Web Animation / The Amazing Digital Circus

A psychological dark comedy about cute cartoon characters who hate their lives and want to leave.^note Clockwise from top left: Ragatha, Gangle, Bubble, Caine, Kinger, Jax, Zooble. Center: Pomni.

Caine: Welcome to the Amazing Digital Circus! My name is Caine! I'm your ringmaster, and I'm here to show you the most jaw-dropping, heart-stopping, mind-bending paraphernalia you've ever laid your eyes upon! Isn't that right, Bubble?
Bubble: That's right, Caine! I can't wait to see what you've got cooking up for today!
Caine: Well, let's not waste any time, let's get right into the show!

The Amazing Digital Circus is an Australian-American computer-animated Surreal Psychological Black Comedy web series created, written, and directed by Gooseworx (Little Runmo, The Pink City), and produced by GLITCH Productions, with former Blue Sky Studios animator Kevin Temmer leading the animation team. It marks Glitch's second collaborative effort after Murder Drones, and their fourth fully-animated series overall.

The story revolves around six troubled humans — timid newcomer Pomni (Lizzie Freeman), trouble-making rascal Jax (Michael Kovach), jovial optimist Ragatha (Amanda Hufford), emotionally fragile Gangle (Marissa Lenti), paranoid veteran Kinger (Sean Chiplock), and moody cynic Zooble (Ashley Nichols) — who find themselves trapped in the Amazing Digital Circus, a zany virtual world full of infinite possibilities, except for two things: swearing and leaving. Led by the goofy A.I. Caine (Alex Rochon) and his bubbly assistant Bubble (Gooseworx), the six embark on all sorts of wacky, often traumatizing misadventures while trying to keep their sanity intact, lest something terrible happen to them...

The pilot was released on October 13, 2023. One month later on November 12, after the pilot reached 100 million views, Glitch Productions confirmed more episodes will be developed, with Episode 2 set to release on May 3, 2024.

Trailers: Teaser, "MEET THE GANG", Official trailer, Episode 2 Teaser

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"Let's not waste any time; let's get right into the tropes!":

• Accidental Hero: Pomni's frantic scrambling through the fake exit, when she's supposed to be looking for Caine to get his help, winds up taking her to the void, which turns out to be one of the most surefire ways to get Caine's attention.
• Actor Allusion: In the Latin-American dub, Kinger asks Zooble if they appeared in any Turkish soap operas, possibly referring to Zooble's voice actress (Maureen Herman) extensive previous works on Turkish soap operas.
• Ambiguous Ending: For the pilot, the cast complete their "Gather the Gloinks" game. Caine sends the abstracted Kaufmo to a cellar with others who may have suffered the same fate and cures Ragatha and Pomni's glitching affliction. As for Pomni herself, her search for the way out of the Digital Circus ends badly as she stumbles into the Void before Caine brings her back. After learning that Caine never bothered to create anything beyond the rumored Exit Door, Pomni is hit with the possibility that there is no escape and this isn't a dream as she initially thought. As the rest of the gang "celebrate" with a digital feast, treating this as "just another day", Pomni is completely silent and is shown to be slowly losing her mind following her first day experience in the Circus unsure what will happen next. The last shot shows a computer with a VR headset, still on but devoid of a user, implying that the person becoming "Pomni" may have entered into this world like Caine said.
• And I Must Scream: The show's premise is that six human souls are violently tormented by Caine without the release of death to save them, all Played for Laughs. This is demonstrated in the teaser, where Pomni suffers multiple knives to the head and lives, but is very much traumatized. Since the plot draws from the trope namer, this is only natural. The pilot, however, plays it more seriously when Kaufmo is revealed to have "Abstracted" and become a monster after being driven insane over trying to find an exit with Caine forced to place him in the Cellar of the Circus and the other doors with an X over the pictures of other unseen characters implying that it has happened to multiple victims of the circus before Pomni arrived.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Caine somehow pulls off both this and Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick (and a little bit of Department of Redundancy Department) in the same line:
  Do you like adventure? Activity? Wonder? Danger? Horror? Pain? Suffering? Agony? Death? Disease? Death? Angel food cake?
• Art Shift: The opening displaying the title begins in the style of a 90s computer game before shifting to the main design.
• Aside Glance: Pomni gives a small, nervous glance while Caine is Rattling Off Legal.
• Aspect Ratio Switch: The beginning segment with the title is in 4:3 in the style of old 3D computer games. The rest of the pilot is in fullscreen.
• Bad Black Barf: Pomni pukes on the floor after experiencing vertigo from Caine's teleporting tour of the circus. Said vomit is pitch black, with some streaks of pink.
• Biblical Motifs: A few are sprinkled throughout the pilot.
  • The ringmaster of the circus is named Caine, and the logo in the office which Pomni spends time going through the numerous exit doors reads "C & A", like Cain and Abel.
  • One promotional art has Pomni crucified.
  • The final scene of the pilot is framed like The Last Supper.
• Black Comedy:
  • The teaser markets the show as a "surreal dark comedy", and illustrates it by playing Pomni's visible trauma over getting skewered by knives for morbid laughs.
  • In the pilot, while introducing the water park to Pomni, Caine explains it's to drown yourself in.
• Bloodless Carnage: The teasers include scenes of violence, such as Pomni being made into a Human Pincushion with four knives sticking out of her, and Ragatha getting hit in the head with a cleaver, but there's not a drop of blood to be seen. Since Caine states the Circus is "a place to be enjoyed by all ages" to the point swearing is auto-censored, blood is presumably right out as well.
• Bread and Circuses: This is the only solution Caine can think of to keep the players from abstracting into Digital Abominations; keep them happy and stimulated with games, food, and adventures while dropping anyone unfortunate enough to abstract anyway into the cellar. As made clear by how many are in the cellar (and the frayed mental state of the inhabitants) it's not the best solution.
• Brick Joke: Kinger rambles asking about an "insect collection" early on in the pilot, which later comes back when he and Gangle come upon the Gloink nest, which he calls an insect collection.
• Broken Record: In the opening, after the cast is introduced in the opening theme tune, the song briefly stutters for a bit, where it loops "day after" a couple times, with the opening also replaying that bit, which is one of the first signs that something is amiss.
• Butt-Monkey: Pomni and the five other souls she's trapped with are a very Black Comedy version of this. Unadulterated suffering is the norm for them and they're unable to escape or delay it, even through death, and it's all Played for Laughs.
• Cabin Fever: The premise of the series is a group of digital avatars stuck in a confined Crapsaccharine World with no memory of their true selves and very little activities to do beyond the adventures provided by Caine.
• Circus of Fear: The titular simulation is named after and mainly centered on a circus-like building (although it isn't the only major location in it), and people who enter it can never leave, lose their memories, are trapped in the bodies of wacky characters, and can't even die. Caine tries to help them stay sane by giving them "adventures" to do, but isn't very good at it. Furthermore, if any person loses their mind, they'll permanently turn into a glitched-up monster.
• Comedic Strangling: Zooble chokes out Jax after the latter uses their detachable hand as a backscratcher without permission.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Ragatha, Jax, Gangle, Kinger and Zooble gave up on trying to escape the Circus long ago and just treat it as everyday life. It makes sense, considering the alternative is going insane, like Kaufmo.
• Conscience Makes You Go Back: After Pomni runs away and abandons Ragatha to escape from the abstracted Kaufmo, she briefly sees the damage done to her hand and decides to head back to help Ragatha.
• Crapsaccharine World: The Amazing Digital Circus is a whimsical, primary-colored virtual circus one might find in a children's pre-rendered CG computer game from The '90s, and its inhabitants resemble classic toys like wind-up teeth and clown dolls. It's also full of former-humans struggling not to go insane in the digital world, with the world-controlling AI doing a bad job of helping them.
• Creepy Basement: The circus has a basement, which is where Caine puts Kaufmo in after he has abstracted.
• Curse Cut Short: Zooble, upon seeing Kinger have an Epic Fail trying to help them.
  Zooble: Hey! Kinger, you mother— (Gets swallowed.)
• Dangerously Garish Environment: The show is set in a technicolor environment with bright colors and oddly endearing character designs. The setting itself, however, just happens to be a digital world that the cast is trapped in for an unknown period of time and are constantly psychologically tortured by an enthusiastic, unpredictable AI circus ringleader who has no idea what he's actually doing to them.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Implied by the show's official synopsis, where it's stated that Pomni and the other five humans are tormented by both Caine and "their own personal traumas".
