Film Theory: The Amazing Digital Circus is LYING To You!

[Music] There Is No Escape [Music] ever hello Internet welcome to film Theory the show that'll be theorized Rising day after day after day after day after day and we don't know why let's talk about the amazing digital circus shall we you my friends stumbled into an incredible world of Wonders where anything can happen except for swearing oh my God in case you aren't caught up with this one this is the latest series from the creative Geniuses over at glitch Productions this one was written produced and directed by Goose Works a talented artist who also composed music for both hasb been hotel and hell of a boss and their creativity and experience really come through with this one I got to say you guys went crazy recommending this one to us across comments GT live and our subreddit and it's pretty darn easy to see why between the amazing animation Gable moments and incredible cast of characters and a storyline wrapped up in like 18 different layers of mystery this is the perfect show for us to dive into which means that if you haven't watched the first full episode yet go do it watch it after this Theory though I'd be surprised if you hadn't cuz this thing already has like 30 million views across the platform it is doing Mighty well for itself but just so we're all on the same page for today's theories the follows a woman named pomy who's thrust into a strange Digital World styled after a circus alongside five other humans Jax The Lovable jerk ratha the sweet Optimist gangle who can't hide her emotions zubal who's made out of a bunch of random objects and kinger who's been trapped there the longest and has gone kind of crazy as a result the whole circus is run by a ring leader named Cain who according to the show's website is a quote wacky Ai and all of the humans are just subject to his every women desire God Zs you're right Jacks we should have a brand new adventure for our new member pomy I said that like 5 minutes ago however the humans don't necessarily want to go on these adventures and they're constantly trying to find ways of getting out this has even driven some of them insane leaving them abstracted where they devolve into monsters case in point the clown kofo was obsessed with finding the exit and abstracts just before pomy shows up oh K's been obstructed it's okay what is that and yet even when pomy does get herself to the exit in this pilot episode it doesn't go anywhere it's just end hallways and office spaces repeating it is basically the back rooms as it turns out Kane made this fake exit hoping to give the humans what they wanted he just didn't know what to put on the other side I do have to apologize for lying about the exit I was having so much trouble figuring out what to put on the other side and ended up never quite finishing it and more or less that's where we leave the colorful cast of The Amazing digital circus after this first episode now already there's just so much World building here for us to dig into so many questions posed that we want the answers to to like who's behind the amazing digital circus is there an actual way out or they just trapped forever are characters like kmo really gone or can they be brought back in some way and uh sorry to say I don't have a whole lot of answers for those things not yet for as much as glitch and Goose Works packed into the first episode they've done the wise thing and not given us a whole lot of answers but I do think they've given us plenty here to theorize about so here are three amazing digital circus theories don't run for the exit doors yet my friends we're going in let's start things off a bit small scale here Theory number one everything in the show is literally a video game set in the late 1990s now there's a lot in just this one episode that paints this as a video game world for example right at the beginning we see a pixelated title card for the show that's obviously in the style of old school PC PlayStation and N64 games this is further driven home in a secret video that you can find if you go to Wacky watch.com a URL shown on screen during the episode which shows us the main menu for this game we also see a flower pot fall to the ground and clip into it kind of like an old school Source engine glitch Kane mentions that he created the Digital World in the weird back rooms office area in a way that's very similar to how a game developer would create World spaces plus when pomy first enters the world she says this I put on some weird headset and now I'm here again directly implying that the whole thing is a game she put on a VR headset and was transported into the world with the digital circus all of that checks out and should be pretty darn obvious to the Casual viewer but what you might have missed is the fact that this is set in the late 1990s and not the present day like you might expect from something talking about using V R headsets and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that points us to this conclusion first of all basically all the tech that we see throughout the series seems to be pulling straight from the 9s anytime we see a computer in the show it's always the white boxy styled CRT monitors and large white computer towers reminiscing to models made by companies like Dell and Gateway back in the '90s and early 2000s and this is both in the actual episode and in the off-site material as well in that same wacky watch commercial we see a real life computer with the same old school design what's more the beginning of this wacky watch video says that this was an old old tape recovered on a date that's censored and given the degradation on that tape implies that not only is this video old but was also recovered in the past as well but this goes beyond just the tech that's used in the series many of the characters and iconography from the show are very reminiscent of popular characters and ideas from the late '90s and early 2000s pom's gesture design takes a lot of cues from sega's old nights in dream series Jax shares design inspiration and a similar name with Max the rabbit from the salmon Max Games Bubble clearly takes cues from Super Mario's chain Chomps Jax and gangle were both inspired by characters like Poppy the performer an old Japanese 3D animated series volcane and the digital circus setup Fair reminiscent of the villain and plot of I have no mouth and I'm a scream a short story by Haren Ellison adapted into a point-and-click adventure game in 1995 anyway you slice it it's very clear that