah. Robert Manion has revealed he personally pushed to cut this song and just have Ethan monologue to Hannah instead, finding it suited the character better.
  • The sequence with President Goodman in the Black and White was originally a much more Played for Laughs Battle in the Center of the Mind for Goodman personally, with Uncle Wiley manifesting as one of a sea of clones of Goodman's father giving him a chance to sing the song "Everything Is My Dad".
  • "Do You Want To Play?" was initially even creepier, with verses from Becky revealing her dark side where she's The Resenter over how much of a toll caring for dying children has taken on her.
• Word of God: Once again, Nick Lang has taken to Twitter to answer some (but not all) of the many questions people had about The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Black Friday, many of which have been added to their relevant trope entries but a few of which are also here:
  • To encourage fanfic writers, he's revealed that Becky Barnes, Tom Houston and Linda Monroe all knew each other in high school, with Becky being a year behind Tom and Linda a few years older. Jane Perkins was older than Linda and may not have overlapped with them, while Emma is a few years younger and was a freshman when Tom was a senior. (Paul Matthews is the same age as Emma, but lived in a poorer school district and went to Sycamore rather than Hatchetfield High.) Sherman Young and the other shoppers were in the same general high school cohort but their exact ages haven't been nailed down.
  • Although her maiden name has not been revealed, Linda Monroe is not related to any of the other named Hatchetfield characters (and her birth family, whatever its name, is one of the wealthiest and most respectable in town).
  • Lex Foster, Ethan Green, Alice, Deb, and Grace Chasity are all around the same age (17-18) and in the same high school class. Deb and Grace are currently seniors at Hatchetfield High, Alice transferred to Clivesdale High after her mom and Bill got divorced last year, and Lex dropped out this year. Alice, Deb and Grace all know each other and Alice dislikes Grace; Lex wasn't friends with any of them and is something of a loner thanks to her bad home life. "Hot Chocolate Boy" is also a Hatchetfield High Student but nothing is currently known about him besides this.
    • The required adjustments to the Hatchetfield timeline that came about due to two seasons of Nightmare Time coming between Black Friday and Nerdy Prudes Must Die include Grace and her NPMD co-stars (including "Hot Chocolate Boy", now known to be Peter Spankoffski) now being two years younger than Alice, Deb, Lex, and Ethan.
  • Paul does know who Becky is (as the result of some as-yet untold story) but didn't go to Hatchetfield High and doesn't know any of the other characters introduced in ''Black Friday'', since he's an introvert whose social circle mostly revolves around his coworkers at CCRP Technical. Notably, he doesn't know who Tom is before he meets him, even though the town gossip revolves around the saga of how Becky and Tom were a Super Couple whose lives both took tragic turns.
  • In the Black Friday timeline Prof. Hidgens is indeed still in the fully stocked apocalyptic shelter he's built in his home, just as he was in TGWDLM. He never physically appears at the Lakeside Mall during Black Friday because that would be totally out of character for him.
  • Tim Houston is somewhat younger than Hannah Foster — Hannah is 13, the same age as her actress, and Tim is about 9 or 10. (Hannah was aged up to match her actor's age after Kendall Yakshe was cast, and her still-childish behavior in the script is down to her Disability Superpower.)
  • Nothing in particular happened between Becky and Emma to cause Emma to hate her — Emma just doesn't get along with her, and probably resents the callous way the town gossips made her sister's death out to be a "plot twist" that might enable Tom to get back together with Becky.
  • The Alternate Universe nature of the setting does have some actual metaphysics behind The Multiverse that will be explored in the next show, rather than just being a convenient excuse to tell different stories with the same characters.
  • In an extremely tantalizing and debate-inducing hint to fans, when a fan asked Nick an innocuous question about which Starkid cast member he'd like to see play Jane if she were an onscreen character, he said he couldn't answer because it would be a spoiler, indicating the intent that her appearing onstage is a non-hypothetical. She appears in the first season of Nightmare Time portrayed by Jaime Lyn Beatty.
  • In response to the massive fan outcry over the fact that Lex never finds out Ethan dies and gets a chance to mourn him over the course of the play, Nick Lang said he regrets the pacing of the show didn't permit this to be addressed in Act 2, and says he believes Lex, like Hannah, subconsciously sensed Ethan's death when it happened. She won't openly talk about it because it's too painful, but her sense that Ethan must be dead is definitely part of her hitting the Despair Event Horizon in Black Friday.
  • The Gainax Ending is intended to be ambiguous, and the question of what exactly happens to the Lakeside Mall survivors is a Riddle for the Ages that will not be directly answered.
  • Although the fact that there is one sprawling, interconnected Hatchetfield multiverse is massive Fanfic Fuel, Nick did feel the need to douse the flames by officially denying that any of the other Starkid shows were meant to tie into one overarching continuity, despite the extreme popularity of Epileptic Trees involving Starship and Firebringer.
  • Nick later did another post detailing a few things about the metaphysics of the Black and White: Uncle Wiley was wearing a protective suit like the President when he initially entered the Black and White and did not dissolve into it the way MacNamara did, meaning he and MacNamara aren't in the same situation — Wiley is still physically alive and can move freely through the real world in a way MacNamara can't. Also, the Sniggles were never human beings, and were created as emanations of the Black and White with no purpose but to serve Wiggly. This means that, as far as we know, MacNamara's status as a human who dissolved into the Black and White to become a Spirit Guide is completely unique.
• Word of Saint Paul:
  • Lauren Lopez revealed that she believes Gary Goldstein is one of the many lovers Linda Monroe has cheated on Gerald with.
  • Kim Whalen has explained the Funny Background Event of Robert Manion's character sneaking into line during the choreography for "What Do You Say?" by saying he was there before and the always-honorable-and-helpful Becky Barnes was holding his place for him while he ran off to use the restroom.
  • Hilariously, when both Nick Lang and Jon Matteson were asked if Jon's Secretary of Defense character had a name, Nick replied he didn't while Jon immediately threw out the name "Wallace McNeill".
• Written by Cast Member: Once again, Jeff Blim is both writing the music for the show and acting in the cast.