Claw
| Claw | |
| |
| Date | April 18, 2012 (Mondo)[1] April 19, 2012 (YouTube) |
| Character(s) | Nutty Lumpy Flippy Toothy Lifty and Shifty Handy Giggles Cuddles |
| Origin | Happy Tree Friends Hot Topic web ad |
"Claw" is one of the Happy Tree Friends Break shorts. It reuses the setting and basic premise from the Hot Topic collaboration web advertisement, albeit with different death scenarios. This makes it the second Happy Tree Friends short based on the ad, after the clip featured on YouTube Live in 2008.
To date, this is the last Happy Tree Friends Break short published.
Plot[edit]
First scene[edit]
Various Happy Tree Friends are inside a claw machine. The claw moves down and picks up Cuddles by the head, who then falls loose. The claw once again picks up Cuddles by the head with a tighter grip this time, causing him to panic and cry for help. Handy jumps up to try to save Cuddles, but fails due to his lack of hands. Lifty and Shifty are next to try by pulling on Cuddles' legs, but this results in the rabbit's body being torn in half, dropping his internal organs and pouring down blood. As Cuddles is taken away, Flippy is beginning to flip out, while the rest of the Happy Tree Friends yell in terror and desperately knock against the machine, trying to get out.
Second scene[edit]
Various Happy Tree Friends are inside a claw machine. The claw moves down and picks up Cuddles by his back. As everyone else looks up, Cuddles struggles to escape the claw, only to eventually have his skin ripped off. After his body falls back down, everyone freaks out.
Fates[edit]
Deaths[edit]
- In the first scene, Cuddles' body is torn in half.
- In the second scene, Cuddles' skin is ripped off.
Survival rate[edit]
- Number of surviving main characters: 8
- Number of dead main characters: 1
- Total rate: 88.89%
Animation errors[edit]
- Toothy is depicted with normal buckteeth instead of his large gapped ones during certain expressions.
- Lumpy's antlers change directions once.
- Flippy's beret is mirrored several times.
- An additional joystick is accidentally drawn briefly on one of the arcade machines on the left side of the screen when the claw is grabbing Cuddles the second time in the first scene.
- While purposefully obscuring certain physical features is normally done in a crowd shot to ease animation, the second scene of this short ruins the effect due to Toothy moving further to the left when he and other Happy Tree Friends react to Cuddles losing his skin, showing Shifty without a tail.
- When the Happy Tree Friends freak out after Cuddles' death in either scene, Lifty's hand clearly phases through the claw machine, as a bit of it can be seen outside the machine's boundary every time he knocks.
Trivia[edit]
- Not counting any Happy Tree Friends videos belonging to the Break collection yet lacking a Break intro sequence, "Claw" is the only one whose intro plays in the middle of the short to bridge two different scenes. It is also the only Break short with a differently animated intro sequence, as it consists of a black screen with the prize machine's claw picking up the show's logo first (like in the YouTube Live short). Though followed by the "break" logo in the usual animation, there are no "bitten off" screen animations.
- "Claw" is also the only Break short to be divided into two parts, and each part plays a different variant of a given scenario.
- Unlike the original ad and YouTube Live version, the arcade machines on the left face right instead of left. This may have contributed to the "extra joystick" animation error mentioned above, as its placement matches where it would be if the arcade machines faced the original direction.
- "Claw" is the Happy Tree Friends short with the shortest title.