• Dark Reprise: The ending of the pilot has the last minute of the episode play a darker remix of the show's main theme that played at the beginning of the episode. This happens right after Pomni learns that the exit door she and Kaufmo were searching for was just a fake made by Caine and that Kaufmo "abstracted" over a false hope of escape before being put in the cellar of the circus by Caine. As the music plays over the other residents talking about how they can only feel the sensation of eating, the shot zooms in on Pomni until she and the others are all at the dinner table and she looks at the food. The very next shot shows the others conversing with each other as the camera zooms in on Pomni again with her now sporting a Broken Smile as she breaks down and finally realizes that she isn't dreaming and accepts that there is no escape after all.
• Developer's Foresight: In-Universe. Upon learning that swearing isn't possible in the Amazing Digital Circus, Pomni tries every swear word that she can possibly think of. They're all censored.
• Digital Abomination: Overlapping with Transhuman Abomination, anyone that loses all their sanity and "abstracts" eventually turns into a violent mass of black ooze with multiple psychedelic rainbow eyes that causes everything it touches to glitch out, as made evident by Kaufmo and everyone else in the Cellar of the Circus.
• Disembodied Eyebrows: Everyone has these by default.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Several parallels are drawn between Kaufmo's situation and suicide. Ragatha justifies Caine's adventures as a way to avoid "something terrible from happening" and she is only later revealed to be talking about abstraction. After learning about what happened to Kaufmo, Zooble states that "[They] can't believe Kaufmo just gave up like that", and admits they thought Kinger would be the one to abstract next.
• Door Roulette:
  • While searching for Caine, Pomni opens several doors only to be hit by boxing gloves, stare into nothingness, or find something uncanny and/or disturbing on the other side.
  • Pomni later finds the elusive Exit Door, which leads her to a dimly lit room with another door, and another, and another. Each one takes her to a different but similarly dim room, including a larger one with a decrepit computer. The last one leads her into the Void before Caine retrieves her.
• Dysfunction Junction: No one seems to be fully sane in the circus. Pomni is a Nervous Wreck, Ragatha tries to help others and go along with Caine's adventures to cope, Gangle's depressed throughout the Pilot, Kinger... is Kinger, and Kaufmo has already gone insane and Abstracted into a monster before Pomni can meet him. Jax seems to be the most put-together, and even then he's a complete Jerkass.
• Eldritch Location: Two of them have been shown: The Void, a place one cannot go into, at least not without Caine's protection, without becoming catatonic and the cellar where Caine drops the abstracted into.
• Evolving Credits: It's implied the in-game title sequence changes according to who's currently playing, as Kaufmo has a cardboard cutout in his place when he doesn't show up for the roll call and Jax and Zooble state they don't want to redo the intro to account for newcomer Pomni.
• Extendo Boxing Glove: While searching for Caine, Pomni goes through several doors that causes a punching glove to hit her, twice.
• False Reassurance:
  • Caine gives one to Pomni in the teaser while she's objecting to his surprise Knife-Throwing Act.
    Caine: Don't worry, my dear! You won't even die horribly!
  • Downplayed in the pilot, which reveals that Caine created a false exit door because the inhabitants of the circus kept wanting one, but he didn't know what to put at the end and it just leads to the Void. Kaufmo's obsession with finding it eventually led him to "Abstract" and become a monster while Pomni starts going insane when she goes through it. Notably, however, Caine nervously tries to deflect when asked about the door's very existence, implying he realized it was a bad idea at some point.
• Fish Eyes: Several characters go wall-eyed when they space out or start going mad, especially Pomni, Caine and Kinger, and in the case of the latter two, it helps that they have floating eyeballs.
• Floating Limbs: Kinger only has two floating glove hands. He tries to grab Zooble's head to prevent them from being eaten, only for them to continue to be pulled away with two disembodied hands hanging on to them.
• Flyaway Shot: The pilot's last scene is a zoom out from within the circus, to the outside, to the void, leading to the front screen of a computer.
• Foreshadowing: In the pilot, Kaufmo is stated to have not shown up for the introductory song the players were recording that day. Ragatha later tells the newcomer Pomni that Caine tasks the group with various activities in the Circus to keep their minds healthy. If someone's mental state completely breaks down, something "terrible" can happen to them. They soon discover that he (Kaufmo) had abstracted and became a mindless beast while trapped in his room while supposedly trying to find a way to escape from the Circus.
