Series / Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

There's three of us, just three of us, us three!

Duck: ♪ And every day's a new surprise! ♪
Yellow Guy: ♪ When you're learning with us guys! ♪
Red Guy: And we live in an actual nightMAAAAARRRE!!!

— "Friendship" Couch Gag

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is a British Horror Comedy TV series by Becky Sloan, Joe Pelling, and Baker Terry, adapted from the 2011 web series of the same name. Its first series aired on Channel 4's streaming service All 4 on September 23rd, 2022, and aired on Channel 4 from September 30th to October 14th.

Originally, the series was to be produced by Super Deluxe, Conaco, and Blink Industries. A pilot episode was produced from 2016 to 2018, titled "Wakey Wakey", and it premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The scope was expanded to an entire town called Clayhill, with a larger cast of supporting characters to match, which Becky analogized to South Park. However, the creators felt that it was too much of a thematic departure and contained topical references that could make it an Unintentional Period Piece; when the series was picked up by Channel 4, Becky, Joe, and Baker scrapped the pilot and went for a setting and storyline more in line with the original.

Much like the web series, the story follows three nameless puppets, referred to as Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck. Every episode features a new edutainment character, usually a talking object, that arrives to teach them a valuable life lesson about an important topic. But things inevitably take a turn for the worse and weirder, and they often find themselves trapped in a living nightmare. As the series goes on, some of them even begin to question just how real the world they're living in is.

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Tropes with their own pages:

• Foreshadowing

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The Channel 4 series contains examples of:

• Adaptational Jerkass:
  • Although none of the characters do much of anything bad in the original, Duck is certainly an example of this in the TV series. He's mean to Yellow Guy, used to bite him severely, kills a piece of bread and his clone without good reason, and casually mentions having forged documents that may have led to many deaths.
  • To a lesser extent, Red Guy also gets a bit of this. While in the web series his rude comments were fairly mild and were only ever directed towards the Teachers, in the show they're a lot harsher, and are often directed towards the other puppets as well.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Tony, Colin, and Lamp, three of the villains from the web series, have minor roles in the show, but all of them appear to be friends of the puppets in this version. This gets a possible justification in "Electricity", which hints that the versions from the web series were Killed Offscreen at some point and replaced with new versions with different personalities.
• Adaptational Wimp: In the web series, Teachers seemed to have total control over everything the puppets did during their lessons, and any attempt by the puppets to interfere with their plans tended to be swiftly and severely punished. In the TV series, while the Teachers are still Reality Warpers, they seem to be on slightly more even footing with the puppets. For example, in "Friendship", Duck Guy manages to kill Warren before he can take over Yellow Guy's subconscious, and in "Electricity", Electracey's lesson gets derailed when Duck Guy rips out her batteries, leaving her unable to speak coherently.
• Aerith and Bob: "Friendship" features a character named Warren. On the other hand, Yellow Guy's name is so long it takes Red Guy half a minute to type it out, and apparently includes a hyphen. And his maiden name was apparently "Rat Eyes." Keep in mind the computer they are typing on isn't a qwerty keyboard.
• Art Evolution: All the puppets were overhauled again for the TV series. Duck's head is rounder and his feathers a slightly lighter green instead of the black/green before, and Yellow Guy's body now has much more definition and a nice square shape compared to his previously slumpy appearance. Red Guy looks more like his original counterpart, the only change being his eyes, which have slightly longer eyelids connecting them to his skull instead of the perfect spheres from before.
• Art Shift:
  • In "Jobs," this takes place during Duck's "counseling" session in the elevator and is given an almost early-2000's Flash animation look.
  • In "Friendship," the segments inside Yellow Guy's mind are animated in colourful, claymation-esque CGI.
  • In "Transport", the Choo-Choo Man's song is done in a 2D animation style similar to the one used in episode 6 of the web series. Also, Yellow Guy has a dream that's done in stop motion.
• Asshole Victim: In "Family", Roy shows up while Lily & Todney's family are having dinner. It's implied he violently murders them to steal their chicken, but after their creepy behaviour including kidnapping Yellow Guy and stealing Red Guy's blood, one could say they definitely earned it.
• Audience? What Audience?:
  • In "Family" Duck announces that he found something in the attic, but he won't tell what it is at first, giving Red Guy three guesses to figure out what it is. When Red Guy gets it right on his second guess, "a packet of Chuddle Dollops," Duck insists that he still uses his third guess. Red Guy asks what the point would even be, since he has already guessed correctly, and Duck explains that "People are dying to know what your final guess would have been." A confused Yellow Guy asks "What 'people'?"
  • In "Friendship", when Warren first appears, he speaks to the audience- and we get a good view of what the puppets see, as if he’s talking to no one.
• Autotune: While previously used for Duck's voice in the web series, it's significantly toned down in the show. Notably, after Elec-Tracey's song in "Electricity", Duck is "charged" with electricity and his voice returns to how it sounded in the webseries for the rest of the episode.
• Bait-and-Switch: In "Friendship," after being annoyed to no end by Warren, Yellow Guy's "Shy Older Brother" excuses himself by saying he has to leave, breaks a window with his elbow... and then proceeds to slit his throat with a shard instead of jumping out.
• Bait-and-Switch Character Intro: In "Family," two characters enter the room with Lilly, Todney and Yellow Guy. The twins greet them as "Father" and "Brother". One naturally assumes the massive, paunchy, scowling, adult-sized figure with male pattern baldness is the father, right? Wrong! The tiny little fellow dressed as a schoolboy is! Yellow Guy lampshades this by yelling, "That one's the dad!?" when he finds out.
• Berserk Button:
  • In "Jobs", messing with his friends and brainwashing them appears to be Duck's. He ends up causing a huge accident upon realizing that none of the events going on are correct. To a lesser degree, his ego about his intelligence not being stroked.
  • In "Friendship," Duck loses it and snaps at Yellow Guy after he accidentally smashes their computer.
• Big Bad: The TV episode "Electricity" has the massive reveal of Lesley, a colorfully-dressed woman with stitches on her face who apparently controls the main characters' lives with a miniature version of their house... which she also lives inside. Or she might actually be trying to help them. It's all very unclear.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Yellow Guy brings Duck back from being "dead" by digging up his grave and smashing the talking coffin.
  • Yellow Guy's father shows up to rescue him from Lily & Todney's family. Subverted as he's apparently just there for the Grolton's Chicken bucket, though his violent attack still allows his son to get away.
• Bloodier and Gorier:
  • Yellow Guy getting his hand horrifically torn off in the machine in "Jobs", and the Briefcase throwing a coin into Duck's eye
  • In "Death", shortly after Duck declares himself dead some kind of bloodied internal organ falls out of him, then creates a blood-drenched hole in the floor, from whence cometh the Coffin. We also later see his legs rotting away, and his brain fall out when he decapitates his doppelganger.
  • In "Friendship", Yellow Guy's "shy older brother" construct violently slits his own throat and bleeds out, rather than listen to Warren's podcast.
• Body Horror: When Duck briefly lifts up Duncan's helmet in "Jobs", he sees Duncan's brain has its own mutilated, screaming head.
• Black Comedy: The series lapses into this, due to its graphic violence Surreal Horror and sometimes shock value.
• Breather Episode: The episode titled "Death," ironically. the episode has the least focus on horror elements in the series and instead puts a heavier emphasis on comedy even in the darker moments.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: In the episode "Death," a talking box of tissues at Duck's funeral offers Red Guy and Yellow Guy a sandwich, a tissue, and, lastly, a sandwich wrapped in a tissue.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • Towards the end of "Friends", the puppets talk about how everyone has a worm in their brain that tells them mean things. Yellow Guy's worm says that people don't like him because he's stupid, Red Guy's tells him that he doesn't have the right look to pull off denim, and Duck Guy's tells him that the documents he's forged have led to many deaths.
  • Also, the Couch Gag from the same episode:
  Duck Guy: And every day's a new surprise!
  Yellow Guy: When you're learning with us guys!
  Red Guy: And we live in an actual NIGHTMAAAAAAAAAARE!
• Butt-Monkey: Much like the web series, this is largely fulfilled by Yellow Guy.
  • In "Jobs" he gets aged 40 years and his hand torn off by machinery, then when everything goes back to "normal" afterward he quite clearly misses his wife and child.
  • In "Family" he's told his Dad doesn't count as a family, then Lily & Todney and their dad kidnap him to be their new Mum. He escapes when his own father shows up, but it wasn't a rescue; his father was just there for the fried chicken.
  • In "Transport", while riding in the car Duck gets videos, headphones and snacks; Yellow Guy gets an overflowing ashtray and a barf bag. He also falls out the car window at one point and gets run over by a car in his dream sequence.
  • Especially prominent in "Friendship". The other two get mad at him for forgetting the computer password and call him things that are bleeped out. He retreats into his subconscious, but then Warren the Worm shows up there and ruins everything.
  • Warren also takes on this role in "Friendship", with the three main characters extensively mocking his appearance.
• Central Theme:
  • 1 discusses Jobs and Employment
  • 2 focuses on Death
  • 3 is about Family
  • 4 discusses Friends
  • 5 focuses on Transportation
  • 6 starts off talking about Electricity. But like the web series before it quickly goes meta.
  • The series as a whole has "how not to teach something". It's widely speculated that the series is also about how the media conditions children to think in certain ways.
• Character Focus: "Jobs," while showing the events of all three characters, seems to focus the most on the Duck and his quest to find a job in the factory and be appreciated. He's even eventually the one to end everything and reset it all back to the beginning.
• Cheated Angle: Parodied with the Carehound's design in "Jobs". In his illustrated picture in the elevator, both his eyes are visible despite facing sideways, similar to the character designs of Peppa Pig. However, once Duck sees him in the flesh, it is revealed that he actually has four eyes in total, two on each side of his face
• Chekhov's Gun: In "Jobs", it's the first aid kit. When Red Guy asks if the workers have seen the Briefcase, one of them motions to it and Red Guy dismisses it as not the correct kind. Later on, it's opened in an emergency by Duck to reveal that it was the Briefcase the entire time, thus letting him continue his song and get them out of the factory.
• Comically Missing the Point: In "Death", Duck's gravestone is engraved with "David" — because Duck thought the point was to give his gravestone a name.
• Couch Gag: The semifinal verse of the theme song changes in every episode of the TV series.
• Crapsack World: As in the web videos, the TV show takes place in what is essentially one, with the familiar concept of the three puppet main characters being constantly tormented by life "lessons" delivered by (varyingly deranged) teachers while slowly unraveling the world around them, remaining essentially the same. The series does lighten up the austere setting a tad — and somewhat switches up the Surreal Horror and overwhelming darkness of the original for a notably more comedic and off-the-wall vibe — with more dialogue and assertiveness from the main characters, and the teachers generally being less deranged than those from the web series (as well as more prone to the aforementioned tormented puppets biting back). On the other hand, as seen in "Transport" (and to an extent, in "Electricity"), the true "world" that surrounds the characters is shown, much more straightforwardly, to be incredibly bleak, seemingly consisting of little more than abandoned junkyards and one (or more) ambiguously evil puppeteer that treats all the characters much like playthings.
