Web Animation / Guy Collins Short Films

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Guy Collins is an independent animator responsible for creating several popular YouTube short films, including the Raised By Zombies and Kaizo Trap series.

This page is meant to cover the short films of his that do not possess their own pages.

Tropes in this series include:

• Acid-Trip Dimension: In “Voyager”, the titular spacecraft enters one (represented by all of the lines suddenly being white against a black background) after falling into a black hole; among the surreal things seen is the TARDIS, which opens so the Doctor can pull Voyager back into the “normal” world.
• Alien Invasion: Some invading aliens (with a mothership right out of Independence Day) randomly appear in “Bagger 288”; Bagger manages to knock them out of the sky at the cost of his own life.
• All for Nothing: In “Overtaken”, a young man, stuck behind a redneck’s pickup on a one-lane road, finally manages to pass him when the road splits into two lanes. The two then get into a competition seeing who can pass the other… only to crash when the road narrows to one lane again. And then the boy is stuck behind the redneck on the escalator to heaven.
• All Just a Dream: “The Progress Bar” turns out to be a man’s nightmare of having to wipe everything he cares about on his computer to make space install an update, only for the update to be faulty and brick his computer; he wakes up in the morning to find, to his joy, that the update actually installed itself with no problem.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Electric fans in “Fan Death”, and the titular space probe in “Voyager”.
• Appliance Defenestration: At the end of “The Progress Bar”, the man, seeing the update he put so much into getting crash his computer, hurls the thing out of the window (he’s in an office building) out of rage. And then he wakes up.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever: In “Fan Death”, electric fans (and windmills and helicopters) are secretly sentient, and plotting the death of the human race; they were moving slowly, only snuffing out a few humans in the night, but when the South Koreans figure them out, they move to an outright rebellion.
• Bait-and-Switch: At one point in “Rage”, the chain of Disaster Dominoes leads to a car tire rolling at speed down a steep sidewalk; we then cut to a man just finishing setting up a house of cards down below. The car tire approaches him… and completely misses his project. And then a football that had been kicked into the air earlier in the short comes down and hits the cards.
• Banana Peel: At one point in “Lag”, the main character encounters one while running to the server; due to his current affliction, he doesn’t slip until after having already run past it.
• Big Electric Switch: This is how the lead electric fan sends out the signal for fans to move onto the second stage of their world domination plans in “Fan Death”.
• Big Red Button: A nuclear button shows up a few times- in “Socks With Sandals” (where it’s used against a guy wearing sandals over socks), “The Printer” (where it’s used against the world-devouring printer, ineffectively), and “Rage” (where it’s labeled “Nucleash”, and accidentally pressed in the progress of swatting a fly).
• Bird-Poop Gag: Very early in “Rage”, a bird in flight drops a load of guano right into the eye of a baseball outfielder; this results in him letting the ball he was trying to catch ricochet off him, continuing the chain of Disaster Dominoes.
• Bittersweet Ending: “Bagger 288” ends with Bagger, hated by humanity for much of the short, saving the world from invading aliens (It Makes Sense in Context, sorta) at the cost of his own life, but finally earning the respect of the human race- and remaining alive for just long enough to realize that he’s being celebrated.
• Burning Rubber: In “Overtaken”, streaks of flame appear behind the sports car and pickup truck as their owners make them tear down the overtaking lane.
• Can't You Read the Sign?: In one short, an anthropomorphic Bagger 288 (the heaviest land vehicle in existence at the time the short was made) decides to check out Perth; amidst shots of people fleeing in terror from the giant piece of machinery can be seen a sign reading “no heavy vehicles anytime”.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In “Stray”, the YouTube page seen at the end of the short has links to previous films in the series.
  • In the secret video for “Voyager”, the Nyan Cat that appears at the end greatly resembles the protagonist of “Stray”.
  • In the secret video for “Rage” (where God has to restart the world after humanity kills itself for what is implied to not be the first time), the young man from “Overtaken” appears briefly in Heaven.
• Contrived Coincidence: In “Stray”, a stray cat that dreams of being a famous Internet celebrity manages to get tangled up in multiple strands of colored twine that were in a display outside some craft store, and then jumps on the table of someone enjoying breakfast outdoors, getting pop tarts stuck to his sides. All of this making him incredibly resemble Nyan Cat.
• Creator Provincialism: Guy Collins is Australian, and most of the shorts- if they even have a defined location- take place in the country, usually in Perth specifically. This is most notable in “Bagger 288” because, in Real Life, the Bagger 288 strip-mining machine is located in Germany, but in the short it’s fairly close to Perth.
• Cruel Twist Ending:
  • In “Lag”, a man afflicted with real-life lag manages to cure it by entering a server building… only to trip over a power cord for a CPU; this makes him vanish, leaving behind only a paper that says “this user has disconnected”.
