YMMV / Nightmare Time S1E1 "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man and Watcher World"

The Hatchetfield Ape-Man

• Adorkable: Lucy and Konk's Falling-in-Love Montage is this in spades, owing a lot to Joey Richter's goofy facial expressions and Angela Giarratana's unfalteringly earnest Ingenue act.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Yes, Rule 34 of Bigfoot exists in Real Life, and was a big enough deal to become an issue in a 2018 congressional election.
  • The line "He'll rip off your face" in the Title Theme Tune of "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man" and the singer's comically aghast reaction to it is a reference to a famous news story from 2009 about a chimpanzee who did exactly that to a friend of its owner, who became the third person in the United States to receive a face transplant (in a minor bit of synchronicity, the chimp apparently attacked the woman because she picked up his favorite toy, a Tickle-Me Elmo).
• Crack Pairing: Even though it ends tragically, the fact that Hidgens and Ted start out in cahoots in this story was a big shot in the arm for "Tedgens" shippers.
• I Knew It!: A lot of fans initially guessed that the Plot Twist in this episode would be that Konk was really the Homeless Man being paid to impersonate an Ape-Man by Prof. Hidgens. While they were right about Konk being a human, none of them seriously guessed he'd be Ted. Then came Episode 2 and the story "Time Bastard", with the even bigger twist that they were Right for the Wrong Reasons because the Homeless Man is also Ted.
• It Was His Sled: If you're spoiler-averse it's best to avoid any discussion of this episode online before seeing it... Because the Hatchetfield Ape-Man is a Con Man, and is none other than Paul's sleazeball coworker Ted from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Starkid knew their own fandom well, when they decided that the first episode of Nightmare Time would be a new adventure starring Robert Manion as Professor Hidgens.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Everyone pretty much expected the twist that the Ape-Man was in some sense really human, but not everyone was satisfied with the reveal that it was Ted pulling a con. A lot of fans still pull for the Wild Mass Guess in the live chat that went in the exact opposite direction — that "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man" is Ted's origin story. (i.e. that Konk eventually learned the human species' ways, turned out to be a "horny bastard" and a "sleazeball", and Lucy dumped him while Hidgens kept his word to place him in a new identity as Ted Spankoffski and agreed to never speak of it again.)
• Unexpected Character: Nobody expected the Ape-Man to actually turn out to be Ted.

Watcher World

• Alternative Character Interpretation: The discussion over whether Bill is actually a bad father or not was already extremely heated on the YMMV page of The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, and it got way more intense with the release of "Watcher World", especially now that we've gotten to know the real Alice directly and gotten to see her Bratty Teenage Daughter personality up close, warts and all. Is Bill's cluelessness and tendency to carelessly trample over Alice's feelings evidence of his own selfishness, and does it border on abuse? Or is Bill really trying and pouring his heart out — to a degree to which many neglected kids, like Lex Foster, might dream of in a parent — but Alice is so narcissistic she refuses to even try to meet him halfway? Is Alice right that she's the one who's suffered most from her parents' divorce and that they're shitty parents for letting their personal issues ruin her life — or is she just rubbing salt in her dad's wounds over something that obviously hurt him on a far deeper level than it hurt her? Or is trying to figure out which of them is "the asshole" in the relationship completely missing the point of what's supposed to be a portrait of the unavoidable mistakes and miscommunication in any parent/child generation gap relationship? The passion with which fans disagree on this issue — verging on Broken Base levels — partially speaks to how closely Alice's situation mirrors that of a lot of Starkid fans (who are disproportionately young, female, nerdy and queer), and everyone agrees that the intensity of the response reflects how successful Starkid were at making Bill and Alice feel like real, fully drawn characters.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Blinky's Watch Party musical numbers are an intentional example, tying into the overall Mind Screw around the Sniggles and Blinky.
  Alice: Okay, what are the Sniggles? Are they birds… or monsters? What am I watching and why is it so stupid?
• Creepy Cute: Blinky, in the same tradition as the Tickle-Me Wiggly.
• Crack Ship: The fact that Blinky and Wiggly seemed to be vaguely the same "species" and that Blinky is clearly some kind of Expy of Wiggly led the fandom to jokingly embrace the "Blinky/Wiggly" ship, with a lot of jokes about what it'd be like for two Eldritch Abominations to live together as roommates or to go out on a date. This then led to another tongue-in-cheek series of joke posts demanding everyone Abandon Shipping when "The Witch in the Web" revealed Blinky and Wiggly as "brothers", since the fandom draws a hard line against Incest Yay Shipping.
• Fan Nickname: The Sniggle played by Curt Mega is fairly important — he's the third Sniggle in the video for "The Blinky Song" — but is never given a name in the script. One popular Tumblr post — reblogged by Curt Mega himself — proposes calling him "Snurt".
• Growing the Beard: A lot of former critics who'd expressed mixed feelings about Starkid's first attempt at really getting serious with Black Friday had huge praise for "Watcher World", which deals with similar themes to Black Friday with much tighter and less Anvilicious writing, and sets a high bar for future stories.
• Memetic Mutation: People pointing out the parallel between the line "Praise the Watcher!" in this show and BuzzFeed Unsolved's "All hail the Watcher!" riff in their infamous "The Eerie Case of the Watcher" episode led to a few fans making memes and Fan Fiction of a Crossover imagining the Real Life hosts of Buzzfeed Unsolved investigating "The Eerie Case of Hatchetfield, Michigan".
• Special Effects Failure: There's some notable Green Screen fails in this episode, like James Tolbert's "transparent" bowtie (but see Throw It In! on the Trivia tab) and Mariah Rose Faith not having an actual green screen (or a uniform background behind her, as Zoom recommends when using the digital background feature) causing her arms to constantly "flicker out of existence" as she moves around. It happens to Corey Dorris too, notably when he's miming the "Test Your Strength" Game, with Zoom's algorithm hilariously deleting his head from his shoulders when his face goes out of frame.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "The Blinky Song" is one for "The Tickle-Me Wiggly Jingle" and "Snoozle Town" is one for "Black Friday", both from Black Friday. This seems to be intentional, with the former sung by the Sniggles and the latter sung by Angela Giarratana, and both of them mainly distinguishable by replacing most of the words with nonsense.
• Tough Act to Follow: It's almost unfortunate how "Watcher World" tops so many people's lists of favorite Nightmare Time episodes, considering it's available for free and all the subsequent stories in Season One were originally paywalled.
• Unexpected Character: The appearance of the Sniggles from Black Friday (introduced by an Announcer with a voice suspiciously similar to Uncle Wiley's) was a huge shock.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Nick Lang called out a comment from the live chat on this episode for Approval of God that jokingly ignored the Bill/Alice plot entirely and said the moral of the story is the Sniggles deserve a union.