the creators want the show to have the same '90s vibe that we're all so nostalgic for right now but you might be thinking hold on they're talking about VR headsets here that's a modern thing right when this thing just be inspired by the 1990s rather than set in the 1990s that's a pretty good call out a lot of advances in virtual reality technology have only been made across the last decade especially when you're talking about gaming that doesn't mean that VR technology didn't exist back in the 1990s and I'm not just talking about the rudimentary black and red wire frames of the Virtual Boy either back in 1991 Sega announced the Sega VR in 1993 virtuality created the mega visor display and in 1995 Fort technology hit us with the vfx1 headset just to name a few and looking into Old footage of all these things it doesn't look too dissimilar to the sort of world that we see in the amazing digital circus simple flat textures rudimentary shapes and polygons there's not a lot of detail here but that's for good reason these headsets they couldn't handle a lot of detail true story I actually have some firstand experience with these rudimentary headsets the Great Lake Science Center in Cleveland Ohio actually had a special exhibit on VR technology in its basement when I was a kid and it blew my mind with the amount of wires and cables these things took to run it felt like you were jacking into the Matrix and you had to wait 45 minutes to put on one of these headsets but all of a sudden you were dropped into a video game it was simple I was walking through a purple field with a bunch of bunch of green triangular mountains in the background but it was effective and it captured my imagination for decades since so much so that even though it was a 5-minute experience that happened in my life like two decades ago I still remember it vividly to this very day anyway madpad childhood story is aside the long and short of all of this everything that we see in the series is pointing to this taking place in the past and not in the present all of this has already happened from our perspective we're just watching the events of the game unfold so now that we know that we're in a 1990s video game here let's dig a bit deeper shall we Theory number two humy helped create this hell simul that they're currently stuck in it's a pretty bold claim so what would make me say that well a couple of things firstly one of the scenes that really jumped out to me while I was watching and rewatching the pilot was the sequence where pom's running through the back rooms on the other side of the exit door at one point she enters a more traditional looking office space with computers and cubicles before stopping and staring at one desk in particular this is played as a big moment we Linger on this shot for a long time as a classic horror esque Dolly Zoom hits both the desk and pomy before she has herself a psychological break the lights start to flicker and she cackles uncomfortably before running on the whole thing is really menacing and off-putting and clearly meant to leave us with a big impression why well because this desk isn't just some simulation that Kane cooked up in the back rooms it's based on a real place in the real world of this universe outside of the simulation a place that we actually see in the episode at the very end right before the credits roll we zoom out of the circus and through the void revealing that all of this has been taking place inside of a computer that makes sense we've already established that this right here it's a big old simulation but take a look at the computer and the desk it's the the exact same setup that we saw earlier in the episode in the back room section the same old equipment on the left the same file cabinets on the right the same retro Monitor and keyboard and computer tower and speakers the same VR headset and headphones this is exactly the same but clearly this one's in the real world not only have we literally zoomed out of the computer implying that we're no longer in said simulation but the lighting in the scene is much more natural it's warmer sunlight is streaming through the nearby window all at an angle because the sun's lower in the sky this is not the flat computer simulation lighting that we've been seeing throughout the rest of the episode that right there the desk and computer setup existing both in the simulation and in the real world is already a pretty interesting point but why then would it break pomy what causes her to go off the deep end and start laughing well I think that subconsciously pomy recognizes that this this is her desk at the beginning of the episode they make it clear that pomy has lost her human memories but this I believe is triggering a deep realization inside of her based on what we're given here I believe that pne's human Persona is an employee at CNA the company developing the digital circus game and VR headset and seeing it here inside the game un some weird flash of her memory as to what's happening to get her into the situation she's trapped in the very game that she helped to create it's ironic hence why she laughs it's funny it's Darkly funny I can see this being a huge reveal down the line and one that could be potentially devastating for all the rest of our characters for pomy obviously but also for all the other characters who are trapped in here who would be seeing her as the one to blame for their current imprisonment also real quick super short micro Theory I don't think we have enough information to figure out what the initials in the company named c and a stand for but one possibility that did jump out to me it could potentially stand for Cain and Abel partially named after the AI ring leader of the simulation Cain which could then lead itself to a lot of interesting story possibilities you see Cain and Abel are a pair of brothers who are the sons of Adam and Eve with Cain ultimately killing his brother and creating the first ever murder in the world anyway you know how we love ourselves a good Biblical reference here and I just wanted to mention it in case we get more clues in future episodes but something we do have more than enough to say about Theory number three all the characters aren't actually humans trapped inside the digital circus instead they're all digital copies of the brains of humans who've put on these headsets cloned and then forced into the simulation now this is a pretty big swing I mean pom's first line of the series is practically oh no I'm a human who put on a headset and