Workin' Boys is a half-hour short film from Team StarKid, set in their Hatchetfield Horror Comedy anthology setting.
In The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, eccentric biology professor Henry Hidgens reveals that he's always wished to develop Workin' Boys, a musical he wrote about a blatant self-insert and his six college chums hanging out on a football field and reminiscing about their college days, and entertains a captive audience with the show's title number.
StarKid fans began clamoring to see the real Workin' Boys, which left the Lang Brothers a bit stumped, as they had deliberately engineered it to be the worst possible idea for a musical. The solution, a short film about Professor Hidgens attempting to make a production of his show, was included as a stretch goal on the Kickstarter that funded Black Friday and StarKid Homecoming. The film was in pre-production when the COVID-19 Pandemic hit in early 2020.
In 2023, a week before the public release of Nerdy Prudes Must Die, StarKid revealed that they had in fact filmed the short on the down-low, and that it would premiere on the same day as Nerdy Prudes. On Friday the 13th of October 2023, the short was made available to backers of the aforementioned Kickstarter, and temporarily to all those who paid to see the Hatchetfield Halloween livestream that evening.
It can be found here
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Workin' Boys contains examples of the following tropes:
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: Hidgens goes insane, slaughters his entire cast and is shot dead while trying to take the audience hostage to watch his one-man show.
- Executive Meddling: In-universe. The Starlight Theatre is willing to produce Workin' Boys, but only if he changes the all-male cast to be all-female instead.
- Gender Flip: Hidgens grudgingly accepts turning his show into Workin' Girls, a gender-flipped version.
- The Ghost: Chad does not appear in the short,
for he is too idealized in Hidgens's mind for any actor to do him justice. For seemingly the same reason, there doesn't appear to be any onstage depiction of Chad in the Show Within a Show either. - Insistent Terminology: The one concession Hidgens makes to changing the genders of all of his characters is that every instance of the word "football" is changed to "football, but for girls". Every. Single. Instance.
- The Lad-ette: Hidgens changes the genders of the characters and absolutely nothing else, so they're a bunch of old sorority sisters who spend their spare time throwing a football around and catcalling at men.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The Workin' Boys may have returned as revenants to persuade Hidgens to take revenge for his script being butchered, or he might just be losing his grip on sanity.
- Multiple Gunshot Death: Hidgens takes two bullets from Grace standing up and has to have the entire gun emptied into him before he dies.
- Prima Donna Director: In directing his show, Professor Hidgens refuses to accept any feedback, verbally eviscerates everyone's performances, and after a month of rehearsal, his speech to his actors on opening night is a scathing declaration that he will never forgive them for butchering his material. Then he massacres the entire cast for not doing his script justice and turns it into a one-man show which he forces the audience to watch at gunpoint.
- Sanity Slippage: Hidgens starts to lose it after seeing the performance of Workin' Boys and realizing that the audience think it's a comedy and goes completely off the deep end after possibly being visited by the spirits of his dead friends, spurring him to massacre the cast and do the show himself with the audience held at gunpoint.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Ted Spankoffski tries this after Hidgens murders the entire cast and takes over the performance himself. It gets him shot by Hidgens.
- Who's on First?: When Ruth sees the audience for the first time, she has an attack of Performance Anxiety and forgets her line. Zoey tries to help her by repeatedly whispering her line to her — unfortunately, Ruth's line is "Excuse me, who are you?", which just upsets Ruth more as it makes her think Zoey has forgotten her.