  • In “The Progress Bar”, a beleaguered office worker wakes up to find that the update that destroyed his computer was only a nightmare, and steps into the elevator to head home… ten seconds before the elevator’s OS is supposed to update.
  • “Clippy” ends with the beleaguered paperclip assistant finally finding work… only it’s just as a paperclip, filing some documents away in a dark and dusty archive.
• Cute Machines: “Bagger 288” manages to turn the largest land vehicle (at least at the time the short was made; it’s been supplanted by the Bagger 293) into an absolutely adorable Woobie who just wants to spend time in the field (or in a forest, which due to his size is basically a field to him) and relax, only to earn the ire of humanity due by being accidentally destructive.
• Deadly Rotary Fan: This is how the electric fans attack humanity in “Fan Death”; someone, even basic household fans are able to reduce human beings to Ludicrous Gibs.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: In “Bagger 288”, the city-sized UFO explodes dramatically after getting a hole punched in its center by Bagger; somehow, this doesn’t lead to UFO debris raining down on the city it was hovering over.
• Disaster Dominoes: “Rage” is a two-minute-long sequence of these, starting with a butterfly and ending with the Earth plunging into the sun after a nuclear war was triggered by a head of state hitting the Big Red Button while trying to swat a fly. Humorously, at one point the chain takes a 79-year break for an acorn dropped by a squirrel to grow into a tree that, eventually, breaks someone’s gutters.
• Distaff Counterpart: The secret video for “Voyager” introduces Voyager 2, who looks just like him but with eyelashes and, somehow, a ponytail.
• Dramatic Drop: In “Bagger 288”, a worker is seen dropping his coffee cup while witnessing Bagger 288 rip itself free of its discharge boom and simply roll out of the strip mine.
• Elevator Failure: “The Progress Bar” ends with the man being stuck in an elevator when it shuts down for a software update.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: In “Overtaken”, when the two cars crash due to neither driver being willing to let the other go ahead of them when the overtaking lane ends, the collision creates a massive explosion.
• Everything Makes a Mushroom: In “Overtaken”, the explosion of a car and a pickup truck (see Every Car Is a Pinto above) somehow creates a titanic mushroom cloud.
• The Face of the Sun:
  • In the secret video for “Voyager”, the probe (having returned to Earth through a bizarre and improbable series of events) is stuck in a science museum next to a solar system display containing a model sun with sunglasses.
  • In “Bagger 288”, Bagger’s longing Imagine Spot of a peaceful life puts a smiley face on the Sun.
• Face Palm: “Rage” ends with, after the Earth plunges into the sun, God being seen doing this while watching Earth plunge into the sun (an event triggered by a butterfly blowing out a man’s match) on his “Omni-Vision” screen.
• Faux Horrific: “Socks with Sandals” is about everyone having increasingly horrified reactions to a man wearing, well, socks with sandals, culminating in the police being called and the Nuclear Option being used (ineffectively) against him.
• Flying Saucer:
  • One of these appears “Voyager”, amidst the crowd of spaceships that the probe encounters.
  • In “Bagger 288”, a city-sized one straight out of Independence Day appears to attack an unknown city (which might be Perth).
• Gainax Ending: “Bagger 288” appears to be a fairly straightforward short about a sentient bucket-wheel excavator finding that humanity doesn’t actually like him… until the ending, where an Alien Invasion occurs, and Bagger 288 spontaneously develops jet boosters, flies up into the sky, and makes the alien mothership explode by slamming into it.
• Genius Loci:
  • Early in “Voyager”, the titular probe, lost in the depths of space, has an Imagine Spot about near-Earth space, which is filled with smiling satellites and a grinning Earth and Moon. (Whether celestial bodies are actually alive in the short’s universe, or if it’s just meant to show how cheery the Imagine Spot is, is unknown.)
  • In “Rage”, after humanity renders itself extinct with a nuclear war, the planet Earth (displaying the short’s trademark rage face) has had enough and decides to plunge itself into the sun, leaving behind a shocked Moon.
• Grapes of Luxury: In “Fan Death”, once electric fans enslave the human race, the lead fan is seen forcing human slaves to “feed” it grapes (which are just chopped up in its blades).
• Gray Rain of Depression: Most of “Clippy” (about the tragic life of a very hated paperclip) has one of these going on in the background.
• Gratuitous Russian: The title of “Печеньки”; in the comments, Guy admits that he named it that because he just likes the Cyrillic alphabet.
• Guy In Real Life: A “Guide to the Internet” poster seen at one point in “The Progress Bar” details this, as well as how children on the Internet are really adults.
• Hydrant Geyser:
  • One of these randomly pops off in “Socks With Sandals”.
