Much has been made of Tim and Eric's 'dad humor'. This, when combined with frequent glimpses of child abuse and pedophilia, and occasional lapses into audiovisual nonsense, make the show appear to be an extended thesis on childhood trauma and PTSD.
Every product is made by the Cinco monopoly, which shows that people are too stupid to keep this company from being a massive corporate success. The company's presence has lead to a rise of mutants and chimeras such as Chippies and Rascals. The familial system is shown to work similarly to a multi-corporate structure: Entire families can be taken over and placed under one "father".
Child labor and slavery are still legal under local "Child Clown" outlets. Also, one third of the citizens are variable-gender clones of TV stars, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim; Tim "Prime" being a result of an immortality experiment.
On a positive note, playground technology is decades ahead of our own and sunglasses can be used to materialized matter from thin air.
Or reasonable anything, really, which is why all the Cinco products are as ridiculous as they are. This is similar to the above theory, but instead of the intents being necessarily to control the population, the extra-dimensionals or whatever have just colonized the planet and the world is now just doing things their way.
This has always been my view on a lot of the T&E style. It makes a lot of sense to me that a show which features so many infomercial, late night and daytime programming parodies mixed with a heavy dose of surrealism is the equivalent of someone with insomnia lucidly halfway falling asleep and dreaming about whatever generic things are on TV in the same room. A lot of people fall asleep watching TV and it explains where a lot of the delirious hallucinogenic feel comes from. It even gets meta at one point when Pierre puts on dream cream and accidentally gets some in his mouth, cue deranged animation.
The Tim and Eric universe is so dystopian, even genetics has been controlled to the point where 9/10 males will be born with one of two perfect gene sequences: "TIM HEIDECKER" or "ERIC WAREHEIM". Even girls like Jan Skylar sometimes acquire these genes. Only those who go through pregnancy outside the citadels can avoid this fate: thus otherwise talentless entertainers like David Liebe Hart and James Quall land themselves acting jobs on TV and become very famous just for being different. Otherwise though, most actors are just more perfect gene copies. The original Tim and Eric at this point are unknown, which is why there are so many discrepancies between plots that claim to feature those characters... they're different people every time. Many "TIMS" have died, but this is fine as they are the most cheaply replaceable.
Think about it. The three times we have seen James Quall actually do stand-up (Tim's birthday party in Season 2, at the bread hut in the movie and in the Chrimbus Special) his jokes have done pretty badly, only getting small laughs... if anything his perceived hilarity has deteriorated with every appearance. And yet in his first appearance in Season 2, Cinco was selling a hugely overpriced DVD set featuring "QUALLity comedy!" Obviously this is Quall's attempt to mooch off his brothers' success in order to further his own career. And when the Cinco brothers die, he just ramps up the insanity of the company.
Thus begins the show: Tim and Eric seem pretty normal at first, but bit by bit we pick up on some random quirks they seem to have: Saying "Chip chip chip!", calling dads "Pep-pep", and eventually making "Quall" puns. They were trying to disguise these abnormal traits at first, but then decided to let them be known while the camera rolls. But then later in the series we see all the other castmembers display behavior that is either direct mimicry of this kind of nonsense or... oh no... they've been brainwashed... and I'm... nexoihtohaioj823yrhp
- "Pep-pep" is actually a real term used around Pennsylvania where Tim and Eric grew up.
- However, Tim and Eric use it purposefully, they know it won't make much sense to the majority of their audience. It's just part of their lexicon now.
Their real names were always Tim and Eric of course, but when they hit their 20s they got themselves a show on MTV and changed their names to sound more "cool". At this point they started smoking pot, which lead to harder stuff (LSD) and now we have... this show.
In the song "Time Travel", Casey describes "the end of all of mankind", where he claims he will unite with his brother despite the implication that this event is far enough in the future that Casey will be dead from old age. He then goes on to speculate that he and his brother will ride of a "crystal ship", hinting that Casey's brother has a means to escape and has not only not aged naturally, but is in no danger. Keep in mind that Casey's brother is already a strange character- never removing his sunglasses, only performing bizarre dances in the videos and barely speaking at all. When he does speak, it's with an unnaturally deep voice.
In Glen Tennis' film, "Crystal Shyps", it's hinted that humanity is all but completely wiped out and in a feud with creatures called "Krog Monsters", who travel in the titular crystal ships to find and menace human survivors. Glen regards the movie as Serious Business, which, given all the other crazy shit going on in Awesome Show, could be because he knows that it's a true story of mankind's ultimate fate.