now I'm trapped here and then Kan follows it up with this my my it appears a new human has entered this realm human he calls her a human and that actually lines up with what we've seen with the official synopsis explicitly calling pomy and the others humans in contrast to Cain being an AI quote from that synopsis a woman gets trapped in a crazy virtual world along with five other humans and are now subject to the whims of wacky Ai and their own personal traumas plus I just personally like the image of a bunch of people strapped into these VR headsets Allah swordart online but all of that being said I believe that there's a lot of evidence pointing towards these characters being computerized clones rather than actual humans for instance as I mentioned above pomy starts going a bit crazy when she sees her desk from The Real World in the circus's back rooms but think what was actually on that desk a headset pretty clearly a headset that is not on any human's head and that's not just a thing in the simulation it's also on the desk in the real world too that we see in the final shot of the pilot if there's a human trapped in the digital circus here with a headset firmly planted on their head that they can't get off shouldn't they you know be stuck there with the headset on their head given the little that we have to go off of right now it makes more sense that pomy put on the headset had her Consciousness copied into the game and then she just took off the headset to go home meanwhile pomy in the game can't take it off because she's is not a flesh and blood human anymore she's a digital copy whose memories begin the moment the headset was put on and even if we're wrong and this desk isn't pom all the other characters went through this exact same process when they first joined as Jax's hinted at when he sarcastically said how do I take this headset off just keep grabbing at it that works for all of us they all tried the exact same thing and it didn't work for any of them they're all digital copies grasping at a VR headset that isn't there anymore but you know the thing that really convinced me of this Theory the mannequins yeah did you notice these guys all throughout the episode we see several artist mannequins populating the circus you know these are the things that artists will sometimes buy to help him get references for poses most prominently we see him in the restaurant with Kan and bubble acting as background characters but why would they matter well we know that Kane can create NPCs Kane is this one of your NPCs or is this a new sucker so maybe these mannequins are just random nameless characters that Kane made up to fill in the circus maybe but that just doesn't sit right with me first off the dolls are clearly capable of emot itions we see one get upset when pomy interrupts at taking a bath silently screaming at pomy until she slams the door there's something more going on here than just these things being background extras take a look at this when ragi is showing pomy to her room there are several other doors for other characters in the background this is actually a great piece of World building we see that each of the current characters have themselves their own rooms as well as several other characters that we haven't met yet there's this colorful one that I can't quite make out what looks to be a pinkish purple goo monster some sort of cute doggo green and orange ante eater looking guy a black queen chest piece that I'm going to guess is named Queeny seems to be Ker's counterpart implying that he didn't come into the simulation alone regardless all of these portraits have giant red x's over them and that checks out these are likely characters that have abstracted in the past just like kfmo did we even see other abstracted creatures in the cellar when cane banishes cough mode anyway along with these past and current characters we also see several doors with blank mannequins on them not just one but multiple doors if I had to guess what's going on here when a new human enters the game these rooms trans form into one that's appropriate for them and the mannequin on the door transforms into their character and what's more I believe that there's a mannequin in the game that also transforms into that character right now they're placeholders but they get molded into these human copies whenever someone new puts on the headset and their brain gets scanned into the system that would fit thematically with the idea of the mannequins to begin with they're supposed to be used as references and then turned into something real when you're using them for your artwork that would also fit with the fact that they're on the doors of all these empty rooms and the characters being scanned clones of human bra brains would fit the fact that they can't take off their headsets despite us seeing a headset not being worn at a desk that is clearly meant to be pomes it just all fits with what we've seen from the series so far in short the series is gaslighting us it isn't about a bunch of humans trapped in a simulation it's about a bunch of human consciousnesses that have been scanned into an AI system and then mapped onto blank mannequin bodies where the computer can then simulate their human behavior and push their buttons to the breaking point learning the weaknesses of the human psyche and then when they've had too much and Abstract out of the system well then you just boot up another new simulation and try again there is no exit door just an endless loop of torturous tests run by Kane as he tries to understand The Human Experience just like a real circus all of it is just a big performance but hey you know a character in the show that I think is criminally underrated bubbles this adorable little bubble doggo seems like they're willing to eat just about anything but I know for a fact they would 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Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 4,717,541

Keywords: Amazing digital circus, the amazing digital circus, the digital circus, digital circus, the amazing digital circus theme, amazing digital circus jax, jax, pomni, kane, digital circus ending theme, the amazing, the amazing digital, the amazing digital circus pilot, amazing digital circus reaction, glitch, glitch productions, murder drones, video game, analog horror, tv theory, amazing digital circus explained, amazing digital circus memes, film theory, film theorists, matpat

Id: FYF7l-lim10

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 05 2023