Tag: AmazingDigitalCircus

Sunday Sunday: The Amazing Digital Circus, Episode 4

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Who, among everyone on the internet, is just finding out about the release of Episode 4 of the breakout Youtube hit The Amazing Digital Circus here? It’s already up to 44 million views.

I’ll embed it here, but before we get to that it’s worth noting how it got to this place. Its creator Gooseworx made a number of items before it, including one linked to directly from these halls, Little Runmo. A few other representative Worx from the Goose are The Darly Boxman Show, The Ghost of the Year Award and Elain the Bounty Hunter.

Not too long ago Gooseworx joined up with Glitch Productions, a small outfit that hither-then had been known mostly for machinima based on Super Mario 64. Soon after they released the extremely popular show Murder Drones, but it was tADC that really caused them to blow up.

Now, tADC is released on Netflix around the same time it debuts on Youtube. I hope they didn’t have to sign some kind of demonic contract to do that; some folk have been treated badly by the Netflix regime. But the show is still on Youtube and can be watched there, if you can put up with their horrendous advertising scheme, that is.

Several characters show heretofore unseen sides of their personalities in this one. Up until now Gangle has only been a bit character; usually-helpful Ragatha spends most of the episode in a Stupid Sauce stupor; and Jax, under the prospect of punishment, doesn’t get to be nearly as entertainingly belligerent as in the past. It also sees the return of Gummigoo, but is it really the same person as Pomni remembers?

Gooseworx has a Tumblr, which is full of hints about the show and the direction it may take. One piece of information revealed there is that The Amazing Digital Circus is planned to be a limited series, with a total of nine episodes, although with some possible short detours along the way. The show has turned out to be popular in Japan, and there’s a manga adaptation of it being web-published. I’ll leave it to you to find links to that (there’s fan translations out there too), but one fun page from it, from the issue-end artist created content, is this festive/creepy Abstracted Kaufmo christmas tree!

Sundry Sunday: The Amazing Digital Circus, Episodes 1-3

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

We try here to introduce people to things they may not have seen. This means having a certain mental model of our audience, a guess of what you have and haven’t seen before. And since you’re a bunch of people, a clowder of individuals, even the best guess I make could be wrong for many of you.

(Clowder is a term for a group of cats, not people, but it seemed appropriate in this case. Meow.)

I’d expect that today’s presentation is already known to some of you, it’s very popular on Youtube, with the pilot, from a year ago, having racked up a third of a billion views. But if I asked a random person on the street, “Hey, isn’t the Amazing Digital Circus great?” I’d get blank looks. But then, here in the US, I think certain political choices are beyond obvious, yet I personally know people who choose otherwise. We all have our intellectual ruts.

Let’s not veer too far from the subject. It should be enough to say that even very popular internet things may not be known to those who are not “very online.” So it is with the Amazing Digital Circus. Created by Gooseworx, who also created the animation Little Runmo (previously here, and again in playable game form), The Amazing Digital Circus is about human characters who get transported into a digital reality and are left stranded there. While it’s not explicitly a game, we do consider all forms of electronic entertainment within our sphere of discussion, and the A.D.C. is very game-like.

At first, the Amazing Digital Circus looks like it’s a crazy-fun kind of cartoon, but it doesn’t take long for the lore to set in, and reveal that there’s a lot more going on than there may seem at first. In the Circus, the humans have a whimsical representation that they didn’t choose, and none of them are much pleased to be stuck there. The circus is overseen by a ringmaster, Caine, who has godlike powers. Caine is an interesting figure, he creates adventure situations for the humans to overcome, and is antagonistic, but isn’t a evil figure. He’s not responsible for the humans being in there or stuck there. Humans in the Circus who give in to despair tend to become abstracted, becoming big and mindless glitchy eyeball monsters, so Caine tries to give the surviving humans things to do to preserve their sanity, even though he’s not really all that sane himself.

The main character though is Pomni, the Circus’ newest inhabitant, and the least content with her predicament. Will she find a way out, or will she eventually manage to make peace with being trapped in the Circus’s virtual world? My own theory is that the human characters aren’t really humans, but copies of humans, that think they’re the originals, so it doesn’t really make sense to “escape” the Circus. But that’s just a guess, and a really big guess at that. Let’s see where it goes.

So far, there are three episodes, each about 25 minutes long, so set a little time for each one.

The pilot is episode one, where Pomni enters the Circus and we meet the other characters:

Episode two is Candy Carrier Chaos, which focuses on an “NPC,” a character who isn’t a human:

Episode three, just a couple of days old as of this post, is The Mystery of Mildenhall Manor, which reveals some off the backstory of one of the human characters, Kinger: