WebVideo Weird and demented, but in a good way
Don't Hug Me I'm Scared started out as a single little video - three puppets that looked like something from Sesame Street who learned about creativity from psychopathic notepad. The video acts all nice and innocent at first, but then the moral becomes twisted when the notepad tells them things like "green is not a creative color". In the end, the entire video goes insane, creepy and weird. The rest of the series is like this. And I love everything about it.
> I love the puppet designs. While yellow guy was kind of weird in the first video, I still think these guys made a great job on them
> All videos have their "lessons" done in a song and they are all catchy. My favorites have to be 'Time' and 'Love'.
> The humor is pretty funny. Red guy's utter uninterest in anything, yellow guy's naiveté and teacher's Comedic Sociopathy and obsession with whatever the hell they are teaching always make me giggle. The songs themselves have their moments of So Bad, It's Good and the jokes come from places I seriously didn't expect them to. Yeah, some jokes are simple, weird and childish, and yet they work.
> Despite the series' infamy for starting innocent and ending with pure Nightmare Fuel, it doesn't scare watcher in the same way every video - first one ends with random insanity and craziness, that's unsettling and has some gore, but it's mostly just random crap popping up on screen. The second ends with "students" rotting alive. Third ends with yellow guy joining a cult. Fourth one hints at creepiness in middle of the video but doesn't go as far compared to those before it. Fifth one has visible organs and some unsettling Nothing Is Scarier horror. And sixth one is creepy from the start to finish. Also, the videos are more set on shocking the watcher rather than startling him - I don't remember any jumpscares from the series, at least not any obvious ones...
Generally, DHMIS is fun little series. It's weird, it's funny, it's demented, it's confusing, it's creepy, it's charming... and I just love watching them. It's definetly not for everyone, through, but as long as you want some smaller scares and you don't mind some weird humor, songs that won't ever, EVER leave you no matter how much you try to forget them and just some general weirdness, then you might enjoy this.
WebVideo Hi kids! Do you like violence?
As much as I'm writing this to get a grip to writing in English again, what drives me to this series is (or was) general intrigue about the subject.
So, what is this nostalgia-trip for generation z? It's essentially a series of six shorts, made public through Youtube, and each one of them talks about the fun! interesting! and most importantly, educating! adventures of three fellows: a red Chewbecca, a yellow Fortnite player (ah ah) and a green duck. Oh yeah, and it's a horror series, but I guess that's not important.
As much as this series is one of the greatest memes ever, even thanks to some genuinely funny moments, this is an obvious example of "fake innocence", which is then used to create full-on horror. Doki Doki before it was cool. Proto-Doki?
I could say that it's just shock value, and it kind of is, in the most technical way. But shock value is a tool, and just as every tool, it depends on how you use it: a technique that the creators love to use is buildup through sheer eeriness, like the use of the black color in the first short, the foreshadowing of the song in episode 6, the sudden repetitions in the song of the fourth one... the autotune in the fourth one. Yeah, I guess that wasn't the use that the creators envisioned for that tool, but I'm fine. That's what makes the shock so effective when it comes, as a natural ending of a progression of events more than it is a random change in the middle.
Obviously, it's a horror with layers... or maybe not. The main focus of the series isn't metaphor, as it is the way in which mass medias send us contradicting, and sometimes even wrong messages, and expressing the concept through the use of an educational show. Every subsequent interpretation is cool, but it kind of ignores the main focus, which is the distortion of the general concepts themselves in every episode (except the sixth one, which is... plot based, I think?).
So, I can't really give a precise rating to this. So, let's say that, as a horror product... it's probably one of the best things I've seen in a while. But why am I telling you? These videos have a whole lot of views, you've probably already seen it.
Best scene (to me): from episode one, everything that the Sketchbook says.
Best scene (to everybody else): the ending of episode two. Talk about a cool horror punchline...