• Four-Fingered Hands: Except for Ragatha (who has two opposable fingers plus a third big one), all characters with hands only have four fingers at each.
• Fourth Wall Psych: Jax seems to be looking at the viewer when he ridicules Pomni for still believing it's a dream, but he's actually looking at Ragatha.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • In the hallway, one can see the doors to the rooms of other residents whose pictures have been crossed out. What happens to Kaufmo implies they were all Abstracted and locked by Caine in the cellar. One of them is of a black queen chess piece that resembles Kinger, implying that they may have come together.
  • In "POMNI WAKE UP TIME TO GO ON AN ADVENTURE", after Caine says there will be "new colorful characters", the video quickly flashes through glimpses of several new characters.
• Genre Mashup: The show manages to combine Psychological Horror, Black Comedy, Slapstick, Horror Comedy, Surreal Humor, and Surreal Horror all into the format of a Zany Cartoon.
• Getting Eaten Is Harmless: Zooble is swallowed by the Gloink queen upon meeting her, which Jax shrugs off, saying they'll be fine. Indeed, the Queen promptly regurgitates them when Kaufmo lands on her, with Zooble no worse for wear.
• Hope Spot: Pomni finds the exit door she saw and goes through it, only to find out it's a fake exit comprised of many rooms leading to the Void. Caine claims that he made the exit door because everyone wanted an exit, but never finished it because he had trouble figuring out what to put on the other side.
• Human Pincushion: Pomni is turned into one during the teaser, with Caine throwing four knives into her body and head. Despite this, she remains alive.
• Inconvenient Summons: The teaser introduces Pomni posing as if she's about to bite into something like a sandwich, only to notice her food has vanished into thin air.
• Inside a Computer System: The titular setting is a VR world controlled by Caine, in which the rest of the cast is trapped.
• In the Dreaming Stage of Grief: Pomni initially tries to convince herself that she's dreaming, that she is trapped in a virtual reality game because she is unable to remove her headset, all to avoid being overwhelmed.
• Ironic Echo: The Sun's first line in "POMNI WAKE UP TIME TO GO ON AN ADVENTURE" is an ironic twist on the Moon's first line in the pilot.
  Moon: Hello, Caine. I love you.
  […]
  Sun: Hi, Caine! I'm gonna kill you!
• Jump Scare: "POMNI WAKE UP TIME TO GO ON AN ADVENTURE" starts with Pomni lying in bed and staring at the ceiling before Caine suddenly jumps out screaming at Pomni/the camera.
• Knife-Throwing Act: Caine puts Pomni through one against her will in the teaser. It ends with Pomni being made into a Human Pincushion.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Those who are trapped in the Digital Circus can't remember their past names, and thus either have to think of a new one or let a slot machine choose for them.
• "Last Supper" Steal: The ending feast is arranged suspiciously similar to The Last Supper, with Pomni in the Jesus spot. Though, this can only be a creative shot used to zoom into the center of the Sanity Slippage or the empty staring-turned manic grinning Pomni. However, some claim it to be another biblical reference that might have some meaning.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: While the Gloink Queen is boasting evilly about her desire to assimilate the world, Jax responds by commenting that the whole endeavor is "dumb and weird". The Queen falters a bit and tries to counter him by saying "Well, you're still watching it!", as if responding to the sentiments of a less-than-amused viewer of the pilot.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: The theme music peters out after Pomni accidentally knocks over Jax and Kinger, and causes Gangle to drop her mask.
• Level Ate: The Candy Canyon Kingdom is a land of candy, including its leader and her subordinates.
• Lodged Blade Removal: In Ragatha's character trailer, after she gets a cleaver lodged in her forehead, she pulls it out harmlessly.
• Logging onto the Fourth Wall: The Wacky Watch Parody Commercial features the shop's weblink, which redirects to the In-Universe Amazing Digital Circus game trailer filled with Ominous Visual Glitches.
• Magical Profanity Filter: Since the titular setting is for all ages, all swears in the simulation are bleeped out with wacky cartoon sound effects, as Pomni quickly discovers. This also applies to rude gestures, as shown when Zooble flips the bird.
