The Amazing Digital Circus: Episode 2 Trailer Released

Glitch Productions has released the official trailer for the second episode of the viral phenomenon The Amazing Digital Circus. Set in “The Candy Canyon Kingdom,” a setting with callbacks to the board game Candyland as well as Wreck-It Ralph, and featuring homages to Mad Max: Fury Road along the way, the episode is every bit as inexplicable at first glance as was the show’s pilot, which has racked up millions of views on YouTube and resulted in a full-series order for the series. The Amazing Digital Circus pilot was a massive hit, wildly outperforming expectations when it was released to YouTube back in October.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you can do so for free on YouTube. The story centers on Pomni, an exasperated girl who appears in the world of The Amazing Digital Circus after strapping on a VR headset. Now trapped there and looking like a jester, Pomni forgets who she was before coming to the Circus and is forced to deal with the surreal and terrifying new digital world around her.

You can see the teaser below.

Since the series debuted, fans have been making all kinds of wild theories about what will come next and — like all popular online things — it has been followed up by fan art, fan fiction, knockoff videos, and bootleg merch. While there are a few pieces of official merchandise available through Glitch’s storefront, you can find unlicensed knockoffs all over Amazon and other online storefronts.

With ’90s imagery sprinkled in, some fans online have speculated that the show is a loose adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s acclaimed dystopian fiction I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Originally published in 1967, the short story was adapted as a video game in 1995. In it, five humans find themselves trapped in a strange digital world, unable to escape or to die. It shares some undeniable similarities to The Amazing Digital Circus, although some of those trappings are so general that they have been so widely popular in the internet age. 

Gooseworx, who developed the show while also working on the music for Hazbin Hotel, has cited I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream as an inspiration, saying that The Amazing Digital Circus is a similar idea but with the aesthetic of an I Spy book.

New episodes of The Amazing Digital Circus start on May 3.