Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is suddenly back in wonderful, chaotic form
If you, like me, were terminally online around the early 2010s, you probably know, love, and have sorely missed Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.
Co-created by animators Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling, the six-episode web series set a fire across the Internet when it was released on YouTube between 2011 and 2015, with a unique blend of puppet-based antics and Lynchian shock humor. The animated shorts have since amassed over 216 million collective views on YouTube and inspired everything from elaborate fan theories involving Serbian war criminals to a small clothing line. Now, over six years since the last short, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared has finally returned as a half-hour television series, and it’s like the show never left.
The series centers on a trio of strange, colorful characters — a tall man in a red morphsuit with two beady eyes atop a mop-top of scraggly hair named “Red Guy,” a yellow man-boy with a tuft of blue hair in blue overalls named “Yellow Guy,” and a talking green duck in a gray jacket named… “Duck.” This eclectic group reluctantly goes on adventures when they’d rather just sit around their house instead.
These adventures typically revolve around a fourth-wall-breaking music number sung by a talking inanimate object, like a notepad or a refrigerator, about an ostensibly educational topic (e.g., creativity, healthy eating, dreams) before inevitably collapsing into a psychedelic death spiral of body horror and unremitting ennui. It’s a lot of fun. In a lot of ways, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared could be described as the demented British half-cousin of Sesame Street and the heir apparent to Wonder Showzen, albeit less politically charged than the latter and more focused on taking a sledgehammer to the standard of
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