YouTube Live

"YouTube Live" is a special short for the titular online event held on November 22-23, 2008. The Happy Tree Friends acted as one of the hosts among other YouTube celebrities like The Black Eyed Peas rapper will.i.am, Tom Dickson of Will It Blend?, among others. The short itself was repurposed from the Hot Topic collaboration web ad that played before episodes, as it plays similarly minus the presence of the YouTube Live logo. It was played as intermission before Smosh's brief appearance preceding Akon's performance.

The standalone short was uploaded shortly after the event went live. It was made available on MondoMedia's YouTube channel on November 26, 2008.

Plot

Various Happy Tree Friends are in 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, this time by his stomach. He laughs for a moment before the claw slams him against the sides of the machine, alerting the others down below. After a few bashes, Cuddles struggles to remove himself from the claw before it slams him against the glass a few times, cracking it and killing him. 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.

Fates

Deaths

• Cuddles' face is bashed against the glass three times.

Injuries

• The claw grips Cuddles' stomach firmly. Cuddles is also slammed against the sides of the claw machine, injuring one of his ears, giving him blackeye, and breaking his teeth.

Survival rate

• Number of surviving main characters: 8
• Number of dead main characters: 1
• Total rate: 88.89%

Animation errors

• Toothy is only properly depicted with his large gapped buckteeth while smiling. All other expressions use the standard buckteeth for the mouth graphics.
• Lumpy's antlers change directions once.
• Flippy's beret is mirrored several times.
• When the Happy Tree Friends freak out after Cuddles' death, 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.

Differences from the Hot Topic web ad

Aside from the presence of the YouTube Live logo on the claw machine in this short, there are other differences:

• In the Hot Topic web ad, the arcade machines on the left side of the screen feature Buddhist Monkey on the sides. Since "Rink Hijinks" went through an edit that removed the imagery to be consistent with the machine's function as a claw machine in that short, the ones featured in "YouTube Live" lack it as well.
• Blood splatter does not appear on the glass after Cuddles is bashed against unlike in the Hot Topic web ad.

References in later episodes

• The Happy Tree Friends Break short "Claw" would later recycle the premise and setting of this short, albeit with different animations (having two different scenarios). Like the Hot Topic web ad, the YouTube Live logo is absent there.

Trivia

• The arcade machines are reused from "Rink Hijinks", while the vending machine is reused from "Nuttin' Wrong with Candy".

External links

• The short on YouTube