by Toussaint Egan

In late February, Dropout CEO Sam Reich announced via social media that the Los Angeles-based streaming service had acquired the rights to Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, both the original online short series and the six episode TV series which heretofore never aired in the United States. As someone who had the opportunity to review the sequel series when it premiered in 2022 for [REDACTED], I was over the moon at the news that one of the finest works of stop-motion comedy would finally get its long-awaited due outside of the United Kingdom.

Created by animators Becky Sloan, Joe Pelling, and Baker Terry, the puppet comedy horror series burst forth into the world as a YouTube short in 2011, following an episode in the lives of three anthropomorphic puppets named Yellow Guy, Duck, and Red Guy as they learn a hard lesson about the nature and limits of "creativity." Produced in Sloan, Pelling, and Terry's free time with no budget, the short proved a meteoric success, amassing viral popularity among animation enthusiastics and shock humor fans alike for its macabre satirical take on children's educational television.

A second episode, "Time," was produced in 2014, followed by four more produced between 2014 and 2016 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. Taken together, the DHMIS shorts exemplify some of the very best of what the 2010s era of animation, comedy, and the internet at large had to offer; a pure lightning in a bottle distillation of irreverent creativity and unhinged whimsicality punctuated with existential sobriety and goofy slapstick violence. After nearly four years, a television adaptation of the series was announced in July 2020, set to air on the British public broadcast Channel 4. And, after a brief delay in light of the death of Queen Elizabeth (what a bizarre sentence to write that is), Don't Hug Me I'm Scared finally premiered in September of 2022.

At its core, the half-hour TV series remains much the same as its web series predecessor: A horror-themed comedy show featuring puppetry, live action, 2D animation, CGI, and stop-motion animation. What sets the show apart, however, is the amount of attention paid to the dynamic between its three protagonists, wrestling with the larger question of why this particular trio of misfits even bother to hang out with one another, let alone live together and share a wallet, and wringing their odd throuple antics and spats for ripe humor.

"We realised that one of the things that we found intriguing about the shorts was their odd, intimate smallness," Joe Pelling said in an interview with Channel 4. "So that's one thing we've tried to retain with the half hour episodes, this kind of claustrophobia, this smallness and the central question hanging over the show. Where are we? Who are these guys and what's going on? Trying not to iron that out or explain it, that's part of the fun. That's something we kept in our heads when we were developing this."

Having rewatched it for the first time in years, the show has lost none of its anarchic charm and comedic vitality. From a hilarious misadventure exploring the banality of employment and a meditation on mortality to an Ari Aster-esque ode to the nature of family, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is a tremendously entertaining series for animation fans and black humor-loving sickos alike (I should know, I'm both). While there are currently no plans for a second season, Sloan, Pelling, and Terry have not dismissed the possibility of more self-funded content for DHMIS should the opportunity and inspiration to make them strike. Speaking as a longtime fan, I'm just as much down for more stories centered on Yellow Guy, Duck, and Red Guy as I am for whatever else the series' creators have in mind to attempt in the future. After all, there's no wrong way to be creative; that is unless, of course, you're using the color green.