Web Animation / Pamtri

S A N T I A G O

"Describe Pamtri here or I will kill you."
"Why?"
"Because we're tighter than bark on a T R E E."

"Oh. Okay."

YouTube has had lots of channels that have posted deranged and surreal animated series since the very beginning. One of these channels is Pamtri, who blew up in popularity in early 2017. While the channel had started uploading surreal 3D animations for several months, its popularity only really kicked off with the SpongeBob SquarePants parodies "Mrs. Puff Has Had Enough," and "Sea Bear."

Pamtri's videos can be divided into four types:

• "In a Nutshell:" Parodies of animated cartoons or films, which rarely ever have anything resembling to a coherent plot.
• Spongebob parodies: Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Santiago: Videos featuring Pamtri's OC, Santiago; a 666 years old man with a "killing addiction."
• Other: Videos not featuring Santiago or Spongebob that tell independent stories.

Santiago appears in almost every video, regardless if it's an "In a Nutshell" video or not, and most often without any explaination. Nobody really knows who he is, or where he came from. The only certain thing is that at least one character will be killed by him.

There are other running gags as well, including a number of very recurring phrases and other easter eggs. As of April 2023, Pamtri has over 961 thousand subscribers.

Pamtri's channel can be found here. They also have a Twitter. If you're on Discord, you can also join their group here.

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Tropes in Pamtri's videos include:

