Trivia / Hatchetfield

• Acting for Two: Being a series of live theatrical productions, a very small roster of actors plays enough characters to populate a small town.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • Even though both shows made it pretty clear there's no obvious visual difference between people who've been possessed/assimilated and people who haven't, it was very common for Fan Art of The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals to show victims of the Apotheosis with bright blue Glowing Eyes, and after watching Black Friday to switch it up and use green Glowing Eyes for victims of Wiggly's cult. Team Starkid took note of this, and in the story "Watcher World" in Nightmare Time Season One, people under Blinky's Mind Manipulation are described in-universe as having telltale purple Glowing Eyes.
• Creator Couple:
  • Lauren Lopez and Joey Richter secretly dated for eight years before revealing themselves as engaged in mid-2020. They generally avoided being seen together in a romantic context to prevent suspicion, but still appeared as a few duos in Hatchetfield, namely Dan & Donna and Jingle & Jangle. Opening up about their relationship shortly before Nightmare Time allowed them to openly share a screen and snuggle each other during the readings, and living together allowed them to film the music video for "Peanuts!" in person.
  • Curt Mega and Kim Whalen, longtime collaborators with Richter's troupe, the Tin Can Brothers, made their StarKid debut together in Black Friday, and team up as Duke and Miss Holloway in Nightmare Time.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Nick Lang has admitted that Becky Barnes is, in fact, his favorite of all the Hatchetfield characters and he thinks of her as "a true hero."
  • He's revealed that among his other favorite characters is — to some fans' surprise — Linda Monroe (which he loves in the Love to Hate sense), a character who remains The Ghost throughout all of Nightmare Time Season One, and that this is because the first ever Nightmare Time story he and Matt wrote is about Linda, and is one they're still saving for the possibility of filming for real after the COVID-19 Pandemic is over.
• Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • The Lang Brothers are on record that the Hatchetfield series is the work they're proudest of out of everything they've done — including the A Very Potter Musical series that made them famous, which they've always felt slightly uneasy about since it's a parody piggybacking on J. K. Rowling's popularity (and was never originally intended for as wide an audience as they got).
  • Founding Starkid members Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez agreed with this assessment and singled out the Hatchetfield shows and The Trail to Oregon! (the two projects with Jeff Blim as songwriter) as the Starkid shows they're proudest of working on. (It's especially notable that they picked those shows over Me and My Dick and Starship, which Joey starred in, and Firebringer, which Lauren starred in.)
• Dawson Casting:
  • Obviously usually unavoidable when you have child/teen characters in a stage show, but the "Hatchetfield era" of Starkid had them take big steps to minimize this for the first time — hiring Mariah Rose Faith Casillas and Angela Giarratana (who are both in their early 20s) to play teen girl characters Alice Woodward and Lex Foster, now that the original Starkid members are all in their 30s.
  • Casting Kendall Nicole as Hannah Foster was the first example in their history of fully averting Dawson Casting for an underage character and casting a child actress, because the Lang Brothers had such a strong mental image of the character as a "tiny child with a backpack". Indeed, viewers are occasionally surprised to learn that this is completely averted regarding Hannah, who is consistently only one year younger than Kendall, just seems younger due to her withdrawn, waifish nature. Tim, however, is consistently five years younger than Kendall, playing it straight.
  • Joey Richter's role as the "Obnoxious Teen" — a last-minute replacement for Robert Manion's character of the same name, known to the fans as "Hot Chocolate Boy", who had to be replaced by Joey due to Robert playing Ethan — is the franchise's straightest example, as Joey is a far cry from the baby-faced leading man he was in Starship or Me and My Dick, not helped when the character appeared in Nightmare Time with Joey still bearing the facial hair required for his major characters in the story.
• Development Hell: Nerdy Prudes Must Die was the first story idea for a Horror Comedy set in Hatchetfield, Michigan, and was originally set to be the first in a "nerdy prudes" trilogy, which was eventually expanded into a whole Hatchetfield series. It was put on the back burner so that The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, the strongest standalone concept, could introduce Hatchetfield and the more serious Black Friday could open up the concept of the series. The pre-production of NPMD (and Workin' Boys) were cut short by the COVID-19 Pandemic, and as the pandemic wore on through 2020 with no signs of stopping, the Lang Brothers started work on Nightmare Time instead and began cannibalizing NPMD plot points for Nightmare Time episodes. The two projects were released in 2023.
• Fake American: Every character played by Robert Manion, who is Australian.
• LGBT Fanbase: Team Starkid has had one going all the way back to the A Very Potter Musical days, with the "Scarf of Sexual Preference" Running Gag, but it's become more intense than ever with Hatchetfield — which has both revealed a canon lesbian pairing in its first show (Alice and Deb from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals) and given us Starkid's first canon non-binary character (Ziggs, first mentioned in "Watcher World" and slated to appear for the first time in Nightmare Time Season Two).
• Newbie Boom: Team Starkid got a huge one with the Sleeper Hit success of The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, and with a ton of Gen Z fans therefore being more of a fan of the Hatchetfield series than any of their other works (including the A Very Potter Musical trilogy that put them on the map). Several have commented on the irony that Starkid is now 11 years old — an eternity in Internet years — and yet their fanbase is now younger on average than it's ever been before, which has led to some inevitable conflict with fans who've been there since the beginning and are now, like the Starkid founding members themselves, well into their 30s.