• Creepy Family: Lily & Todney's family, and how. They live in a disgusting-smelling filthy apartment, serve tea that looks like diarrhea and their "family tree" is a literal talking tree they keep in a dark room, festooned with photos of their relatives, most of which have been ominously crossed out. The tree also apparently feeds on the blood of unsuspecting guests. Also their brother looks 40 years older (to the point he gets mistaken for their father), and their father looks younger than them, dresses like a schoolboy and plays video games under their bed at night. At dinner, they're finally revealed as eldritch monstrosities with gaping, toothy monster mouths. Oh, and they kidnapped Yellow Guy to make him their new mum.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right:
  • In "Jobs", the puppets ask the employees at Peterson's and Sons and Friends if any of them have seen Briefcase, and one of them points them to a first aid kit. At the end, it turns out the first-aid kit was actually Briefcase in disguise the whole time.
  • "Electricity" begins with the puppets struggling to figure out a two-letter word for the opposite of "down", and Yellow Guy guessing "When you can't remember that over the top of you, there's bigger ones that are bigger and bigger, and then over the top of it there's a smaller one over all of it at the top of that." He later finds out that this is actually how their house is structured: above their room, there's another room with bigger versions of them, and then another room on top of that with even bigger versions of them, and then another room on top of that where Lesley keeps miniature doll versions of them which she uses to manipulate them.
• Cult Defector: In "Jobs", Duck breaks free from the brainwashing he'd seemingly just been out through quite quickly upon seeing his friends aged into old executives.
• Dark Parody: Besides the show as a whole being one to preschool-oriented puppet shows like Sesame Street, Grolton and Hovris is one of these for Wallace & Gromit.
• Death Is a Sad Thing: Though most of the "Death" episode is characteristically surreal, Yellow Guy's reaction to the death of Duck is played eerily straight and similar to how a real child might try to understand death.
• Deliberate VHS Quality: The Art Shift in the Old Train's song from "Transportation" is done up in this way, making it look like some sort of animation from The '90s.
• Denser and Wackier: With a number of the overarching mysteries of the setting unveiled at the end of the readily available web series, the succeeding TV show ups the wackiness and violence of the "lessons" while shortening the tempers and tolerance of the protagonists.
  Duck: Shut up. What? Don't turn on me. He ruined it. I'm never going to see that skeleton!
  Red Guy: Oh, boo hoo, here we go, everyon—
  Yellow Guy: [smashes bottle on Duck's head] I hate you!
  Red Guy: Wh— [smashes bottle on Yellow Guy's head] —I'm dealing with it!
• Downer Ending: "Electricity" ends with Yellow Guy getting his brain batteries taken out before he can share the mysterious book Lesley gave him. No longer able to comprehend its importance, he instead puts it in the shredder.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Dropped it on a whole town, actually. In "Transport", while trying to find a new place to live, Red Guy suggests Clayhill, the town they lived in during the pilot episode... only for the GPS to inform him that it's gone.
    GPS: Just shriveled up, I reckon!
  • In "Electricity", it's revealed that several teachers from the old and new series are inexplicably dead on the floor. No explanation is given.
• Dumb Is Good: Subverted. Yellow Guy is the dumbest and kindest of the puppets, but "Electricity" shows that he still retains his sweetness after his intelligence is upgraded.
• Eating Lunch Alone: Has a scene that evokes this in Duck's song in "Family".
• Eyecatch: The eyecatches consist of stop-motion of fridge magnet letters sliding together and reading out “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” as a brief snippet of music plays.
• Fingore: Appears in "Death." When proving that Duck is dead, his finger gets snipped off. All that comes out is a bit of smoke. Then Yellow Guy tries it with his own finger, only for it to spit gouts of blood.
• Furry Confusion: In "Job", the teacher is a briefcase who has a briefcase, causing Yellow Guy to say "He's one of those guys with one of himself".
• Genre Savvy: The guys seem now fully aware of the routine from the beginning and casually expect it to happen, and usually they're interested in following along at first. Yellow Guy says that a suitcase teacher with his own suitcase is "One of those guys who has one of himself", Red Guy and Duck see the appearance of a new Teacher as a return to normalcy when Yellow Guy is acting weird, and when Duck seems to forget about the routine, just seeing a miniature train stroll into the living room is enough to make him say "Oh right. This kind of thing."
• Gilligan Cut: In "Transport", Red Guy claims that driving through the wilderness is more fun than anything that might happen back at their house and Duck begrudgingly agrees. Cut to their empty living room with the arrival of Time Child, a laser-shooting rave-dancing robot wizard who wants someone to drink and party with.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: Yellow Guy's "job" (welt) on his shoulder in "Job", as well as his mangled arm at the end.
• Half-Identical Twins: Lily and Todney.
• Hard Truth Aesop: The Aesop of "Jobs" is that we most likely won't be able to choose the jobs we want. Also, the workplace can be monotonous, tedious, and even downright exploitative.
• Hate Sink: Warren is definitely this. He's annoying, narcissistic, incredibly clingy, doesn't care about anyone else, and even transforms into a terrifying monster at the end with the intent of making Yellow Guy his friend whether he wants it or not. Pretty much all of the characters dislike him and it's heavily implied he drove his previous friends away for being such a nasty piece of work.