• Moment of Weakness: When being chased by the Abstracted Kaufmo, Pomni sees the exit door she's been desperately seeking all pilot sitting right in front of her. Despite trying to find Caine to get help for the glitching Ragatha, the monstrous Kaufmo's presence, lack of hiding places, and Pomni's own temptation to leave ultimately push her to go through it to get away. Afterwards, once Caine resolves the issue due to Ragatha (painfully) crawling her way to him herself, Pomni and Ragatha have a visible awkward silence between them, Pomni not justifying her choice and Ragatha not confronting her about having to save herself in the end, but it's clear that Pomni knows her actions were largely motivated by a selfish choice regardless of the logic behind them.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The "Meet the Cast" video is a compilation of the funny character intros played to quirky, laid-back music. Then after the title card, it cuts to black where we hear a terrified Pomni screaming that she can't take a "headset" off.
  • At the beginning of the pilot, Caine introduces us to the Digital Circus and a whimsical intro tune starts playing. Barring Caine's mildly uncanny design, you could easily assume at that point that this is some kind of kids' show. Cue Pomni appearing, visibly confused, distraught and scared by the chaos unfurling all around her, and the happy-go-lucky vibe of the intro falls apart quicker than a house of cards in gale-force winds.
• Morton's Fork: Once you enter the Digital Circus, your three options are to suffer the torment of an Obliviously Evil A.I. ringleader, accept the fate of being trapped inside for all eternity, or become a beastly Digital Abomination upon going insane from being desperate to leave.
• Multiple Demographic Appeal: As Caine said "The Amazing Digital Circus is a place to be enjoyed by all ages!" and also by fans of different genres. The show is made for fans of Sci-Fi Horror and Psychological Horror due to its existential nature and inspiration from "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", fans of Zany Cartoons due to its bouncy nature, and its lack of swearing anything too explicit means that it does indeed mean viewers of any age can watch it.
• Musicalis Interruptus: Pomni enters the world in the middle of what is presumably the intro and roll call for the Amazing Digital Circus meant for whatever audience might be watching, and in her confusion she accidentally cuts it short by bumping into everyone.
• Narrative Profanity Filter: Because the show takes place in a digital location that is made for audiences of all ages, at least the majority of the cursing is censored. Pomni discovers this for herself when she tries to cuss, only to be cut off by a Sound-Effect Bleep. Later on, Zooble Flipping the Bird is censored in the same way.
• Ninja Prop: When Jax kicks the remaining kegel, a "Spare" pop-up appears on-screen, which he's annoyed by and breaks.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Jax trips Ragatha in his teaser and she falls to the ground, only to immediately walk into view from the left.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: One of the locales Caine snaps through in the teaser is a pool of black liquid in a dark chamber with an overhead light, multiple glowing eyes, and sinister ambient noise. A similar-looking (if not the same) ooze can be seen creeping through one of the doors at the end of a hallway. The pilot shows that this is the fate of those who lose their sanity completely and undergo abstraction, turning into mindless abstract beasts who Caine simply locks away when found.
• One-Eyed Shot: When Pomni ends up in The Void, she's momentarily stunned during the trip with a single shot of her eye appearing.
• Ontological Mystery: What is the Digital Circus and why is everyone trapped within it?
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: In-Universe. When (at the time, unnamed) Pomni is deciding her name after suffering Identity Amnesia, Caine goes on to list that her name must not include any "objectionable content".
  "Objectionable content includes, but is not limited to, sexually explicit materials, obscene, defamatory, libelous, slanderous, violent, and/or unlawful content or profanity."
• The Place: The show is titled after the Amazing Digital Circus itself, name-dropped by Caine at the start of the teaser.
• Production Foreshadowing: Pomni makes an appearance in this tweet from Glitch commemorating one million subscribers poking her head out of the bottom left corner.
  • She also makes a cameo in SMG4 in a brief summoning gag during The Very Safe and Legal SMG4 Show, with enough time to scream "OH NO NOT AGAIN" before being poofed out again.
• Production Throwback:
  • In a promotional tweet by Glitch for the series, Gangle is seen to have a dorcelessness mask hanging on her wall, referencing a previous work of Gooseworx's, "BLUE_CHANNEL: THALASIN".
  • In the pilot, after the Gloink Queen spits out Zooble's head, Kinger asks if they had experienced a game show while in there. Fellow Gooseworx shorts Elain the Bounty Hunter and Little Runmo featured game shows in the stomach of another character: the climax of Elain the Bounty Hunter had Elain swallowed whole by her target and then forced to participate in a game show while inside him, while Little Runmo had Runmo play a wheel-spinning game in the Temp King's stomach for the chance to win a 1-up.
