What Is The Online Series 'The Amazing Digital Circus'?
Image Source: Glitchprod
One of the great things about the internet is that we can see creations that we never would be able to see otherwise. There are stories we can read, limitless information to learn, and art that we can consume all at our fingertips. One part of that is we’re able to see video creations outside of big studios, especially on places like YouTube, which has a large animation community. Enter The Amazing Digital Circus.
Released on October 13th, 2023, by Australian studio Glitch and created by animator Gooseworks, it instantly became a massive success, becoming one of the most watched animation pilots in YouTube’s history, amassing over 150 million views in the first month, with it sitting at over 356 million at the time of this writing. The pilot even got a Film Theory less than a month after its initial release. The two subsequent episodes were also major successes.
So a few people like it, is what I’m getting at.
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The show follows a woman who puts on a VR headset and gets trapped in the eponymous Circus. There, she meets several other people who have met the same fate, such as Jax, an irritable, snarky, sarcastic rabbit character, Ragatha, a kind Raggedy Ann-esque doll, Gangle, who has a body of red ribbons topped with an interchangeable comedy or tragedy mask, Zooble, a mishmash of interchangeable parts, Kinger, an insane white king chess piece, and Caine, the AI that runs the circus, whose head is a pair of eyeballs inside of a set of teeth. The woman can’t remember her name, so Caine renames her Pomni.
Image Source: X
Pomni soon wants to escape from the Circus, but the rest assure her that there is no way out, even though she keeps seeing a door marked “exit.” She hears that another character, a clown named Kaufmo, was talking about the door and rushes off to see him with Jax and Ragatha while Caine begins the daily “adventures” he creates to amuse and give meaning to the people in the Circus, with that day’s being “gather the Gloinks” which are a group of shapes with eyeballs that grab everything in sight. When Pomni, Jax, and Ragatha reach Kaufmo’s room, they see that he has “abstracted”, which means that he’s turned into a giant black monster with many eyes. She runs off to find Caine but finds the exit door again and goes through, eventually finding something, but it turns out not to be what she expected.
As of this writing, there are only three episodes of the planned nine-episode season, with the show planning to end after the ninth one. Creator Gooseworks has said that she doesn’t think there could be a second season and that the show works best as a limited series. Full control and high quality have always been of the most importance to the creators. At first, the series was only on YouTube, but they struck a deal with Netflix, and the episodes now come out on the streaming giant the day after their YouTube release. However, one of the conditions was that they would retain full creative control of the series, so it looks like Netflix is just hosting the show.
Image Source: NewonNetflix
It seems a bit redundant, but they probably get paid to have it on there, so good for them if that’s the case.
The show has a ton of merchandise, both legitimate and bootleg. If you want legitimate merchandise, you have to go to the official store website. Everything else is, as Caine put it in one of the side videos, “dirty bootleg and won’t support the show.” This has not stopped people from creating whatever they want, as you can imagine.
We don’t know exactly when the fourth episode will come out, but given the length of time between episodes (about five months), it will probably be a while. Until then, we have three episodes, a few side shorts, and an overall smashing success. If you haven’t seen the show yet, definitely give it a watch. It’s well worth it.
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