Sometimes I watch a little more Youtube than I should. My algorithm consists mostly of video essays on the economy, tournament footage, and random gaming clips. Well one day I was whiling the hours away watching a bit of nonsense, and the algorithm recommended the pilot to a new cartoon series. The Amazing Digital Circus. I did a cursory search and discovered this random pilot is the start of a mega-successful series with a massive fanbase, all based on an old sci-fi horror called I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

This week the finale was released and I binged the entire back half of the series in one night. It’s a fun and tense series for teens and young adults that was well worth the watch. But the thing that caught my eye was how Glitch Productions blurred the line between new episodes, new merch, and marketing.

Plot

The Amazing Digital Circus tells the story of a group of unfortunates trapped inside an old 1990’s videogame. No one remembers their name, and everyone has taken on the form of an avatar appropriate for the circus atmosphere of the game. Kinger is a king chess piece, Jax is a prankster rabbit, and the protagonist Pomni is a sad little jester with very expressive eyes.

Running the world is an AI named Caine. Caine has godlike power in the simulation and a primary mission of keeping his trapped human guests engaged with his various adventures. If you’re familiar with the original Harlan Ellison story there may be some alarms going off in your head here. Thankfully instead of behaving like the malevolent AM of the original story, Caine brings an energy that’s a mix of circus barker and the Genie from Disney’s Aladdin (best captured during his show-stopping song in the eight episode).

Caine’s adventures inevitably go off the tracks in a dangerous and psychologically tormenting direction, and the plot of the show focuses on its human cast’s efforts to endure Caine’s accidental tortures while seeking a way out of their digital prison. It might sound like a horrific story, but the cartoony characters, comedic tone, and wacky settings take most of the edge off the physical horror, leaving only the existential.

An Exploration of Psychological Conditions

Since death is off the table, the worst-case scenario for our band of plucky characters is called ‘abstraction’. Years spent trapped in a simulation take their toll. If a character loses their grip on reality too much, they ‘abstract’, which means turning into a horrible monster that Caine makes sure to store permanently in the basement.

Keeping each other sane and healthy becomes the day-to-day focus of our characters. Each character has to fight their own inner-demons. To add insult to injury, the avatars in the game are specifically designed as physical representation of each person’s psychological struggles. Gangle carries a collection of masks and can only express the emotion on the mask she wears. Zooble’s body is an assortment of components she can mix and match, representing her own body dysmorphia. Ragatha is a raggedy ann doll that’s desperate for other’s approval. As the series goes on, we see each character’s deal with their own psychological turmoil. As you can imagine, there’s a heavy theme of self-acceptance that runs through the story.

Marketing Blurring Into Story

The entire series of The Amazing Digital Circus (TADS) was released directly to Youtube, rather than through some streaming service. From an accessibility standpoint, this allowed the show to reach a massive teen and young adult audience. From a financial standpoint, this meant Glitch Productions had to get creative.

If you’ve already seen every episode of TADS, you’ve actually only seen about 75% of the content related to the story. When a company advertises their upcoming episode, it’s a cut up of clips from the episode. Not here. Every preview TADS is entirely unique content. The AI Caine speaks directly to the audience, and often reveals elements of his character that weren’t visible inside the story.

One particularly meta moment comes when Caine advertises the series by practicing knife throwing on poor Pomni. Then in one of the later episodes, Pomni is blinked out of existence while eating a sandwich, and when she returns, she has a bunch of knives sticking into her jester avatar. The commercials are literally canon to the series.

But it doesn’t just extend to previews. Merchandising is a key element of funding TADS, so one of Caine’s favorite gimmicks in the youtube shorts is to punish his players by taking their avatars and turning them into the plushies that are sold online and forcing them to sing songs or engage in various harrowing challenges. After watching the whole series, the best thing to do is go to Glitch Production’s Youtube channel and watch all the advertisements. They even hid some key lore related to one of the ‘abstracted’ characters that isn’t present in the main series while advertising pins and plushies.

Conclusion

The story is a great modernizing of a sci-fi classic with modern, psychological sensibility. But the greatest innovation of this series comes in the marketing. Glitch Productions didn’t just make a great story, it produced an online experience. The voice actors are regularly invited to play games with one another online, they’re brought out to cons, the fanbase is constantly speculating on tiny aspects of the lore, they even got the finale into theaters (with a sing-a-long of Caine’s song that you can see online).

We’re getting to a place in the modern age where tv advertising and big posters aren’t the way to get butts in seats. Rather than following the cinema model, Glitch Productions followed the model set by the game series Five Nights at Freddy’s. Make a ton of content, add enough deep lore to get the fanbase buzzing, and produce tiers of content. The end result is that no matter what kind of fan you are, you’ll always leave satiated.