• Rattling Off Legal: Caine, as he asks Pomni to choose a name, stops to spout off the following in about seven seconds:
  Hereby acknowledging that your chosen name and/or names may not breach the Digital Circus user license agreement stating that your name may not include objectionable content. Objectionable content includes, but is not limited to: sexually explicit materials, obscene, defamatory, libelous, slanderous, and/or unlawful content, or profanity.
• Retraux:
  • The promotional images released by Glitch are intentionally made to resemble a nineties point-and-click game.
  • The beginning of the pilot is framed like the startup of an old nineties PC game, where there are black bars on the side of the video, as if the game was made for a 4:3 aspect ratio, rendered at a low resolution. The grass textures have a low polygon count, the logo appears to be made with colorful blocky 3D text, along with the title appearing at a capped frame rate. When the pilot properly starts, it zooms in, fades out the retro textures, and has the black bars disappear as the video adjusts to a 16:9 aspect ratio. The Main Theme preview video starts almost the exact same way, though with three blocks of options and custom glove cursor like it was an older PC game.
• Rock–Paper–Scissors: Upon seeing Zooble in trouble, Kinger and Gangle play rock-paper-scissors to decide who rescues them. Gangle loses due to her lack of fingers... something Kinger needs time to realize.
• Room Full of Crazy: Once Jax opens Kaufmo's room, they find it entirely scribbled with the word "EXIT," along with demented paintings and drawings that have him realize there is no exit. Alongside the others mentioning Kaufmo losing his sanity some time before the events of the pilot, this punctuates how he far he fell and eventually Abstracted.
• Sad Clown: Kaufmo cracks jokes all the time. It's implied that the other characters no longer laughing at his jokes led in part to his Abstraction.
• Sanity Slippage: Omnipresent among the non-NPC cast. Kinger seems to be the most far gone, with Pomni following close behind, the latter both while desperately trying to find a way out, and coming to the realization that her current dilemma may not be a dream after all and there is no way out. Kaufmo has lost it completely and has turned into an abstraction.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Kaufmo is implied to have been dormant in his room prior to Jax opening the door, because the rooms are seemingly soundproof^note Kaufmo didn't react to the players' presence until his door was opened, and none of them were able to hear his abstracted noises before it was open. and an abstraction doesn't have the hands or brainpower to open a door.
• Self-Deprecation: Jax and the Gloink Queen's Leaning on the Fourth Wall joke starts with Jax saying "This is dumb and weird". While In-Universe he's talking about her evil plan, the Queen's reaction ("Well... but... yet, you're still watching it!") makes it sound like he's talking about the surreal plot of the pilot itself.
• Self-Referential Humor: In typical GLITCH Productions fashion, there is a lot of this in the show. In the pilot, Jax laughs about Pomni thinking it's just a dream and gives an Aside Glance, before the camera zooms out to Ragatha wondering why he's staring at her.
• She's a Man in Japan: In the original, Zooble has an Ambiguous Gender, but in the Russian dub is referred to with words that explicitly label them as female.
• Shout-Out:
  • After Pomni goes through several exit doors, she eventually finds herself in The Void, which she stares into. While she travels through it, it is framed and animated similarly to the famous Stargate scene from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, complete with Extreme Close-Up shots, dramatic music, and lights passing by her.
  • Kaufmo is named after Andy Kaufman — early concept work even calls him "Kaufman".
  • Kaufmo's visual design also makes him a dead ringer for Koko the Clown.
  • Ragatha's glitched-out face plays Pong at one point.
  • Pomni's colour scheme, spindly body, and hat evokes NiGHTS into Dreams…. Her situation is more-or-less an inverse of Nights' situation: instead of freeing dreamers trapped in nightmares so they wake up, she's the dreamer desperately trying to wake up from a nightmare.
  • The scene with the multiple exit doors was inspired by the The Stanley Parable as it was confirmed by Gooseworx that the game was an inspiration for her work.
  • Abstraction works almost identically to Hollowing.
  • While explaining the "Gather the Gloinks" adventure, Caine proclaims, "The entire circus tent will be infested with Gloinks, and you gotta catch 'em all!"
  • One of GLITCH Productions' images posted as extra material for the series depicts four edited screenshots out of The Powerpuff Girls (1998)'s intro sequence putting Caine in Professor Utonium's place.
