Yellow Guy, one of the characters in the YouTube series. PHOTO COURTESY OF CREATIVE COMMONS
Kaitlyn Leister
Staff Writer
Those that were on the internet in the early 2010’s might remember a particular web series on YouTube by the name of “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.” It was a series set up like a children’s television show that would quickly turn into graphic images and nightmare inducing sequences before snapping back like nothing happened at the end.
To many, this show may still haunt their nightmares, even after the series ended in 2016 with the sixth and final episode. Then, the next year, it was announced that a TV show would be in production, something many people had not been aware of until the show was released in September of this year.
The three puppets, referred to as Red Guy, Duck, and Yellow Guy, have returned from their long hiatus to now haunt the world through Channel 4 streaming, though sadly this service only streams in the U.K. Audience members in other countries have just been making do with spoilers on social media or accessing through VPNs in order to continue watching a rather unforgettable series. Many are waiting to see what angle the creators Becky Sloan, Joe Pelling, and Baker Terry have taken the show in, and if the horror aspects still catch one as off-guard as the original did.
The six new episodes are titled as such, Jobs, Death, Family, Friendship, Transport, and Electricity. With the descriptions of such episodes telling very little of what the episode actually contains, playing with the theme that this is nothing more than an innocent children’s show, the crew of “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” has certainly grown from their time as an online web series.
Hearing of this made many rewatch the original haunting series still found on Youtube, and needing to sleep with a light on after the fact. Even so, many can attest their love of the series and theorize on the overall message of both the online show and television show. The innocence on the surface, then changing to something gruesome or made to make one stop watching and collect themselves before continuing is still a rather great creative design choice. Even after so many years, it still holds up as shown in the trailer for the television show of something being wrong, you just have to wait for it.
