PicoBlog

Does anyone else remember Angel Hare? Or was that just a me thing growing up?

Coming up in the nineties, I recall watching a lot of schlock. Like, nautical tons of shit. Just scads of it. Every church, elementary school, daycare, and library was filled with their own proprietary collections of VHS tapes containing children’s entertainment of various quality, ranging from the staples of Disney’s theatrical animated releases and the less popular but still respectable catalogue of Don Bluth on one end, to less widely acclaimed by still competently made fare like the Land Before Time direct-to-video sequels and, my personal favorite, Veggie Tales, all the way down to totally unknown, obscure tapes of public access programming and shoddy animations made by people in their basements that may or may not have had a total run of copies that you could count on one hand. Being children with voracious appetites for colorful cartoons, goofy slap-stick antics, loud noises, and generally anything that could keep our developing brains constantly and ceaselessly stimulated, we’d watch just about anything. Even if we liked the Disney and Bluth movies the best, once we ran through those enough time to commit the scripts to memory, inevitably, the teacher or caretaker or wrangler, whatever the title of the authority figure du jour might have been, would have to resort to playing the shit that no one would ever really think to play for children unless they were desperate to keep a room full of five year olds quiet for an hour.

The era between 1989 and 1999, beginning with the theatrical debut of The Little Mermaid and concluding with Tarzan, is largely agreed to be Disney Animation’s golden age. In that time span, they only released about ten movies. Now, there are some outliers I’d toss in as great movies that predated this supposed renaissance; The Great Mouse Detective, The Black Cauldron, the Rescuers, and, of course, the back catalogue of classics from the era of Walt himself. If you throw in Don Bluth’s contributions to the medium, you get about another eighteen or nineteen movies that, uh… well, y’know, they aren't bad, per say, but the band Primus put it best.

I’m mostly talking about The Pebble and the Penguin and A Troll in Central Park. I’m not sure if I would feel differently if I watched them today, but whenever those movies came on, it was time for me to tune out.

All in all, though, that doesn’t total out to a lot of movies. Especially when you’re watching one or two a day at school, and even more when you get home. Even if you factor in live-action children’s entertainment, television shows of varying quality, so on and so forth, it didn’t take all that long to chew through the good stuff, promptly tire of it, and end up resorting to combing through the dregs left floating at the bottom of the barrel to keep your seven-year old sped mind from wandering away and doing something stupid, like seeing what happens when you put a fork in a toaster, or sampling the contents of the medicine cabinet. And, before you say, Well, I keep my medicine out of reach from my children… no. No, you didn’t, because there’s not much outside of the reach of a bored and enterprising child.

Now, if there was a very finite amount of good children’s entertainment, there was also a seemingly endless well of the opposite. Like I said - there was a lot of people out there making a lot of crap.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how the internet and YouTube have democratized entertainment. That isn’t untrue. There’s a lot of content creators who would have never gotten their start, let alone even been able to make anything at all if it weren’t for ease of access to digital cameras and programs like Sony Vegas, various Adobe editing software, and, of course, the much vaunted, nigh legendary, Windows Movie Maker. I used to tool around with it a lot myself, way, way back in the day, when I fancied myself an up-and-coming Spielberg. Crudely animated shorts that utilized pictures drawn in MS Paint, stop-motion animations laboriously strung together from hundreds and hundreds of pictures of my Lego creations - I even dabbled in the haute couture realm of YouTube Poop, which, if you don’t know what that is…

Well, if you weren’t there at the time, you won’t get it. It’s an artifact of the late Ought’s and early 2010’s internet culture that just doesn’t translate well to anyone who wasn’t there to see it. If you want to see one of the best examples of the art form, I encourage you to watch some of the video below. It’s a great example of the genre, if it can be called that, as a whole.

I’d like to talk about it more another day, but, suffice to say, these videos of chopped and screwed cartoons irrevocably altered both my vocabulary and sense of humor ever since. About 85% of me and my high school buddies’ inside jokes stemmed just from quoting these videos, which we could do backwards, forwards, and every which way. It’s the reason I still can’t hear someone say the word Dinner and not snicker.

But, for as much as the internet and these various editing suites quote-unquote liberated the laypeople of the world to free themselves from the shackles of Big Entertainment and make their own content, it only took a handful of years for the entire endeavor to ossify into the sclerotic nightmare we see today, where all those plucky young upstart creators have either succumbed to burn out, out-and-out insanity, or just outright died, and those that didn’t are now debatably even worse than what we had before. Worse still, exporting children’s entertainment to the internet - namely YouTube - has proven to be nothing short of a catastrophe. The never-ending nightmare of YouTube content farms is a rabbit hole to be explored another time, but, suffice to say, if every kid born after 2012 grows up to be clinically retarded, it’s because they spent the years when their brain was most plastic watching shit like this for ninety-percent of their waking hours.

If the well of bad children’s entertainment in the 90’s feels endless, the state of bad children’s entertainment today is a well that goes so deep it bores through the bedrock, plunges down to the core of the earth, erupts through the other side and shoots off into the cosmos, where it inevitably collapses into a singularity of brain-numbing filth and nigh-incomprehensible levels of suck that can only be expressed in esoteric mathematical equations with more letters than numbers in it.

So, needless to say, I’m glad that the worst bullshit I had to watch was bad Christian straight-to-video animations produced on a toaster, and not literally mind-melting YouTube videos of Freddy Fazbear twerking or the clown chick from The Amazing Digital Circus shooting up heroin, which were either made by drugged out Indian dalits for .38% of a rupee a day or skeevy pedophiles. Either or. Like, seriously - if you don’t believe me about how bad it is, just watch some of that YouTube Content Farm stuff floating in the algorithm supposedly designed just for kids. It’s not hard to find. I feel like it’s the kind of shit the CIA forced people to watch during the MK ULTRA experiments to try and brainwash them.

I'm grateful I was a kid in the 90's, and not now. I mean, I still grew up to be retarded, too, but that’s because I snacked on paint chips when no one was looking and I watched too many YouTube Poops.

Almost fifteen years later and this one sound effect still gets me, every time.

Let’s take a step back. Rewind a little bit - literally. Here’s some… apropos mood music.

The VHS boom opened the market for all sorts of amateurs to get their foot in the door of video production, and advances in editing, animation, and home computers all come together in a confluence that enabled a glut of cheap, straight-to-video productions made on shoe-string budgets in the mid to late 80’s. If you, like me, ever wondered why the fuck your Sunday school class didn’t have any copies of Aladdin or Hercules, but an absolutely unconscionable amount of extremely poorly animated retelling of bible stories and scary ass shows with creepy puppets, this is why.

Anyways, it didn’t take long for me to get really, really fucking tired of watching these videos at church, and I joined my parents at the adult sermon, because at least there I could read the Bible unmolested (or, try to read - I’m not sure how much really took from it) rather than be distracted by some bad video tape or all the other caterwauling children. There was only so much I could take of what felt like an endless procession of absolute dog-water movies, low-budget kid’s shows, and just the ugliest, most unsettling puppets you’ve ever seen. There were a lot of puppet-centric shows. And, when I think back to them, I think of Joy Junction.

Now, I never watched Joy Junction in my Sunday school classes. I’m sure I would have, had it been a public access television show filmed in Texas and not Florida. Even though it was filmed in the mid-80’s, there was a lot of 80’s public access crap still floating around on shoddy VHS copies in my church’s library of filth, and there were shows I remember that looked exceedingly similar to it.

I didn’t actually find out about Joy Junction until around 2010 or so, when the YouTube channel Cringevision - who, ironically, is based in North Texas and mostly posted bad public access cringe material he found on VHS in Dallas/Fort Worth-area thrift shops - posted clips from the show. Most if not all of the clips Cringevision posted featured Marty; an abhorrent, repugnant goblin of a ventriloquist dummy puppeteered by the equally obsequious man named Ron. Now, I try to give these programs and the people in them the benefit of the doubt. Really, I do. I think most people who make this content have no intentions of either scaring children, or boring them into a stupor. They usually do one or the other, but I like to think their hearts are in the right place.

But… I had my misgivings about Mister Ron from the moment I saw him,.

I like to think I’m a good judge of character. And, turns out I am, because, you know what? Ronald William Brown of Largo, Florida, was sentenced to twenty years in prison on charges of having a lot of pictures that no one should have. You can read between the lines, there, I’m sure.

If you want to know the full story, here’s a link to an article on the case, but just know this guy was sick sick. There are details that will absolutely make even the most seasoned true crime veteran’s stomach turn that I can’t relay here in good taste. Suffice to say, I don’t think twenty years is enough for this guy. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Mr. Brown should be fed into a woodchipper. Feet first. With his stupid puppet, too.

Sorry for getting dark, there, but, I only show this an example of how… unsettling it is to dive into some of this lost media stuff. Now, Brown’s case is, thankfully, uniquely awful, and I’m sure that 99% of all the other content in the vein of Joy Junction doesn’t have anything nearly as morbid attached to them. At least, not so far as anyone’s aware. But it does put a darker tint over any search into similar content you might go searching for.

Another example of this kind of abhorrent kid’s entertainment is Peppermint Park. While Joy Junction was a public access program, Peppermint Park appears to be a direct-to-VHS series of videos that only made it six episodes before bottoming out. While there’s less ghastly baggage attached to the name, it’s much more puppet heavy, and arguably worse to look at.

I genuinely cannot imagine a child watching this and being anything other than disturbed.

The low-fidelity of the footage, the slipshod, extremely cheap and crude production, bad acting, low budget effects, sets, props, and a general sense of skeaziness to the whole thing; perhaps creepy might be too strong a term to use, but there’s something inherently unsettling about most of the content from this time period and this specific niche. Thinking that there could be something so malicious and detestable as a Mister Ron lurking behind it only makes it feel all the more untowards. There’s just a sense of wrongness to most of it. This sense that it shouldn’t have been made, whether it be because the creator’s ambitions far outstripped their resources and abilities, or because it was just a cheap cash grab made for a quick buck by some fly-by-night production company that no one really cared about, with a sense of apathy and disdain that simply radiates from the footage. It doesn’t help that much of it was so poorly documented and preserved that, a lot of the times, it feels like stumbling upon a half-remembered fever dream. If you ever did watch any of them as a kid, when you think about them, you aren’t even sure if they were actual videos you actually watched, or something you imagined entirely.

Joy Junction and Peppermint Park are largely lost media, and, despite the diligent efforts of the intrepid community of lost media seekers, very little is known about the series, their runs, their production, and even the people behind them. I wrote some on the topic of lost media before, and explained why, exactly, this phenomenon of obscure, forgotten, and neglected media is so unnerving.

All of this is to preface why I was suddenly overcome with an icy sense of dread and uncomfortable familiarity when, late at night, long after I should have been asleep, I was mindlessly scrolling through a thread about lost media on a certain image board and saw this picture that someone had posted.

The user posted a simple question - Were you an Angel Hare kid?

You know, followed by a much less ominous, much more pedestrian spiel about how they found it at a second-hand book store where the sight of this grinning cartoon bunny triggered some deeply buried memories from the very periphery of their memories. And, you know what? It did the same thing to me.

Like I said in my other article, I remember this one show about talking British dogs that just… doesn’t seem to exist, and, while I remember it vividly, I can find absolutely nothing about it. I can only reasonably assume it was a dream or a memory that’s been so warped by time and distance that it might as well be a confabulation.

It’s the same thing with Angel Hare.

Honestly, I barely remembered the show was even called Angel Hare until I saw that picture. I sincerely thought that it was probably a daydream or just a dream dream that I mixed up for something real, as children are wont to do. But, when I saw that image… good lord, the rush of endorphins was insane. In my last article, I spoke about how much it bothers me, in a weird way, that the stupid fucking dog cartoon I was writing about just could not, in any way, be corroborated. Like, I know what I saw, but I feel insane for seeing it because, apparently, no one else did. So, you can imagine the overwhelming relief I felt when I saw that this show about an angel rabbit I recalled was actually, quantifiably real.

It gives me renewed hope that the dog cartoon I saw is real, too. I’m gonna find it one day. Just you wait.

Angel Hare wasn’t a video I saw in church. That might be a little surprising, since, obviously, you can tell Angel Hare is a piece of Christian children’s media just from the name alone. I actually saw it in pre-school, but, when you take into account that this was in a small town in rural Texas and the only pre-school was run by one of the few churches in town… well, it might as well have been a church program. We watched a lot of budget-friendly, knock-off Christian shows of dubious quality alongside the standard Disney fare that every other kid had access to. I had to be four, maybe five at the absolute oldest. And I remember a lot about that time. In another article, I explain that, for whatever reason, a lot of my childhood memories are more clear and easy to trace than those post-high school, and, with a little bit of brain power, I can pull out a surprising amount from this brief period of my life.

I remember arguing with some other boys who wanted to be Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle when we played Power Rangers, because, frankly, I always hated those fucking turtles and never got the appeal, and they were not about to pollute my game of Power Rangers with those stupid reptile losers. I remember the stark class divide between the four and five year olds, and the epic power struggle between us that resulted in one kid getting pushed off the top of the playground and cracking his head open, necessitating a trip to the hospital and having his skull literally stapled together. I’m sure that playground really wasn’t that high, but, being four years old, it felt big big, and I can remember thinking that kid fell off the four year old equivalent of the Empire State Building. I also recall him showing me the staples in his head, and getting slightly ill at the sight. I remember his name was Joseph. I remember being elected to lead the peace talks between the four and five year olds, as a representative of the four year old bloc. The five year olds apologized. They told us that they only harassed us because they were vampires. Like you do. I remember arguing with the teacher that cute was pronounced cut. I even remember being terrified of the principal - Mr. Shipp - because… I don’t know. I just was. He was the only male on staff and, at the time, having been reared largely by my mom at that point, male authority figures seemed scary and intimidating. Even my dad, who I also remember riding around on the lawnmower with because we had this big ass yard at the time. I remember we ran over a quail and I heard the thing squeal as it got mulched. I can remember the toys I had. Which movies were movies were my favorites.

Forgive me if I’m rambling, it’s just, y’know - it’s all coming back. I just remember a lot of weird shit.

And I remember watching Angel Hare.

The thing is, it was really nothing all that remarkable. It was just another cheap Christian kid’s cartoon, and not even a better made one. There were others that had a production budget of more than whatever the producer could scrounge together from his friends in church, like a Veggie Tales or Gebert, who was another weird little puppet from another Christian children’s show.

Angel Hare was not even in the same zip code as Veggie Tales or Gerbert. The animation looked like it was actually stop-motion, using pictures of paper cut-outs being moved around on backgrounds made from cardboard and construction paper. Like the early seasons of South Park, kinda. The characters’ mouths didn’t really move so much as just open and close roughly in time with the dialogue. The characters themselves didn’t move all that much, either. It was all very… stiff. Very rudimentary. Even the tapes they printed the show on must have been done so haphazardly, because I remember the footage would speed up or slow down at odd times, which made the show just feel… weird. Maybe we had bad copies, or maybe the cheap VHS tapes they were printed on just held up in storage poorly. The more I think about it, the more I actually think the show must have been some unofficial, unlicensed production, because there was a lot of music in it that was from the fifties and sixties. Like, actual music that you would hear on an oldies radio station that I can’t imagine the creators would have had the money to license out. Or, maybe they did, and that’s where the entirety of the show’s budget went. I remember the theme song being really well done, though. Very professional, very reminiscent of a lot of those early 90’s Disney cartoons, a lot like The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh or Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers, which, again, suggests they spent way too much money on that and not enough on anything else. I dunno. I tried to look up some information about the people behind it, and, predictably, there’s nothing to find. Outside of a the above picture and one or two scant threads on Reddit from many years ago and a smattering of posts on obscure, backwater forums that I really had to dig to find… there really isn’t much to find. A few people chatting about what tiny fragments of it they remember there. Even fewer screenshots of poor quality VHS rips here. It was distributed by some no-name Christian media outfit called KP Publishing that went defunct in 1998, but, outside of that, no one’s really found anything else. The show, for all intents and purposes, might as well not even exist.

So, you’re probably wondering what the show was even about. And, the honest answer to that is… not much. It was one of those shows with talking, cartoon animals. I mean, obviously. You can probably tell that much from the VHS cover. I think we only had a couple episodes, or they didn’t have that many character models to use, because there were only four or five that I remember. One was a badger, I remember that, and his name was Francis. I only remember that because there was a fox named Francine, which is so close that they kind of went together. There were others, but the only other one I remember clear enough to definitively say was real and not just some kind of muddled mix of dreams and memories was, of course, the eponymous angel hare.

Her name was - is? - Gabby. Angel Gabby.

Not very subtle.

And, no, if there was an Angel Raphie or Angel Mikey, I didn’t see those episodes. It was just Angel Gabby. And every episode was basically the same. Francis or Francine and maybe some talking woodland critters I don’t remember would have a problem, and, after calling for Angel Gabby, she’d come down and help them, all the while breaking the fourth wall to impart good and Godly lessons to the audience of children. It was one of those kid’s programs where there really was no fourth wall, and the characters were aware of the little kids on the other side of the screen. Of course, the lessons that Angel Gabby was teaching were nothing ground breaking. Unless you were still learning to spell your name, I guess. It was all stuff like, There’s no need to be afraid of the dark (because angels are watching you) or There’s no need to be afraid of meeting new people (because angels are watching you) and Your favorite things make you special and you’re so unique (because… angels have something to do with that, too, I’m sure). That last one would send the average boomercon into apopleptic fit. Everyone is special? I don’t think so, SNOWFLAKE!

Angel Hare was one of the first one of examples of wokeism being injected into children’s media, thus, I’ve resolved to track down all remaining copies of this dirty commie propaganda and burn it like the filth that it is. I’m going to personally find Angel Gabby and turn her into a nice stew and put her taxidermied foot on a keychain.

I feel a bit bad saying that. Partially because pretending to be a boomercon leaves a little bit of vomit in the back of my mouth, but mostly because I remember actually kind of liked the show at the time. Yeah, sure, it was cut-rate and tangibly cheap, but, compared to some of the other stuff we watched… well, I hesitate to call it good, but it wasn’t as offensively bad as some of the other tapes I watched at the time. There was this ambiguous, indescribable charming quality to it, I suppose. I can’t really explain what it was, exactly. I think it was the voice actress that played Angel Gabby. She just sounded like a nice person. She had a way of speaking that made a three or four year old feel good, even if she wasn’t really saying anything of substance.

But, more than anything… I remember one episode. Very, very clearly. And that episode, more than anything, was the reason I figured Angel Hare, like that dog show I keep bringing up, was a dream. See, there was one day at school where I couldn’t go outside and play with the other kids because I’d twisted my ankle something fierce. How, I don’t really remember. I was probably doing something I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t unable to walk so much as unwilling, because my pain tolerance was staggeringly low and I really didn’t want to play Power Rangers with Mutant Turtles when my foot hurt, so, with enough whining, I managed to get one of the teachers to let me stay inside and watch a video instead. I got to pick out whatever I wanted from the tape collection, which was a pretty august luxury to be afforded. Why, out of everything on offer, did I pick Angel Hare? Couldn’t tell you. But I did. And the teacher put it in for me and went to do something else, which, hey - maybe not the best idea to leave a four or five year old unattended in a classroom, but, at the same time, I was a good kid and, with a movie playing that I had specifically chosen, it was probably safe to reason that I’d sit my little white ass down and be glued to the screen for the duration of the runtime. Maybe she went to go watch the other kids, which, given how rowdy we could get, probably demanded more attention than my dumbass watching a movie. Maybe she went out for smoko.

Who knows. Doesn’t matter.

This episode of Angel Hare started off like they all did. The theme song plays. The title of the episode rolls. There’s some slow, sludgy 50’s crooning doo-wop track that I don’t think they had the rights to use playing in the background. Francis the badger was upset because there was a new friend in the forest - which was, y’know, me, or the audience, whatever - and he wasn’t sure how to introduce himself. So, he calls Angel Gabby to help, and, like always, she came down from her little house in the clouds and exchanges pleasantries. I remember she always said, I love to hear you call, which always seemed like a weird thing to say. She tells Francis some pablum about how meeting new people doesn’t have to be scary, so on and so forth, before turning to the audience and saying something along the lines of, Hello, there. My name’s Angel Gabby. What’s yours?

There was a moment of silence so, that if you were a particularly dim-witted child who actually thought you could communicate with characters on the screen, you could tell them your name. I’d already learned that the funny characters on the other side of the screen couldn’t actually hear you, so I didn’t bother responding. What a wise child, was I. Angel Gabby listened intently to an answer I didn’t give, staring at me all the while.

Oh? she said. She laughed. That’s a wonderful name. It’s nice to meet you, and I hope we can be good friends.

And she didn’t say anything else for a long moment. She was just quiet. Staring right at the screen. Staring right at me. I would have thought the video had screwed up and paused, if the music hadn’t kept playing, and Angel Gabby didn’t tilt her head to the side with an expression that conveyed as much curiosity as a simple cartoon character could emote, as if to say, Well? Are we going to be friends or not?

Well, I decided right then and there that I was not going to be friends with Angel Gabby, and I was never going to watch Angel Hare again, because I got up, I walked outside, and I joined everyone else because my foot did not hurt bad enough to stay in that room with her.

See, the reason I thought that Angel Hare was a dream is because I distinctly - vividly, even - remember that, right after Angel Gabby said Oh? as if responding to something I said - she said my name.

I heard her say my actual, legal, God-given first name. Plain as day. Unmistakable. As if she was repeating it to herself after I’d told her.

And, I know. I know. I know what you’re thinking, because, trust me - I’ve thought the same thing a thousand times since I saw the picture of the Angel Hare VHS.

Someone finds an old tape of an obscure show nobody remembers that conveniently has no track record of existence. I just happen to remember watching it. And I remember having a dream where the main character looked at the screen and said my name. Which certainly doesn’t feel like it was a dream. That sounds like stupid creepypasta-tier bullshit.

And that’s because it is.

Everything preceding that was absolutely true. Especially the stuff about the mystery talking dog show - that story is 100% true, and I do plan to find it, one day, but, yeah. No. Fortunately - or perhaps unfortunately - I did not watch some cursed tape possessed by some incorporeal intelligence that tried to communicate with me. I think. Maybe they have before and I’ve just been too dense to notice. There was no Angel Hare tape at my pre-k school.

But, while my own experience with Angel Gabby maybe a fictional yarn, what I didn’t make up is Angel Hare. On the contrary, Angel Hare is very real.

In fact, that picture of the VHS is very real, too. It's upcoming merchandise being made for the series.

Is Angel Hair an animated series? Yes, actually. Kind of. It’s just not a cheap, straight-to-video cartoon made by some questionable Christian media publisher. Rather, Angel Hare is a genre-bending web series created by the group East Patch Productions; a two-man animation and production team consisting of sisters Hannah and Rachel Mangan, working out of their parent’s basement in Clemson, South Carolina.

And, I’ll just say it now - I don’t like Angel Hare.

I adore Angel Hare.

Listen to me. Here’s a playlist containing all content East Patch Productions has made relating to Angel Hare, which includes two seasons, each six episodes in length, as well as ancillary shorts, including Q&A videos with the character of Francis. You can get through all of it in an hour and change, at most. If nothing else, I cannot stress enough that you absolutely should watch the first season. It doesn’t take more than twenty minutes to get through all of it - no episode is longer than five minutes.

I promise you, it is worth twenty minutes of your time.

I can’t really speak about what I like about Angel Hare and what makes it so good without spoilers, and, trust me - when it comes to the final episode, you want to go into it blind. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that I’ve watched just about every analog horror series on YouTube of any notoriety - and plenty that have none - and not a one of them ever left me with the sense of holy shit that the conclusion of Angel Hare’s first season did.

So, please - I implore you - take twenty minutes of your time and watch season one of Angel Hare before coming back to finish this article. And, you know how often I say, but only after you finish this article. Not this time. Go on. Get. Shoo. Come back in twenty minutes. And, if you really can’t be bothered, well… your loss.

But you’re going to upset Angel Gabby. She won’t be mad. Just disappointed. And I don’t know how you’re gonna be able to live with yourself.

Anyways, there are spoilers beyond the break. Proceed at your own risk.

I’m not going to recap the details of Angel Hare’s plot. I’m assuming you either watched the videos, or you don’t care and are willing to read on either way. That’s fine, if you didn’t. Really. It’s not me you have to worry about.

I’ll put the puzzle pieces of the conclusion together if you weren’t able to yourself: Angel Gabby is, obviously, not just a cartoon character. What is she, exactly? That’s up for debate. The second season introduces a character called Angel Zaggy, who’s full name is later revealed to be Zagzagel. Zagzagel, in traditional Abrahamic folklore, is the name of the angel of wisdom, and often depicted as the angel that spoke to Moses through the burning bush. Though this would imply that Zaggy and Gabriel are angels, what exactly an angel is in this setting is still is up for debate. Are they actual guardian angels in a religious, Biblical sense? Incorporeal intelligences that pretend to be angels? In Season 2, it’s shown that they aren’t just limited to interacting with humans through the in-universe cartoon of Angel Hare, but can shift into other television shows, and even other media, changing their appearance accordingly.

They almost seem like some sort of electronic parasite, with the ability to infest and transmit through immaterial mediums, perhaps electricity, perhaps radio frequencies, perhaps something else entirely, but it’s heavily implied that when Jonah let her out in the final episode of Angel Hare, Gabby has access to and can freely travel through the internet to communicate with and help others.

Given how she helped Jonah… well, what exactly that means is up for you to decide.

Perhaps these answers will be provided in future installments to the series - East Patch Productions has heavily implied that there will be more Angel Hare to come - but, for now, the true nature of the angels is up to audience interpretation. And I don’t just mean true nature as in what they are. I’m talking about their disposition.

Though, again, nothing is explicitly stated, if you fit together the pieces and read between the lines, it becomes exceedingly clear what happened at the end of the first season.

Gabby is Jonah’s protector. Self-appointed, or divinely assigned? Again, the answer isn’t clear, but regardless of how or why Gabby took such an interest in Jonah, the result is the same - she actively coached a young Jonah into murdering his abusive father, up to and including finding a gun, how to use it, how to dispose of it, and, finally, destroying the evidence, the last of which is highly implied to be with the direct intervention of Gabby herself.

Now, I need to deviate for a moment and address the conclusion to Season 1. If you didn’t watch the series, you need to watch this one. It’s mandatory. I’m assigning it. Right now. Go. Watch. Don’t be lazy.

This episode - the final installment of season one - in my opinion, is borderline perfect in execution, both technically and narratively. In terms of technique, you won’t understand the wow factor this had unless you know how it was done. Watching it as a standalone video is impactful enough, what with Angel Gabby finally making direct contact with Jonah in a way that is as uplifting, exciting, and wholesome as it is unnerving and unsettling, but, the thing that really made this episode special is that it was not originally a YouTube video. The footage that was used to make it was taken from a livestream and edited into a video. The audience was watching it all happen in real time, as if the events on screen really were happening right in front of them, in real time. There’s a lot of talk about analog horror being immersive in the sense that it’s largely steeped in the aesthetic and narrative conceit of found footage, but no other series I’m aware of has gone so far as to make the ending feel as real as Angel Hare. I wasn’t there to see it, but god damn, I wish I was.

Also, I just have to address it at some point, so I’ll do it here - the song of choice for the end? Jesus Christ, could it be any more perfect? Not only is the song itself just straight fucking fire, but, thematically, I don’t think a better track could have been chosen.

I absolutely love this song. Like, ever since I watched Angel Hare for the first time, I listen to it all the time. I take weekly cold plunges in a nearby lake during the winter, and, the one time I did it alone because the friends who usually do it with me were unavailable, I went out into the water and listened to this song twice over to keep my mind off the fact that I was up to my neck in thirty degree water with snow falling on my face. Transcendental is the only word I can find to describe it.

You really gotta try it sometime.

So, technically, the conclusion to Angel Hare’s first season was as satisfying as it was ambitious. Narratively, I think it’s even better. Angel Hare is one of the few stories - especially in the realm of internet media - that I’ve seen which pulled off a flawlessly ambiguous ending. The conclusion doesn't spell anything out for you - it's open to the interpretation of the viewer. The best part, and perhaps the most impressive, too, is that it doesn’t feel like an ambiguous ending. A lot of people who either don’t look too deep into the text of a narrative or just plain don’t think about it too hard will tell you it’s not an ambiguous ending.

Angel Gabby is confirmed to be real. Jonah makes contact with her. She’s his guardian angel. She saved him from an abusive parent. Gabby is good and, despite how creepy she came off at first, she'd been good the whole damn time. Everything is turning up Milhouse.

But is it really?

The ending is wholesome. It’s endearing. It’s genuinely a heart-warming moment when Jonah and Gabby touch the screen on opposite sides, reuniting proper after many years. I watch it and I smile every time. It makes you feel good. But there’s a reason that Angel Hare is considered an example of analog horror. For as sweet as the conclusion is… I was still left with an incredibly uneasy feeling, and that unease only grew the more I thought about it.

As stated above, there’s still no definitive evidence that Angel Gabby is actually an angel as most people would understand it. There’s no definitive evidence that she’s a benevolent entity, either. Who’s to say that Jonah’s father wasn’t abusive, and that Angel Gabby wasn’t manipulating him for untowards end? Jonah is clearly not the most stable individual when the narrative begins - can his recollection of events be trusted? And, by that measure, can Gabby's motivations be trusted? Even if Jonah's father was abusive, Gabby still provided a child with step-by-step instructions to commit murder, and actively aided and abetted the destruction of incriminating evidence. The act of taking a life is still the act of taking a life, even if the life taken is a wicked one.

Worse still, as Jonah studies the tapes, his mental state begins to deteriorate. Visibly. Not only are traumatic memories of his past resurfaced when he finds the Angel Hare VHS, but he becomes increasingly obsessed with Angel Gabby as a figure; a plot point that is elaborated on in Season 2, where once communication between the two is established, Jonah begins to spend more and more of his day running footage of Angel Hare on the computer so he can spend time with her. All his time with her. In a dark room. Alone.

If Angel Gabby is really as benevolent as she claims to be, does that sound like behavior she’d want to encourage in someone she cares about? Someone she claims to love and whole-heartedly swear to protect? Is she sequestering him away from the outside world to further isolate and manipulate him? Maybe she, for completely innocent and wholesome purposes, wants to spend time with him, too, but has lost sight of the fact that she’s actively hindering him rather than helping him by enabling his continued obsession with her. Perhaps, as his guardian, she feels as if the only way she can keep Jonah safe is to keep him away from the outside world, like some kind of angelic helicopter parent.

And that is part of what makes Angel Hare such phenomenal story telling. It never comes out and says much explicitly. And what little it does say, what few answers are drip fed to you over the run time, only end up posing further questions. So much of it is open-ended and left up to viewer interpretation that it leaves you a lot to mull over and think about, long after the scant twenty-minute run time comes to a close.

Now, I do worry that further Angel Hare stories will dispel this effect. It’s only natural that, as a narrative progresses, the author, by necessity, will have to answer the burning questions they’ve set up to keep the audience invested. But, by doing so, it will also, by necessity, lose some of the mystique and intrigue engendered by the ambiguity surrounding it. Season 2 already did some of this by introduced Zagzagel, and, while he’s a perfectly enjoyable character in his own right, and Season 2 is an excellent addition to the canon, it does make weighty suggestions as to what Gabby’s true moral alignment is. She gets herself into a sticky situation because she’s helping too many people. And, while help is nebulously defined, if at all, it is very much suggested that she is acting with legitimately good intentions.

Again - the definition of help that she has may not align with the conventional human understanding of help, just as her interpretation of good may not match what we would think of as good, but, still. It really depends on how much you want to read into the narrative. And, of course, I’d be remiss to mention that even if they are angels with good intentions… were angels not beings that inspired equal parts reverence and fear? Were angels - even those that took human forms - not intimidating to behold?

But, I gotta say - I love Angel Gabby.

The fact they manage to do so much with her in such little time really speaks to the skill of the series’ creators. For every bit as wholesome as she is, there’s this slight, nagging sense that’s there’s just something… off about her. That she’s not exactly on the up-and-up. That her friendly, kindly, righteous facade is just that - and act. Yet, despite that, I, like Jonah, feel a worrying need for more Angel Gabby in my life.

She’s a great character. But I just can’t shake the feeling that she’s entirely on the up and up.

But, for a moment, let’s assume she is the benevolent guardian figure she presents herself to be. For the sake of the argument I’m about to make, let’s say that Angel Gabby is, for all intents and purposes, an unambiguously benevolent figure with nothing but noble intentions in her little bunny heart.

Let’s return to that masterful conclusion of Season 1 with this in mind. Gabby good. Yes? You understand? Okay. Good.

Angel Hare is considered a work of analog horror. For several reasons, I’d contest this label, but, at the same time, it has undeniable elements of the genre baked into it, and, yes, there is an argument to be made that it is, at it’s core, a piece of analog horror.

With that in mind, it’s easy to assume that Gabby is a malicious, scheming figure that’s putting on an act to achieve untowards ends. It’s easy to get the sense that Jonah is being lured down a rabbit hole - pun intended - following bait set by this entity, most likely to meet an unfortunate fate. After five episodes of unsettling low-budget animation, creepy audio glitches, strange and haunting music, death, murder, intrigue, and the ever-present sense that Angel Gabby is neither exactly what she seems to be or really all that nice, when she finally makes direct contact with Jonah, and it’s confirmed that she isn’t just a figment of his imagination. That’s surprising enough. But the biggest surprise?

She’s not evil. Her eyes don’t roll back in her head and blood doesn’t start oozing from the sockets. She doesn’t leap out of the computer screen and attack him like a rabid… well, rabbit. There’s no gotcha moment where Gabby pulls back her mask to reveal some eldritch beast or demonic horror. Taken at face value, it’s easy to read the conclusion of Season 1 to be that Gabby, for as much as we were tempted to believe otherwise, was actually exactly what she said the whole time - a benevolent guardian angel.

Subverting the expectations of the audience is a popular concept in media right now. Routinely, it’s trotted out to be used as a flimsy defense for extremely poor writing, unsatisfying conclusions, or to explain away why a creative who clearly detests the audience their meant to appeal to pissed all over a beloved franchise, character, or property. If you’ve watched any mainstream movie in the past five years, at least, you’ve seen it.

Luke Skywalker is reduced to a bitter old man and gets killed and the flawless cardboard cut-out stand-in takes his place and is elevated to the position of the Jedi messiah. Indiana Jones is put out to pasture so an insufferable, scolding schoolmarm can take up his hat.

It doesn’t always have to be a negative thing, either. Sometimes, there are effective, genuinely shocking twists that completely alter the trajectory of the story that no one saw coming. When I first watched Game of Thrones, I didn’t think that Ned Stark wasn’t going to see the end of the first season. A lot of other series and movies have taken the constant revolving door of Game of Thrones characters getting their heads cut off to equate the concept of subverting expectations to mean that you just have to kill off a major character, suddenly and without any warning or build up, or make some character that appears to be heroic a horrible monster.

Even when it comes to superhero movies, Batman has to have a gun. Superman has to snap necks to save people, because he can’t save everyone. In a better, more well-executed example from superhero movies, Thanos kicks the Avengers ass and erases half of all life in the universe. Sure, that worked as a subversion of expectations, but it was still… nasty. I remember all the little kids in the theater, decked out in their Avengers merch, sobbing their eyes out as they watched Spider-Man disintegrate into ash. And, again, it works - masterfully so - but no one left the theater feeling particularly uplifted or happy, even though it was a foregone conclusion that the Avenger would spring back and win in the sequel (spoilers: they do).

There seems to be this idea that the only way you can surprise an audience is to pull a fast one on them and trick them - lead them on, hype them up, lull them into a false sense of security, then sucker punch them from behind. The twist always has to be a bad one. It has to be dark and violent and cruel. That seems to be the only way that mainstream creators think that they can properly subvert expectations. And these nasty, perverse surprises so pervasive that every piece of media these days seems obsessed with subverting audience expectations. Every director, writer, and creator wants to have this big, dramatic twist that throws people off their feet. Yet, in doing so, subverting the expectations of the audience because so common place, so rote, so routine, that audiences have clued into it by now. The entire concept itself is something of a bad joke. If you watch a big budget movie these days - especially one from a Legacy IP - you can expect there to be some generic, contrived twist that’s supposed to surprise you, but it probably won’t.

In a media landscape where everyone is anticipating something bad to happen, I’d argue that one of the most effective ways to surprise the audience is to let something good happen.

We, as a culture, are so miserably cynical, so jaded and calloused and poisoned by irony, snark, sarcasm, and a complete and total fear of expressing any emotion that isn’t negative for fear of looking vulnerable, that we seem pathologically averse to happy endings. There can be no white-hat gunslinger triumphantly riding off into the sunset. There can be no end where the hero gets the girl and lives happily ever after. If they made a remake of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy would click her magic slippers together and Glinda would just shoot her in the back of the head. Sure, she didn’t go home, but, hey - at least she’s not in Oz. It’s tiresome. It’s exhausting. It’s bleak, and it’s nasty, and, frankly, it just isn’t any fun.

And, don’t get me wrong - I love a dour ending as much as the next guy. I’m not saying that I dislike endings where things don’t end perfectly, or matters aren’t resolved and tied up with a pretty ribbon. In reality, most things usually don’t end like that. Things are messy. Most people aren’t all good, nor are they all bad, and they usually make decisions that occupy the murky gray middle-ground between moral and immoral. People die, often before their time, without good reason, if any reason at all. Bad things happen to good people. It’s the nature of the world.

But part of the reason that fiction even exists to begin with is to provide us the catharsis that comes from the idea of… well, what if it wasn’t always like that?

And I’d go so far as to say that robbing ourselves of that catharsis, that emotional outlet, and forbidding ourselves to believe in anything good, or righteous, or even just plain happy, is one of the reasons that we, as a culture, and a wider society, are so dramatically, profoundly, and obviously mentally unwell. If you pathologize happiness and treat it as some delusions that only fools labor under… well, it only stands to reason that, yeah, of course you’ll be depressed.

Angel Hare does a phenomenal job at providing that good, wholesome sense of catharsis that’s so direly missing from the media landscape today. Jonah didn’t need to mangled by some faceless creature from beyond time and space to give us a satisfying ending, and I don’t think anyone was disappointed when he wasn’t. Even in Season 2, when Zagzagel is introduced as a shady figure of questionable intent, it’s equally satisfying to learn that, despite his standoffish nature and dour demeanor, he really is friends with Gabby like he claims to be, and truly does want to help Jonah find her again. Gabby and Zaggy didn’t have to secretly be some malicious, demonic entities to surprise us. The fact that they aren’t was what surprised the audience to begin with.

The biggest surprise, in the end, was that there really was no surprise.

Hannah and Rachel Mangan did something that so few creators seem to want to do, anymore; they let the characters, and, by proxy, the audience, be happy. They invited us to remember that, sometimes, every once in a while - even if it just for a moment - things do work out. Sometimes, everything is okay.

And I think that’s a message that more people need to hear.

Of course, this message may change over time, as more about the angels and the world they live in comes to life, but, if Season 2 is anything to go by, I don’t think it’s going to be revealed that Angel Gabby is actually some sinister figure. And that’s fine. I’m completely okay with Angel Gabby, Zagzagel, and the others being objectively benevolent good guys. I’d also be okay even if all this speculation is wrong and they actually are soul eating demons from the bowels of Hell.

That’s one of the facets what’s so awesome about Angel Hare - for the first time in a long time, I feel like I sincerely don’t know which direction the series and the characters in it will take. I could see the story going either way. And it’s such a refreshing feeling to find a piece of media that truly feels as if it’s broken out of the mold of the conventional storytelling tropes of the modern age, and is doing something wholly different and unique.

That’s really why I wanted to share it with you today. I think Angel Hare is a wonderful, impactful piece of media that does much more with a total run-time of an hour and the extremely limited resources of the Mangan sisters than than so many other works fail to do with eight seasons, multiple hours, billions of dollars, and a small army of people behind them. It is, in my opinion, one of the finest examples of amateur art on the internet today, and speaks to the quality of work that can be done outside the conventional systems by talented and passionate creatives. If the internet has entered a stagnant, sclerotic age of content creation, flooded with low-effort trash, corporate schlock, and thoughtless cash-grabs, Angel Hare stands as a bright spot in an otherwise very bleak landscape.

It’s not the type of story we deserve… but it’s the type of story we need, now more than ever.

And, because I didn’t mention it before. The art and animation? Superb. Character designs? Fuck, I’m pissed I missed out on the Angel Gabby plush Kickstarter because I want one. The acting? Aside from a hiccup once or twice, it’s well above average, especially in the analog horror scene, where the supposed best of the genre is often plagued with subpar, questionable acting. Stephanie Varens is great as Angel Gabby, but Francis, voiced by Venaimin, is my personal favorite. I loved watching the Q&A videos with him in them - there’s so much personality the actor manages to put into a character. And the soundtrack?

Listen to it here yourself. There’s a lot of obscure tracks that are difficult to find that were conveniently piled into one playlist. It’s mostly old doo-wop and country music, but I love how all of it, in some way, is thematically linked to angels, dreams, prayers, and sleep. It’s a masterful example of how a great soundtrack can elevate a good story to another level.

And, well - that’s really all I have to say on Angel Hare. I could go on more tangents or explore fan theories or really dig into my own interpretations of the text more than I already have, but this article has gone on long enough, and, really, as I’ve said at least a dozen times now, one of Angel Hare’s core strength is coming up with your own interpretation of the narrative. There’s a lot to be said about the religious over and undertones throughout the series - I genuinely think there’s an argument to be made that it’s an inherently Christian piece of media that explores Christian themes of faith and divine providence, which is something a lot of people who’ve watched Angel Hare have made not of - but, since the Mangan Sisters’ religious affiliation is unknown to me, and they’ve never said that they intended it to be an explicitly Christian work of art, it’s all speculation and further personal interpretation I won’t get into now.

More than anything, this was just an opportunity to try and break the mold of kvetching about things I don’t like, and instead talk about something I did like, and share it with others. Not just because I think Angel Hare and the Mangan Sisters deserve to have more eyes on them, but also because it’s an interesting experiment in writing for myself. There’s a reason the Angry Internet Critic schtick dominated online culture for so long. There’s a reason that it’s influence is still very much felt in the online media landscape today. Though most have toned down the theatrical, performative anger displayed by creators like the Angry Video Game Nerd and the Nostalgia Critic, the state of online content creation has become no less overwhelmingly negative in the intervening years.

It’s very easy to talk at length about something you don’t like. Conversely, it’s very difficult for most people to explain why they do like something. And, hopefully, if nothing else, I did that with Angel Hare today, and I also hope that, if you didn’t give it a watch, you’ll be inclined to now.

Just remember - it’s okay to let yourself be happy. You aren’t stupid or lesser or weak for wanting that. There’s nobility in suffering for a just cause, yes, but there’s no virtue in depriving yourself of joy and suffering needlessly. That’s vanity. Oh, and, also, don’t forget - even in your darkest times, know that someone is watching you. You may not see them, but there’s always someone in your corner, ready to help, if only you ask for it.

And she loves to hear you call.

ncG1vNJzZmixkaDCo7XAp5ipnV6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6wnKudXa68tnnAp2SappeauW60wKucZqOZmQ%3D%3D