  • A quick scene previewed in UP NEXT ON THE AMAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS... shows an alligator-like NPC dodging gunfire by performing Pizza Tower-like taunts, with the white flash behind the character and the ability to negate damage if timed well extremely similar to that game.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • A dramatic orchestral version of the main theme plays at the end of the pilot, while the scene is displaying Pomni's Sanity Slippage as she gradually comes to terms with her situation, and the scene ominously zooms out to the computer connected to the digital world.
  • In the main theme song video, the cheery circus music plays as Pomni fidgets, looks uncomfortable, loses it, and curls up into a Troubled Fetal Position.
• Stylistic Suck: The animation sometimes features clipping issues and odd, jerky animation, alluding to how the setting of the show is a digital world.
• Subverted Kids' Show: The show's aesthetic resembles that of an old children's CD-ROM game, but it's a Psychological Horror story about human minds being trapped inside a superficially-friendly environment. Even In-Universe, characters aren't capable of doing or saying anything particularly obscene.
• Surreal Humor: Is described in the announcement trailer as a "surreal dark comedy", and it certainly looks the part. For starters, Caine is a set of eyeballs inside a disembodied jaw floating above a ringleader's outfit.
• Sympathetic Wince: When Pomni vomits from disorientation, a few of the other players can be seen reacting in the background — Ragatha and Jax wince, and Zooble shakes their head.
• Take That!: When Caine plugs official merch in "POMNI WAKE UP TIME TO GO ON AN ADVENTURE", he says anything not from digitalcircus.store is a "dirty bootleg" with a split-second frame showing a bunch of unofficial plushies of the cast.
• Teleportation Sickness: Pomni pukes all over the floor after experiencing Caine's teleportation one too many times.
  Caine: Whoa! Clean up on aisle you!
• Tempting Fate:
  • Before introducing the challenge for the day in the pilot, Caine reassures Zooble that the challenge will be easy to not get involved with should they opt out. The challenge in question involves an infestation of Gloinks who end up tearing Zooble apart and kidnapping them.
  • Pomni asks Ragatha what the point of Caine's "adventures" even are, when they are by all means optional. Ragatha explains that if nothing else they provide a nice distraction from the reality of their current situation, so engaging with them is a pretty good way to stay sane. She goes on to forebodingly explain the importance of trying to keep your sanity in the Digital Circus, because something really terrible can happen to you if you don't, before nervously trying to laugh it off and add that luckily, they are not going to have deal with that today. That's right before the group visits Kaufmo's room, and discovers that the "terrible" thing Ragatha just spoke of has happened to him.
• Theme Tune Roll Call: In the pilot, the implied intro for the titular computer game starts with a roll call of the members of the circus at that moment. When Pomni suddenly appears mid-sequence, Jax breaks character and tells Caine that he doesn't want to redo the entire theme song to account for her.
  There's Gangle and Zooble and Kinger too,
  Ragatha, Jax, and there's Kaufmo, whoo-hoo!
  Day after day after day after day after day we fly.
  Past the Moon and the Sun and we don't know why!
• Thousand-Yard Stare:
  • At the end of the teaser, Pomni is staring off in random directions, shaking in pain after being turned into a Human Pincushion by Caine.
  • Pomni performs a more conventional example after being literally taken from the Void by Caine and back into the circus in the pilot episode.
• Trailers Always Spoil: Several of the countdown images leading in to the pilot's release show Pomni going through a series of red doors, one of which leads to an office filled with monitors showing Caine's face. Pomni travelling through said doors makes up the climax of the pilot, the rooms they're connected to resemble rooms in an old-school office, and they are part of the fake "exit" Caine developed.
• Trapped in Another World: The basic premise of the series is that Pomni and the others have been transported into some kind of digitized plane by a mysterious headset and have had all memories of their previous identities erased. Lampshaded by the song that plays over Pomni's introduction in the Pilot, which is cheekily titled "Get Isekai'd!".
• Troubled Fetal Position: At the end of the main theme song video, Pomni goes insane, curls up on the floor, and starts rocking back and forth.
• Truck Driver's Gear Change: Near the end of the full theme song, the key shifts upward, giving it a slightly manic edge that complements Pomni's mental breakdown at the end of the video.