• Heel–Face Turn: Tony the Talking Clock, the Lamp and Colin the Computer appear as friends to the gang. Colin more specifically, as it's apparently a yearly ritual to go on the internet using him. He seems perfectly personable and polite to them, even joining in banter with them nonchalantly. The Lamp also gives Yellow Guy some advice about concepts of what happens after death and personal beliefs of an afterlife. He even turns himself off with no ill intent whatsoever. Tony hangs on the wall and talks during one episode, casually. It doesn't last long though...
• Just the Introduction to the Opposites: "Death" seems to serve as one to the show itself, as while most of the show is lessons themed around rather benign or cheerful topics like time or creativity and then spinning off into surprisingly dark directions brought about by borderline supernatural beings serving as teachers, "Death" focuses on an inherantly dark theme (death), and yet is one of the most light-hearted and comical episodes in the series, with most of the horror elements being done to the teachers and the supernatural elements happening because of the main trio's own sociopathy rather than the other way around. The trio even ends up killing the coffin who was explaining death and possibly the replacement friend.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • In "Family", Roy cannibalizes the Twins and their family offscreen as they scream in agony.
  • In "Electricity", once the power goes out from overusing electricity, Red Guy and Duck go to the basement, only to discover the corpses of Briefcase, Tony the Talking Clock, Roy, Sketchbook and Duck.
• Lighter and Softer: The series still features plenty of blood and Surreal Horror, but it takes a notably different tack than the earlier internet shorts. Many of the more disturbing concepts are tempered out with a healthy dose of Black Comedy — for instance, "Death" shows Duck slowly rotting away while Buried Alive in a coffin, but he's not particularly bothered by it and the scene mostly focuses on him repeatedly annoying the Coffin with inane requests. In addition, not all of the teachers exist just to torment the main characters, and the main characters actually get to win against them more than once.
• The Man Behind the Man: In "Electricity", we see that the one behind literally everything, possibly including Roy and the old series, is Lesley, an old and stitched-up woman in a colorful coat, who controls everything using the dollhouse on her piano. A staircase revealed after Yellow Guy leaves implies that someone else might even be above her.
• Meaningful Name: In "Jobs", we have Unemployed Brendan. Subverted in that his name is just Brendan and his brother is making him do this, and he hates it.
• Medium Awareness: Crops up more than the web series, most notably in "Death". When the claymated blob from the "Create Your Own New Friend" kit comes to life, Yellow Guy exclaims, "Ugh, claymation!"
• Mêlée à Trois: "Friendship" ends with the trio arguing, which escalates into a big brawl.
• Mind Screw: The show gets even screwier than the web series, with Yellow Guy being revealed in "Electricity" to have batteries in his chest. A set of fresh ones is put in, and suddenly he becomes much smarter and notices a stairway leading to higher floors of the house, occupied by weird versions of his friends. Finally, he reaches a room where an actual live-action human character named Lesley is playing with a miniature version of the house. She may or may not control what happens to the three residents, and might be replacing them when they die. It's all highly up for interpretation. And Yellow Guy leaves before noticing yet another staircase beyond Lesley, indicating that there might be someone above even her.
• Monster of the Week:
  • The teachers for the TV series are for the most part much nicer, but the ones that are more antagonistic are:
    • "Jobs": It's a bit vague whether the singing briefcase is evil or merely negligent, but Peterson's and Sons and Friends Bits & Parts, Ltd. are definitely evil. They encourage upper management to randomly fire (or kill) people, complaints get you sent to the CareHound (a terrifying four-eyed monstrosity that devours you and spits you out as a loyal employee), and hand out cigarettes with lunch. They also encourage dangerous accidents on a regular basis, to help us appreciate the times when there's not an accident.
    • "Family" has more of a Big Bad Ensemble: Lily & Todney and their creepy family feed Red Guy to their "family tree", which drains all of his blood, and kidnap Yellow Guy to turn him into their new mother so she can order them a bucket of chicken.
    • "Friendship" has Warren the Eagle, a gross worm who tries to deliver a lesson about friendship. He isn’t overtly villainous until Red Guy & Duck ask him to enter Yellow Guy's brain and bring him out of his coma, and Warren decides to take over Yellow Guy's subconscious instead.
• Mythology Gag:
  • After killing Warren in "Friendship", Duck Guy shouts "Pesky bee!", the same thing he said after swatting a butterfly in the web series.
  • In "Electricity", Duck Guy sees a crossword question asking for a two-letter opposite of "down" and remarks "Hmmm, that's a tricky one", the same remark he made in the web series after being asked what the biggest thing in the world is.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: In "Electricity", after his batteries are replaced, Yellow Guy uses his upgraded intelligence to uncover the higher levels of the puppets' house, and gets Lesley to give him the book with the answers to his questions. However, when he goes back down to the main level to show his friends, Duck Guy takes out his new batteries and inserts his old ones back, reverting him to his usual idiotic state. He then forgets why the book was important and puts it in the shredder without opening it.
• Never Say "Die": Zigzagged in the second episode which is very bluntly titled "Death"—while the word is used somewhat frequently, "gone away" is used just as often.