• Amazing Technicolor Population: The Man in the Yellow Hat in "Curious George in a Nutshell" is just a yellow palette-swapped Santiago with a hat on.
• Arc Number: 666 shows up a lot.
• Arc Words: "Ugli" appears often, usually to describe a place name. In Spongebob videos the Krusty Krab is named The Ugli Krab, Sandy's Treedome is named "Sandy's Ugli Tree Dome" and Morty's school in the Rick and Morty parody is named "Ugli School."
• Art Evolution: Physics began to get more and more realistic starting with "Krusty Dogs."
• The Bad Guy Wins: Most of the episodes end with Santiago killing everyone. Another example is Mrs. Puff, who by her own admission always wins.
• Berserk Button. Used as a Running Gag. Whenever a character gets dangerously pissed, the screen suddenly goes red while a screeching, indeterminate noise screams in the background. Usually, this ends with someone getting shot or killed.
• Came Back Wrong: After Spongebob is revived through a satanic ritual in "Patrick Brings Spongebob Back", he seems to be demonically possessed and kills Patrick and the entire population of Bikini Bottom.
  • Pops from Regular Show comes back with a demonic and distorted voice and black eyes with red pupils after his death.
• Catchphrase: Several, including "now you must die," "oh, okay," and "because we're tighter than bark on a tree." Santiago's catchphrase is proclaiming his own name either before or after he kills other characters.
• Cluster F-Bomb: When the Spongebob characters trying to laugh, it usually sounds like a f-bomb, due to the text-to-speech system.
  • In "Squidward's Suicide", Spongebob and Patrick are just standing in Squidward's yard staring at each other and laughing over and over while Squidward was trying to practice for a concert.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The videos are mostly independent of each other, but in "Plankton Wins," Spongebob kills Mr. Krabs while under the influence of Plankton's mind control helmet. A later video has Spongebob going to Mr. Krabs' grave, and when Krabs' vengeful ghost accuses Spongebob of killing him, Spongebob mentions that Plankton had been controlling him. There's also the fact that Patrick apparently found SpongeBob's dead body after Santiago killed the latter and performed a satanic ritual to revive him. It succeeds, but not before Santiago possesses SpongeBob.
  • Patrick's aforementioned Satanism is brought back in "Sea Bear" where the circle he draws on the ground to deter the sea bear has a pentagram inside of it.
  • "Revenge on Santiago" implies that all the videos follow the same continuity. A meeting at the Krusty Krab features every character who had appeared in a video and gotten killed thus far planning to go to Santiago's house and kill him as revenge. They succeed... before another Santiago throws a bomb shaped like his head into the house and blows it up.
  Santiago: "Roses are red. Violets are blue. Santiago will kill you."
  • The first video to feature Colonel Sanders has him going to KFC to try and get a Santiago toy, only to get mad and declare that he'll never eat at KFC again when they tell him they don't sell toys. Later on, we find out why he wanted the Santiago toy: to perform a satanic ritual for the purpose of getting YouTube likes. It ends up getting both him and his friend Ronald McDonald killed.
  • "Dying for Pie" references "Plankton Wins" when Plankton asks Squidward to help him get the Krabby Patty formula. Squidward says "didn't you already get the formula?" but Plankton says it wasn't actually the formula.
• Darker and Edgier: Granted, all (but two, see Lighter and Softer below) of Pamtri's videos are dark to some extent, but Squidward's Suicide, an adaptation of the titular Creepypasta, is definitely one of the grimmest in the series. No Santiago, no jokes or gags, just a dark short story where Squidward falls into a state of depression and kills himself.
  • Played with in The Krusty Krab Pizza, at first it doesn't even feel like a Pamtri video. There are no catch phrases or running gags, no Santiago, and after a lot of buildup the story just ends with references to a pair of then popular memes ("Boneless Pizza", and the Seinfeld intro theme). Then there's the stinger.
• Death Is Cheap: It isn't clear whether or not the videos follow Negative Continuity. Either way, getting killed is no indication that a character won't return in the future.
• Death of Personality: Implied at the end of "Inside Out in a Nutshell." After all the emotions have been killed, the video cuts to a still image of Riley, who has a glazed-over look on her face and her eyes have been replaced with television static, likely signifying that she is now an Empty Shell.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Another common theme. Characters will kill one another for the pettiest of reasons (if they even have a reason). An example would be how in "Curious George in a Nutshell," the man in the yellow hat kills someone who may or may not be Santiago because the person called his hat stupid.
• Dull Surprise: Comes naturally when every character has a Synthetic Voice Actor that speaks in Machine Monotone.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first Pamtri video uploaded to the channel called "SpongeBob SquarePants - Plankton wins" has a few noticable differences from later videos:
  • The video title is stylized as "SpongeBob SquarePants - Plankton wins" with the show title and a hyphen followed by the video title. This is less upfront than later video titles on the channel, which simply have the title without extra details.
  • The entire video has a shaky video effect applied to it, as if it were being recorded from a television. Later videos just drop this effect entirely.
  • The sky in Bikini Bottom is just animated television static. Later videos have a dark and cloudy sky instead.
  • Spongebob in the video has a detailed walking animation instead of gliding over the ground. The usage of walking animations is dropped afterwards and only used for small moments in much later videos.
  • There are no sound effects present. The only sound in the music are the character's TTS voices and the music, which doesn't slowly distort as more violent acts are commited in this video.
  • The murder weapon used is a knife, not a gun.
• Eldritch Abomination: Squidward appears to have become one somehow at the end of "Dying For Pie". Or perhaps he was one the whole time?
• Every Episode Ending: Most of them end with Santiago randomly showing up and killing every character onscreen before shouting his name.