• Understatement: In "POMNI WAKE UP TIME TO GO ON AN ADVENTURE", Caine claims that The Amazing Digital Circus will become a full series because the video for the pilot reached their goal of "1 view". The pilot's video had reached over 270 million views by the time "POMNI WAKE UP" was released.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: In a desperate attempt to escape, Pomni enters an exit door that appears in front of her, that takes her to an eerie office area that loops endlessly whenever she passes by a new door.
• The Unpronounceable: Apparently Caine chooses the new names of the souls coming to his circus with the help of a giant slot machine. He pulls the lever and the machine gives him the result "Xddcc"... but, since he has trouble pronouncing it, even contorting his teeth in the process, he spins the machine again. This time the word can be pronounced, so the newcomer receives a proper name — Pomni.
• The Un-Smile: At the end of the pilot, Pomni starts to crack a wide, manic grin during a digital feast after nearly going mad while running through the fake exit door.
• Visual Pun: During the intro, when Caine informs the viewer that what they're about to see will be "jaw-dropping" (Caine's lower set of teeth fall off his head), "heart-stopping" (a disembodied heart speeds towards Caine and he commands it to halt), and "mind-bending" (Caine twists a disembodied brain into a spiral).
• Void Between the Worlds: Outside of the Circus proper is the Grounds. Outside of the Grounds is the Void, an empty expanse of digital space. Pomni ends up there after going through the exit door because Caine hadn't finished designing what was behind it.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: After being teleported around by Caine on a tour of the Digital Circus, Pomni feels dizzy and vomits onto the floor in full view of the camera.
• We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: Right after the start of Caine and Pomni's Knife-Throwing Act in the teaser, it cuts to a screen card reading "PLEASE STAND BY" with drawings of their faces and other circus props, with Pomni screaming in fear and confusion off-screen as Caine assures her she won't die horribly. When the screen cuts back, the act is over and Pomni is a quivering, traumatized wreck with knives sticking out of her.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Before he can actually make an appearance onscreen, Kaufmo has been driven insane and Abstracted into a monster.
• Wham Line: When Ragatha asks Kinger if he wants to join her, Jax and Pomni in checking up on Kaufmo, Kinger both utters one and immediately hangs a lampshade on it...
  Kinger: I think Kaufmo's gone insane. Last time I spoke with him, he was rambling endlessly about some... exit. (beat) Kind of like you, Pomni! You might be going insane too!
• Wham Shot:
  • Jax unlocking and opening Kaufmo's door to find the clown's room is entirely scribbled with the word "EXIT", along with the clown himself having "Abstracted", turning into a towering, glitchy abomination covered in eyes.
  • While Pomni is lost in a maze of Exit Doors, she finds an old computer in one of the rooms, along with a VR headset. The last shot of the pilot episode shows a cleaner version of the computer and headset, active but no one at the controls. With how she reacts in the maze, nearly going insane as she tries to escape, it implies that she ended up in the Digital Circus through her computer and may explain why she is unable to "remove her headset" earlier.
• Win to Exit: Played for drama. Pomni, and the other avatars prior to her arrival, struggle to find a way to summon an exit and escape the game. In most works, it would feature those trapped in the digital world coming together to escape by learning and exploiting the mechanics of the world, ala Sword Art Online. That is decidedly not what happens here, because there really is no escape, owed to the fact that an escape was never programmed into the game. As it turns out, if someone wants to trap someone in a digital world, there is zero reason to program an escape in the first place. Not only that, but any mechanics are incredibly simplistic or ill-defined due to being intended for a young audience, leading to the characters being powerless against the general dangers of the world. The protagonist rallying everyone to come together against the master of this world? Good luck with that when everyone has resigned themselves to their fate and considers it impossible. The protagonist isn't an All-Loving Hero; she's a scared girl who desperately wants to escape her horrible situation and, at the first chance, will abandon everyone if it means she can leave this awful world, because that's what most humans put in this situation would do.
• Wingding Eyes: Pomni's eyes occasionally become scribbles when she's extremely distressed, or spinning spirals when she vomits from disorientation.
• World of Jerkass: Glitch's official website describes the show as "What if it was Toy Story, but everyone was a jerk?" Played With in the pilot. None of the characters go out of their way to be intentionally mean, barring Jax, at worse they're Obliviously Evil (Caine), grouchy (Zooble), utterly neurotic to the point of being barely functional (Kinger), cripplingly depressed or meek (Gangle), or scared out of their mind (Pomni). Beyond that they all seem fairly decent, as much as they can be.

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