• No Name Given: The three main characters have no confirmed names — this is skirted around in the show itself by having them refer to each other as "that guy" or "the other one". The tombstone and mourners in "Death" repeatedly call Duck David, but he and his friends point out that this isn't his name. In "Friendship" we find out that Yellow's name, whatever it is, is apparently quite long, as it takes Red Guy nearly a full minute to type out and is hyphenated. But his maiden name was "Rat Eyes" or "Rateyes". Conversely, Duck's real name takes only a single button press to type out. Also keep in mind that the keyboard they're using isn't a typical qwerty keyboard.
• Noodle Incident:
  • In "Friends", Duck Guy casually mentions having forged documents which may have led to many deaths.
  • In "Transport", Duck Guy grabs a rock from the ocean and, when asked what he wants it for, just says "That's my business, private business!"
• Pressure-Sensitive Interface: Discussed in "Transport". Duck Guy thinks this principle applies to the touchscreen of Mr. Transport's WatchBox, and protests when Red Guy asks him to ease up. His answer —"You have to jab it hard, or it won't respect your choices!"— is not as absurd as it seems due to Red's earlier argument with Mr. Transport's navigation aid (a talking touchscreen).
• Shaped Like Itself: The show's opening lyrics, minus the Couch Gag.
  There's three of us. There's three of us. Look closely you will see.
  There's three of us. Just three of us. There's him and you and me.
  And every day we all hang out to find out what we talk about.
  That's three of us. There's three of us. Us three.
• Ship Tease: Rather oddly for a show like this, DHMIS gives us this in "Electricity", where during the blackout in the house, Red Guy rather nervously states that he enjoys "looking at [Duck]", to which Duck responds that he feels the same. Yellow Guy interrupts before this can go anywhere, however.
• Show Within a Show: "Grolton and Hovris", a parody of Wallace & Gromit. Yellow Guy mistakenly believes that Grolton is the dog and Hovris is the human.
• Speaking Up for Another: The song the main trio sings together at the end of "Friendship" is interrupted when Yellow Guy trips and breaks the computer Colin gifted them for Computer Day at the beginning of the episode, to which Duck responds by calling Yellow Guy an idiot. Red Guy immediately comes to Yellow Guy's defense by telling Duck that he shouldn't talk to him in the insulting way he did (especially since he had promised to stop doing so beforehand). However, he quickly turns against Yellow Guy when the latter hits Duck with a bottle, triggering a fight between the three that carries only in sound and dialogue over the episode's ending credits.
  Duck: You idiot!
  Yellow Guy: What? Don't say that to me, I didn't mean to!
  Duck: Oh, shut up!
  Red Guy: Don't talk to him like that! You said you weren't gonna talk to him like that anymore!
  Duck: What, turn on me?! He ruined it! I'm never gonna see that skeleton!
  Red Guy: What? Oh boo-hoo, here we go, now we're gonna start-
  Yellow Guy: I hate you! (hits Duck with a bottle, sending Duck falling with a scream) Ah!
  Red Guy: I'M DEALING WITH IT! (throws another bottle at Yellow Guy, with the camera getting knocked over alongside Yellow Guy)
• Stop Faux-tion: The "Brain Friends" segment in "Friendship" is CGI made to look like stop-motion clay figures, probably due to how much more elaborate and involved the segment is in contrast to the more reserved use of real stop-motion in the rest of the show.
• Surreal Horror: The series mostly parodies children's shows by starting off the episodes innocent and kid friendly before shifting more towards horror.
• Suspect Is Hatless: In "Jobs," Yellow Guy is looking for the missing teacher (a talking briefcase who carries around a smaller briefcase) and describes him as "one of those guys who has one of himself."
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: From "Family", when the Twins invites the trio to play their creepy, weird, and rather nonsensical boardgame:
  Duck: Where did you get this game?
  The Twins: [quickly, in unison] We didn't invent it!
  Duck: I didn't say you did.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: After many episodes of being manipulated, bullied, and hurt by various teachers, in Episode 4, "Friends", the guys manage to successfully overthrow and kill one of the teachers who overstayed his welcome.
• Variations on a Theme Song: Two different edits to the standard theme song are played during "Death", the first replacing Duck with Stain Edwards (to Yellow Guy's protest), and the second featuring the group singing "There's four of us" alongside a second Duck.
• Wham Episode: Episode 6, "Electricity". There is a staircase beyond the kitchen that we've never seen due to the angle. Upstairs? The Big Boys Room, where a larger Red Guy and Duck sit studying two lessons at once. And another staircase? The Bigger Boys Room, where a hyperintelligent Red Guy and Duck sit doing experiments, lacking any and all empathy for the creature that they've basically mutated beyond recognition. And the last staircase? An attic where an old woman named Lesley sits, playing the piano and playing with a dollhouse that controls the events of the house somehow. And there's another staircase in there, though Yellow Guy is prevented from going up.
• Wham Shot: From "Electricity" when Yellow Guy uncovers what's in the attic. The door parts to reveal a live-action old woman playing piano named Lesley, who's speculated to be the new Greater-Scope Villain of the series.

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"Journeys made and lessons learned
You may feel like you're alone
But no matter how much the wheels turn
The journey always ends up back at home!"

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