YMMV / Nightmare Time

• And You Thought It Would Fail: Team Starkid has a history of defying expectations like this from the beginning, but people's doubts about whether Nightmare Time could succeed as a purely Web Video project without the budget or automatic visibility of Starkid's past stage shows were laid to rest by the Nightmare Time soundtrack album hitting #1 on the soundtrack album charts on iTunes the day after it released — and, at its peak, hitting #6 on the overall album download charts, just behind The Weeknd (immediately after he'd performed at the Super Bowl halftime show).
• Awesome Music: There was so much praise for the Title Theme Tune of Nightmare Time that it was quickly released as a high quality version without Zoom lag on YouTube.
  • Matt Dahan has received enormous praise from the fanbase as the MVP of Nightmare Time, letting us watch him do a completely improvised score for the whole show that not only excellently evokes the required emotions but smoothly weaves in Leitmotifs from the rest of the Hatchetfield series, and that sounds more like a prerecorded soundtrack by a full band than one guy noodling at a keyboard. Especially considering the relatively short time he had to listen to Jeff Blim's new songs and integrate them with the Lang Brothers' new scripts, he's arguably the hardest-working member of Nightmare Time by far.
  • The whole album's received a lot of praise after it was released, but a standout track is the Title Theme Tune of "Jane's a Car", which Mariah Rose Faith and Angela Giarratana said they've been playing nonstop in the car since they first heard it. Reviewers say it's a near-perfect example of the Classic Rock Driving Song genre it's meant as a tribute to, and that it's extremely catchy entirely aside from its context as an intro to a Nightmare Time episode.
  • Kim Whalen gets some awesome vocal moments in season 2, notably her city-saving solo "Run Away With Me" from "Killer Track" and her incredible high notes in "Virginity Rocks!" from "Abstinence Camp."
• Broken Base: A very mild example compared to the arguments the fandom had over Black Friday — very few of Starkid's fans would be churlish enough to complain about any content Team Starkid still manages to put out during a global pandemic — but there has been some debate over people who don't entirely like the unpolished, warts-and-all feel of a live reading over Zoom and would've preferred a more professional prerecorded Podcast format, like Welcome to Night Vale and The Magnus Archives, which Nightmare Time invites comparison to. A few people have also questioned the choice to keep Zoom in gallery view the whole time instead of using spotlight view the way most celebrity Zoom script-readings have done so that whoever's actually acting in a scene takes up the whole screen and we don't get distracted by reactions from the other performers. Of course, for everyone bringing up these complaints there's others who strongly feel that these "unprofessional" elements are exactly what they love about the readings — especially the huge fanbase of Starkid's earlier Zoomcasts of '90s movie screenplays, where seeing everyone together in a big virtual room was the whole draw, and which probably inspired the creation of Nightmare Time in the first place.
  • The base was broken again when Starkid took some of these fan complaints to heart and addressed them with the YouTube release of Season 1 Eps 2 and 3, which led to They Changed It, Now It Sucks! (see that entry for more).
• Continuity Lockout: To a certain extent. The stories can certainly be enjoyed going in cold, but a lot about them is there specifically to appeal to people who know the stage shows.
• Fanfic Fuel: Nightmare Time seems designed to be this — it's arguably "fanfic" made by the original creators, as in much lower-budget Spin-Off stories exploring aspects of the setting the main shows haven't, with Negative Continuity and very much conscious of feedback from fans about what they want to see. And since every single one of these stories is in its own "timeline", they only encourage fans to come up with ways to remix existing "Hatchetfield lore" with the new elements they introduce, with plenty of tantalizing Noodle Incidents to draw from. (Why did Becky stay up a tree for two days in the Witchwood? What would happen if Paul and Emma went on a date to Watcher World, or Tom and Becky? What other adventures has Miss Holloway had? Including the adventure where she apparently saved Ethan as a child?)
• Fanon: Hannah doesn't appear in the intro, likely because her actress is still in school and thus has limited time. Much of the fanbase, upon analyzing the lyrics, has agreed that the in-universe explanation is that the song is actually being sung to Hannah.
  • The Reveal of the five Lords in Black in "The Witch in the Web" immediately led to a round of Epileptic Trees over what domains they rule over/represent, one of the most popular ones being linking the five brothers to the five human senses.
• Friendly Fandoms: The release of Nightmare Time Season 1 overlapped with the release of Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye, a paranormal-themed Web Video and Podcast series by "Starkid-adjacent" troupe the Tin Can Brothers (led by Joey Richter, Brian Rosenthal and Corey Lubowich), which, like the Hatchetfield series, is a Twin Peaks-inspired saga that takes place in a Town with a Dark Secret. Nick Lang both took the time to hype Wayward Guide on the Nightmare Time Q&A stream and acts in a supporting role on the show.
• Narm Charm: A lot of the show depends on this, since it was made with No Budget by actors who are clearly wearing their own clothes, in their own homes, using stock Zoom backgrounds for atmosphere, having had relatively little time to rehearse, and having to deal with syncing problems thanks to being streamed over home Internet connections. It comes off surprisingly well nevertheless.
• So Short, It Rocks: Given that much of the controversy over Black Friday was the long running time and the Pacing Problems, a lot of people have said the shorter, more tightly focused one-hour stories in this format are pretty much perfect.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A lot of what people found charming — and others likewise criticized — about the original Nightmare Time livestreams, like the stream being locked in gallery view the whole time letting you see all the actors, was borne of technical limitations from having to do the stream live with little rehearsal time. Nick Lang took the opportunity to put Episodes 2 and 3 through some major editing before uploading them to YouTube, addressing several fan complaints — but likewise garnering criticism from people who liked the original livestream, warts and all. Many people in particular said they missed getting to watch all the actors' reactions while they weren't in the scene, with half the fun of the original streams being people looking at people's costumes and guessing when they'd jump in and as what character, and watching a whole gallery of their favorite actors corpsing in response to a hilarious scene being the next best thing to attending a show with a live audience. There's also some specific Funny Moments associated with Bloopers that viewers of the original streams miss, and some controversy over whether the actual Deleted Scenes were deleted for good reasons or not.
• Win Back the Crowd: People didn't exactly need winning back, but the fandom was becoming restive with the COVID-19 Pandemic seemingly putting a hold on any original Starkid content for the foreseeable future, and the sudden announcement of Nightmare Time jolted the fandom back to life hard.