  • Got a second, substantial Newbie Boom of mostly young teenage fans thanks to their Colbert Bump from Ranboo streaming The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals on Twitch in March 2021. Notable that there's now a lot of fans coming in who've only seen TGWDLM and are making memes based on that show, after most of the "core" Hatchetfield fandom had already moved onto Nightmare Time after it was released for free on YouTube in February.
• The Other Darrin: Robert Manion was asked by StarKid human resources to take a temporary leave of absence from the group only a few weeks before Nightmare Time 2 was supposed to be released, as a result of confessions that he had sexually harassed band members in an earlier StarKid production. Without the time to devise a more elegant solution such as rewrites or distributing his characters amongst various cast members, Robert is replaced by writer/director Nick Lang in every role, until the season finale in which Joey Richter replaces him as Ethan. Following that hasty Other Marty-ing, Robert's characters are starting to be passed from Nick to other cast members.
• Production Posse: The Hatchetfield series has settled into a stable creative roster since the success of The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, with the Lang Brothers as writers, Nick Lang as director (after Matt Lang relocated with his girlfriend to Wichita, KS), Jeff Blim as songwriter, Matt Dahan as arranger, musical director and bandleader, James Tolbert and Lauren Lopez as choreographers, and a cast composed of the half of the original Team Starkid who followed the Langs when they left Chicago for LA. From Black Friday onward, longtime StarKid friends Curt Mega and Kim Whalen are also heavily involved, both as cast members and in various behind-the-scenes roles.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor:
  • Nick Lang believes in this on principle; as such, Alice's nonbinary classmate Ziggs was The Ghost in the story that introduced them, not debuting until a later story once Jae Hughes was added to the team. For this reason, it's likely that Mariah Rose Faith Casillas's personal view of her police officer character, Doug, as a non-binary person is not canon.
  • Mariah herself is pansexual, while her biggest Hatchetfield role to date is Alice, who's a lesbian.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Mariah Rose Faith Casillas was supposed to be cast as Lex in Black Friday before she was signed on for the touring company of Mean Girls, and Angela Giarratana auditioned for the part instead. Nightmare Time has shown that separating Lex and Alice's actresses does better in highlighting how different they are. Alice is a Spoiled Brat before her Character Development in "Watcher's World" that doesn't want to admit that her dad is flawed but means well and wants the best for her present, and future. She's also a case of Love Makes You Dumb in that her staying in Hatchetfield an extra day to be with Deb gets her killed, and she's in denial that Deb is a bad girlfriend. Lex is a Delinquent and Justified Criminal because her mother is an alcoholic and drug addict that makes her older daughter complicit in drug dealing; her biggest motivation is getting her little sister out of an unstable situation. Push comes to shove, she can defend herself in a fight. Her boyfriend Ethan may be on the wrong side of the tracks, but he's a good kid at heart, who will sacrifice himself for his loved ones. As an added benefit, Angela gets to play the Sniglette in "Watcher's World" as Mariah returns as Alice.
• Those Two Actors: As of Nightmare Time Season One, it's become a clearly visible Running Gag that Joey Richter and Jeff Blim keep playing nemeses to each other. All of Ted Spankoffski's enemies in "Time Bastard" — T'Noy Karaxis, Executive Kilgore, and Jenny's boyfriend Andy — are played by Jeff (with the latter two turning out to be Two Aliases, One Character). So was Ted's nemesis in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, the Dirty Cop Sam (the husband of his Love Interest Charlotte), whose brains he knocks out with a trash can lid and who then beats the shit out of him when he reanimates. And then Ted is killed by a different Jeff Blim character, Gen. MacNamara — who, in Black Friday, turns out to himself have an Arch-Nemesis, his former mentor Wilbur Cross/Uncle Wiley, who's also played by Joey Richter. What's more, this is a "rivalry" that goes back to the Hatchetfield series' Spiritual Predecessor The Trail to Oregon!, with the feud between Jeff Blim as the Father and Joey Richter as the General Store Guy and as the Bandit King McDoon.
• Word of God:
  • The next StarKid musical after Nerdy Prudes Must Die will not be a Hatchetfield installment, but the next Hatchetfield musical will delve into the origin story of Miss Holloway.
  • Nick has said that he and Matt's most ambitious project is to make a Hatchetfield feature film if they get the time and budget (and the COVID-19 Pandemic allows for it). Workin' Boys served as the template to see how good a film they can make on a budget; the film idea is Cast Party Massacre, a film in the "slumber party slasher film" genre starring some of the Hatchetfield Community Theatre actresses seen in Workin' Boys. The small scale of this concept makes it unlikely that the feature film and the Grand Finale of the Hatchetfield series will be the same title.
  • Nick Lang speaks so openly about Uncle Wiley and Wilbur Cross being the same person that it's probably safe to assume that when writing Black Friday he didn't even intend for it to be ambiguous; it's never been formally revealed in-series.
• Written by Cast Member: The songs for the Hatchetfield shows are all written by Jeff Blim, who'd previously written the songs for The Trail to Oregon! and was promoted to permanent songwriter after the move to LA.