• Extreme Doormat: Most characters are like this, needing to be asked or told to do something only once or twice before conceding with a simple "oh ok." They even accept getting murdered with a flat "ok."
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Not even the audience is safe from getting shot by Santiago. More than one video has ended with him shooting at the camera, which promptly falls over (and sometimes cracks).
  • At the end of Spongebob's Cousin, after shooting Stanley, Patrick and Gary, Spongebob turns to the camera and shoots the viewer.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Lots of them. Some are either creepy images of the characters being dead or distorted, some are one or more weird pancake-looking characters appearing and disappearing.
• GIS Syndrome: Most characters are represented either as Father Grigori variations or crude models. However, some are stock images found on Google.
• Instant Death Bullet: Whenever a gun is used, which is to say Once an Episode, the target is always killed instantly.
• Jump Scare: The end of "Spongebob in a Nutshell".
  • Also, the ending to "Dying For Pie".
• Lampshade Hanging: From "Sandy Needs More Nuts:"
  Spongebob: Sandy, why don't you get them? You're standing right next to the table.
  Sandy: Because we're tighter than bark on a tree.
  Spongebob: (rolls eyes) What does that even mean?
  Sandy: MORE, SPONGEBOB, MORE!
• Lighter and Softer: Minecraft in a Nutshell, where there are no guns and pretty much faithful to the source material except Creeper is SANTIAGO.
  • Colonel Sanders Visit KFC features more upbeat music and theme than usual, and is also one of the only videos to use an explicative, with Colonel Sanders saying, "shit".
• Limited Animation: The videos are rendered and animated very crudely in a 3D animation program. Characters rarely leave their reference poses and merely glide along the floor instead of having walking animations.
• Limited Wardrobe: Ironically, Squidward always wears his Krusty Krab hat even when he's not working and Spongebob never wears his during Krusty Krab segments. Sandy doesn't wear her diving suit when she's outside of her tree-dome.
• Living Weapon: Guns sometimes kill independently.
• Me's a Crowd: At the end of "Krusty Dogs," multiple Santiagos rise up from the floor of the Krusty Krab and kill Mr. Krabs by shooting him at the same time.
• Mind Screw: Very much so.
• Monster Clown:
  • "The Friendly Clown" features one who tries to persuade a boy to get into his mouth. The boy refuses, and then gets hit by a truck while walking back to his mother.
  • In the "GONE WRONG" video, Ronald McDonald has a creepy Tim Burton-esque design and mostly does nothing but stand in the background, staring at the camera with a Slasher Smile. He doesn't seem like a bad guy, though.
• Mythology Gag: Whenever a TV is used to play videos, it almost always plays "i_like_tomatoes"
• Neck Snap: Implied every time a Sickening "Crunch!" is heard whenever someone turns their head. There's no ill effects, though.
• Number of the Beast: Comes up a lot in the videos. Santiago is 666 years old. The boy in "The Friendly Clown" lives in house number 666. The phone number that calls in the iPhone video is 666-6666. It's not clear if it means anything or not.
• Really 700 Years Old: Santiago is 666 years old.
• Reality Warper: Spongebob teleports himself and Squidward through presumbly glitching the camera to deliver a pizza with bones in "The Krusty Krab Pizza."
  • Santiago, definitely, seeing that he somehow is everywhere.
• Reused Character Design: The character model for Santiago (Father Grigori from Half-Life 2) is often copied to represent other characters, with minor tweaks where appropriate (e.g. the boy in "The Friendly Clown" is a shorter version of the model, while female characters add long hair to it). On at least one occasion, Santiago has taken advantage of this design choice to kill his victims.
• Rule of Funny: Pretty much the explanation and reason why the Pamtri videos exist in the first place.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Blue does not bark as a normal dog would, but instead proclaims, "Dog sound dot w a v."
• Sensory Abuse: A portion of Elon Musk's laughter in "Elon Musk Hosts Meme Review" is bass boosted to the point where it's just pure noise.
• Shapeshifting: Possibly Santiago. It's strongly implied that he can take the shape of other characters, as there are many instances on which he doesn't appear physically, but where a character who just killed another says his name out loud.
• Scary Teeth: Spongebob suddenly has teeth when he argues with Squidward and cuts up the fish that ordered a pizza to create pizza with bones in "The Krusty Krab Pizza".
  • IT'S A ROCK!
• Shout-Out:
  • Colonel Sanders's "GONE WRONG" video is based off of It's Jay Station's videos.
  • In "Garfield In A Nutshell", Garfield and Jon have the same Synthetic Voice Actors as in the Garfielf videos. Additionally, the background music a slowed down version of "Coc'n Rolla", which was also the background music for the original Garfielf video.
• Sickening "Crunch!": Characters' movements are sometimes accompanied by these. It's mostly heard when they turn their heads, although it is also sometimes present when their bodies begin flailing around at random.
• Stylistic Suck: The intentionally Off-Model characters and objects.
• Sudden Name Change: Parodied with the Lorax, whose name never stays the same from one mention to the next, often in increasingly botched versions of his actual name. He's instead called things like "Lorlax" or "Lormat." He even does this to himself.
• Synthetic Voice Actor: Most characters are voiced this way, although a few videos will feature actual audio footage of them speaking (such as the Donald Trump video).
• The Nothing After Death: Squidward floats in it, badly playing "All Star" on his clarinet, after being eaten by the Santiago-headed sea bear in "Sea Bear".
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: "Hunger Games In a Nutshell" features many different characters from many different franchises duking it out in the Hunger Games.
• Voice of the Legion: Happens on several occasions, most notably with SANTIAGO.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Steve and the creeper (actually Santiago) stretch their body parts and flail around loudly to ridiculous sizes while doing simple tasks in "Minecraft In A Nutshell"
• Wham Line: In "The Krusty Krab Pizza":

  Customer: (Opens pizza box) ...Are those bones on my pizza?

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You have read through this whole trope page. Now, YOU MUST DIE
Oh, okay
(gunshot)
SANTIAGO