Film Theory: This Series is NOT Made for Kids! (Guby)

Hey, kids! My name is Guby, and today, we're gonna learn about Film Theory. Do you know about Film Theory? My favorite part of Film Theory is the murder. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Film Theory, the show that wants to know your favorite color. My favorite color is the subscribe button. If there's one thing that I have been most excited about coming in as the host of Film Theory, it's the opportunity to really dive into the work of independent creators. Don't get me wrong, big-budget content is g

reat, but I found that, especially in horror, it's the independent creators who are able to craft the most memorable scares, because they can dive into what truly terrifies them instead of what a boardroom thinks will spook the ideal number of people, but not too much because we want them to come back for a sequel. That independence, that level of creativity and mystery and horror is what we're going to find today in Guby. The heck is Guby? I hear you ask. Well, other than a word that is really

fun to say, Guby is an analog horror channel that you're gonna find right here on YouTube.com. But rather than getting its spoops from evil animatronics like the Walten Files, or creepy found footage like the Backrooms, or body horror like The Man in the Suit, Guby is more like a parody of classic call-and-response children's entertainment like Dora the Explorer or Blue's Clues. This is number one. Then, this is number two. It comes after one. But hey, YouTube, it's not too much like those serie

s. As the channel description tells you repeatedly, Guby is not made for kids. This is one of those series that was recommended to us by the good folks over on the Film Theory subreddit, and I have to say, you guys nailed it. Matt and I have been covering it over on GTLive, and it's some of the most fun that we've ever had over thinking things. I saw some lore. Abby. Last seen in her home, January 3rd, 20... 2004? Watching something in her pajamas. Parents. Jamie and Albert Lang. Hold no one. So

meone in the living room. Yeah, right. Oh. Oh. No, honestly, we really overthought it. By the time we got to our fifth Cypher puzzle, I knew this was something that I just had to cover here on the channel. And after diving into it, there is so much more to Guby going on than the happy-go-lucky surface would have you believe. You see, underneath this facade of a smiling yellow noodle friend is a dark secret. An evil being literally worming its way into reality through the television and punishing

any children that refuse to play along. Pick your favorite animal, loyal theorists. It's time to solve this mystery. So, first things first. Guby is one of those series that is very dense. Covering each and every puzzle would take a very long time, so what we're gonna do instead is hit the broad strokes and then dive into the main mysteries of the story. Cool? Cool. Let's start by going over what's actually in the Guby videos. Each of these covers a topic that you'd expect to see in a kindergar

ten classroom. Think letters, numbers, the color of blood, that sort of thing. Now, you may not have noticed, but there is something very strange going on here. Yeah, the more you watch, the more you realize that something's not quite right with Guby. Sometimes, Guby takes drastic personality shifts, asking for personal information. Do you wanna see my favorite number? It's on one of these. Can you read those numbers on the front to me? And other times, Guby lets his darker interests come throug

h. Do you wanna see my favorite animal? It's one of these. And then sometimes, at random intervals, glitches will overtake the video. Today, we're gonna learn about... ...sounds. You get the idea. Now, we don't need to sit here and go through every single video explaining exactly what happens. Please, go show some love to Guby and watch through the videos yourself. But I do wanna talk about what's buried in these videos. See, in classic analog horror fashion, during some of these glitches, there

will be pictures or information hidden in just a single frame of the video. And let me tell you, Guby loves to use this trick. In Learned Numbers, there's some morse code hidden in one of the glitches that's difficult to read, but likely translates to evolving. In Learned Shapes, we see various incarnations of Guby across different mediums. A realistic Guby, a puppet Guby, an old-school cutout-style Guby. And in Learn Colors, the whole video ends with an extended glitchy clip of an entirely dif

ferent video. But most prominently, throughout multiple videos, we see bits and pieces of missing persons posters for children, all aged between 3 and 14. And yeah, just from a straightforward content perspective, that's Guby. So, what the heck is actually going on here? Well, let's start out with the obvious bit. Guby here, he's clearly the reason that these kids are going missing. The first big piece of this puzzle is that the kids in these posters all seem to have gone missing while they were

watching TV or in their living rooms. And we know that they were watching Guby because in Learned the Alphabet, we see that a victim's sister left the room to find their grandmother's credit card. Remember the clip we showed earlier? It's on one of these. Bring it over here. What's more, during many of these glitches, we can see multiple images of different children sitting in living rooms looking directly at the camera, almost as if the camera were actually a television. These are the kids tha

t went missing, and we're seeing them from the point of view of the television, from the point of view of Guby. So, somehow, Guby is kidnapping these kids through the TV. And we can even figure out how Guby is doing it, too. Over on GT Live, we wondered if the kids answering Gooby's questions were sort of giving him permission to come into the real world and take them. But after rewatching the series, that's not actually what happens. In Learned Animals, Guby has this exchange with a viewer that

we can hear. The kid answers Guby's question, and everything is great. But elsewhere in the video, the child interrupts Guby, and Guby does not take it well. Guby freaks out, and notice that subtitle? It might look like nonsense, but it's actually jumbled up letters that when put in the right order read, He's telling the child exactly how to play along, to get the answers he wants in the way he wants, when he wants. Also, notice that Guby straight up disappears here. This has to be when he's co

ming out of the TV to get the kids and drag them into his world. And just so we're all on the same page, this isn't the only time this happens. Again, those jumbled up captions read, Guby is then interrupted for a third and final time at the climax of the video. It's called a... Once again, Guby goes wild, and the video just cuts to black. Oh, and also worth noting that the subtitles tell us that all animals have teeth, which is just factually inaccurate. I thought this was an educational progra

m. So, Guby seems to be taking these kids that he sees as not doing what they're told, speaking when they're not being spoken to, and dragging them into the TV. But, what becomes of them then? Well, they become a part of Guby, still aware and still somewhat conscious. During many of the glitches across the whole series, sometimes sequences of numbers will flash on screen. Adept theorists will recognize these as some sort of cipher, and after some trial and error, I was able to figure out that th

ey were actually tap codes, which we've covered before over on our Sister Location Game Theory. So, go check that out if you want a really in-depth explanation. If I'm being frank, most of these aren't super important to the overall mystery. They're more so used to emphasize the creep factor. Like here, where they spell out, He is not who he says he is. Spoopy, to be sure, but nothing new. However, there is another tap code hidden in a later video that reads, Where are we? asked Sophia. We are i

n a beautiful meadow, whispered Mikayla. This is not a meadow, responded Sophia. Mikayla and Sophia were two of the kids from the missing persons posters, and as we see here, they can still see. They can even talk to each other, and some of them even think that something is wrong. And also, we know that this meadow that Mikayla is seeing isn't some sort of weird purgatory TV space, because some of the kids try to communicate with the outside world through Guby. Like here, in Learn the Alphabet,

where there's a moment where one of the kids seems to speak out of the TV. My favorite words are, Help me. Please help me. That's not Guby. That's a little girl speaking. Likely Mikayla, since that's the missing person poster we see shortly after this. In fact, we hear multiple voices come out of Guby. Remember the deep male voice we heard back in Learn Numbers? And in Learn Sounds, we hear Guby's favorite sound, and that sounds a lot like kids screaming. You wanna hear my favorite sound? Plus,

the name of the channel isn't just Guby. It's Guby and Friends. The Friends are clearly the people that he's absorbed. And after all of that evidence, if you're still doubting this, well, this should put a pretty little bow on the point. During one of the glitches, a random quote appears. This one isn't encrypted in a cipher or jumbled in a subtitle. It just reads, If that made no sense to you, fair. It also made no sense to me, but after some digging, I found that it's actually a quote pulled f

rom the short story titled I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, which, hear this, involves a character being merged into an artificial intelligence and tortured forever. I know, this was actually one of the main inspirations for The Amazing Digital Circus, and it sounds a lot like what's happening here with Guby. Just some food for thought, y'all. So that answers what Guby is and how he's doing it, but why? Why is he kidnapping all of these kids and sucking them into his TV purga

tory? Well, for us to solve that part of the mystery, we're going to have to really dig deep and solve the biggest puzzle in the series so far. In the video Learn With Guby, we quickly see that something is off. This is the first video with no subject and no Guby. Instead, there's just static. But, if you look down at the captions, you will see something. All right! Oh my god! So, if you're like me, your mind is first going to jump to the thought that this is some sort of cipher hidden in the cl

osed captions. But notice that some of the letters in these captions are different colors than the rest of the text. That's actually impossible to do on YouTube captions. Yeah, these are physically burned into the video, but just look like YouTube captions. Honestly, this was an amazing way to play with my expectations, and I loved it. Anyway, if we go through and collect all of the differently colored letters, you find that it makes a blank YouTube URL. And as soon as the fake captions stop, ot

her letters and numbers start flashing up on screen, spelling out this. Now, your first thought may be that this is the rest of the YouTube URL, but it's actually too long to work. If you try to go to the video with this code, it just breaks. But here's the cool thing, and shout-outs to Rubex3 on the Game Theory subreddit for helping us figure this one out on GTLive. Down in the description, you'll find this string of numbers, and if you line these up with the previous sequence, you get a new st

ring of text that is the perfect length for a YouTube URL. Plug that sucker in, and voila! A valid link to a brand new video. I combed through this video frame by frame to make sure that we caught everything, and while there are a ton of hidden images, they're all related to things that we've already seen in Guby. X-rays of children, images and cutouts of the missing kids, photographs of animals, diagrams of the human brain, and multiple pieces of what I can only call fan art? But the biggest pi

ece of information we learn here actually comes from the captions once again. Though at first, this might just seem like a strange jumble of random words with no rhyme or reason, if you take the first letter of each word here, it actually spells out this message. How I feast upon the teeth. How I feast upon the teeth. How I feast upon the teeth. To me, this reads clearly as a message from Gooby himself. But what about the teeth? That is weird, right? Yeah, it is. But it's also been a recurring b

it throughout the whole series. I mean, there was that time where the subtitles incorrectly told us that all animals have teeth, teeth are present in a lot of the frame-perfect glitch imagery, and at the end of one of the videos, we see this clip. Here you are, little muncher. We don't want you. This was pulled from an educational stop-motion animation called The Munchers, a fable meant to help children take care of their teeth. Here you are, little muncher. We don't want you. Teeth are everywhe

re in this series. But why? Well, that could point to a couple of things. Firstly, teeth dreams. Stick with me here. Have you ever had a dream where your teeth just get really loose and start falling out of your head? If you have, you're not alone. It's actually a fairly common dream, with philosophers dating back all the way to ancient Greece trying to figure out what they mean. One of the most popular modern interpretations of this is that the teeth in your dreams represent power. Teeth are to

ols used to bite, to rip, and tear. So, that makes sense. Well, Gooby is obsessed with teeth precisely because they represent power in the subconscious human brain. And that would matter to Guby because Guby is literally a thought manifested into reality. See, back in the Learn Animals video, we encounter another glitch, but this one is different. It's less of a glitch and more of an interruption where we stay on this series of monologues for a long time. They talk about how the narrator's mind

has been consumed by thoughts of him, how this narrator imagined his antics, how his name conjured up laughter, joy, innocence, and wonder, how he was an embodiment of childhood itself, and then how he was a manifestation of the narrator's desires, his aspirations, willing itself into existence through the narrator's mind. Most importantly, though, this being started taking the wheel, started pulling the strings enough so that the narrator couldn't even remember a time when this being wasn't a p

art of them. And by the end of it, the narrator was just a vessel for this being to will itself into existence. Not gonna lie, that's really cool. And this idea reminded me a lot of something known as a tulpa or thought form. These are beings that come into existence through the sheer force of someone believing in them hard enough. Basically, Guby here is not a real being, but was made real because of whoever imagined him. But this does leave one major dangling thread. Who made Guby originally?

Who was the narrator who brought Gooby into existence? Well, we can get a pretty good idea of that, too. Throughout the glitches, we can see a sharply dressed man wearing a realistic Guby mask, surrounded by an audience of children. Given the width of the man's jacket lapels, the sort of celluloid yellow aesthetic of the images, and the audience of kids that he's talking to, this is giving some real 70s show energy to me. See, in the early days of TV, particularly between the 50s and 70s, a lot

of sitcoms and children's programming was filmed in front of a live studio audience. This clip from Howdy Doody gives you a pretty good example of what I mean. So it looks like this guy is the originator of Guby, and that he hosted a show as Guby sometime during the 1970s, wearing a mask to physically embody Gooby to help him take the wheel. Then, at some point, Guby made the jump from this sort of classic broadcast TV-style program to something digital, and we know that for a fact for a few rea

sons. Firstly, we often see Guby turn into sort of rudimentary wireframes, which are the backbone of modern 3D animation. Secondly, the dates on the missing persons posters point to them happening sometime in the 2020s. And hey, let's be real, I doubt there are going to be many kids watching anything that isn't digital these days. When you step back and look at all of these pieces on the table, the puzzle becomes so much clearer, and it explains so much. Why is Guby taking the form of a call-and

-response TV series? If kids hear his question and believe that he's real enough to answer him, that would make a tulpa, a being that can only exist if people believe it exists, more powerful. Why would Guby be obsessed with teeth? Well, if teeth represent power in your dreams and dreams come from your mind, a tulpa would be obsessed with them. Why is Guby targeting kids and kidnapping them? Well, if kids watching his show aren't playing along, aren't believing in him enough to answer his questi

ons the way he wants, when he wants, they'd be making him weaker. Plus, do you know what children happen to have more of than adults? Teeth. Yeah, kids are born with all of their teeth. They're just inside of their skull. And kids just tend to be far more imaginative than adults. Like, literally, multiple studies have concluded that people become less creative as they age just because they settle into mindsets or worldviews. So again, Guby would want that additional imagination to help him manif

est in reality. The pieces just line up far too well. At this point, there isn't quite enough information to truly solve the mystery of what's going on here in Guby. There are a lot of dangling threads that we just don't have great answers for. For example, there are other clips from nature documentaries sprinkled throughout the series. It's because of their large and complex brains that mammals are able to pass survival information from generation to generation. And another picture that pops up

repeatedly in the glitches showing this man from the 1930s or 40s. And then there's the song that plays over the narrator's creepy monologue. This thing. I see what I am. I'm too wise. I let off all control. One girl. This is a real song titled Any Little Girl That's a Nice Little Girl Is the Right Little Girl for Me from the 1910s. How does any of that fit with the idea of teeth? Or connect with the different eras of entertainment like Guby's bridging? And what does any of it have to do with t

he concept of a tulpa? Those are all mysteries for another day, my friends. Or who knows? Maybe Gooby was made by a dentist who was just really into retro music. Either way, I for one can't wait to take a bite out of the next part of Guby's story. But hey, that's just a theory. A film theory! And cut! If you want another theory about a cool analog horror series with an incredible aesthetic, go check out our video all about Bois Vert. It's such a great personal story. We should really go check in

on that series again sometime, shouldn't we? Or if you want another theory about a kid trapped in a computer, check out our theory all about the demonically possessed Dora the Explorer. Yeah, I'm not making that up. Either way, I'll see you all next week.