  • This is part of the chain of Disaster Dominoes seen in “Rage”; a squirrel is caught in the resulting Water-Geyser Volley and loses its acorn, which leads to a 79-year delay in the chain while the tree grows, with the disasters eventually resuming when a stray branch from it breaks the gutter on a nearby house, leading to the guy who owns the house cutting it down… and causing it to fall into the road, which causes a car accident.
• Imagine Spot:
  • “The Scrollwheel” is eventually revealed to be one, with a man fantasizing about strangling a very inept computer user.
  • In “Stray”, a stray cat has one after discovering The Internet Is for Cats, where he becomes a viral celebrity… causing a family to take him in and give him a home.
  • Near the beginning of “Voyager”, the titular probe has one (depicted in a Thought Bubble rather than fullscreen), about how much better it would be to be orbiting the Earth than to be stuck in the depths of space.
  • Near the beginning of “Bagger 288”, the Bagger machine has one (again presented as a Thought Bubble rather than a full-screen scene) of himself resting in a field under the warm sun, rather than working his treads off in a strip mine.
• The Internet Is for Cats: Actually used to rather touching effect in “Stray”, where a stray cat stumbles across a laptop left open to a page of cat videos and starts dreaming of a better life as a viral star. At the end of the short, he’s finally achieved this wish, appearing in a video titled “Real-Life Nyan Cat”.
• It Won't Turn Off: In “The Printer”, a man sets a printer to print a very long document and finds that he can’t get it to stop- pressing the stop button, turning off the computer that the printer is attached to, and even unplugging it have no effect. In desperation, he rips out the printer’s supply of paper… only for the machine to start sucking in nearby objects to convert into paper. After it swallows a good portion of a major city (and a nuke sent to stop it for good measure), it’s finally disposed of by launching it into space… only for people to wake up the next day and see paper falling from the heavens, and a gigantic chunk missing from the Moon. In the secret video, something finally does manage to stop it- running out of ink.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: “Lag” opens with a man’s house being struck by lightning while he’s playing a video game; the electricity travels through the TV, console, and controller and into him… and he then discovers that he’s being afflicted with lag in real life.
• Made of Indestructium:
  • In “The Printer”, nothing can be done to destroy the device- even a nuclear warhead sent crashing down on it is only converted into more paper.
  • In “Voyager”, the titular space probe survives being shot by a laser cannon, reentering an atmosphere without any sort of shielding (twice) and even gets better from being spaghettified!
• Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: All of the shorts; for bonus points, the music is public domain, and there aren’t even any sound-effects.
• Nameless Narrative: In all of the short films, only five characters have names- God and Clippy (who don’t really count since Guy Collins didn’t come up with their names), Voyager, Voyager 2, and Bagger 288.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: For most of “Bagger 288”, Bagger 288 doesn’t demonstrate any abilities that wouldn’t naturally come from being a skyscraper-sized Sentient Vehicle beholden to just a bit of cartoon physics. And then some aliens randomly invade, and he suddenly gains giant retractable rocket, and the ability to turn his bucket-wheel (which happens to look like a giant buzzsaw) into an actual giant buzzsaw.
• One-Word Title: Three shorts have one- “Lag”, “Stray”, and “Rage”.
• Produce Pelting: In the “Clippy” short, when Bill Gates introduces the titular paperclip on stage he (Clippy) is immediately under a fusillade of tomatoes.
• Protagonist Title: Three shorts have one-“Voyager” (starring an anthropomorphic Voyager 1), “Clippy” (starring Microsoft’s infamous paperclip), and “Bagger 288” (starring an anthropomorphic, well, Bagger 288).
• Pun: In “Fan Death”, the murderous electric fans are called “fanatics” by the news.
• Ramming Always Works: How Bagger takes down the alien mothership in “Bagger 288”.
• Sentient Vehicle:
  • The star of “Voyager”, although exactly how much an unmanned space probe counts as a “vehicle” is debatable.
  • “Bagger 288” stars the titular giant mining machine, who manages to get out of the strip mines one day with dreams of a happy life only to discover that humans aren’t too keen on having a machine that has a multi-story buzzsaw on the front hanging around their cities.
• Shout-Out:
  • At the end of “The Scrollwheel”, when the events involving the person from the thought bubble are revealed to be taking place inside a larger thought bubble, the person using the computer can be seen searching up Inception.
  • “Voyager” is loaded with these- in interplanetary space, the Voyager probe encounters several ships from Star Wars, the USS Enterprise, the Great A’Tuin, and the Red Dwarf. Then he crash-lands on an alien planet with a Monolith and a Stargate... and the Stargate sends him into a black hole, which he gets out of with a little help from the Doctor.
  • The alien mothership from “Bagger 288” greatly resembles the one from Independence Day.
• Stealth Pun: The Disaster Dominoes in “Rage” were all set in motion by an innocent little butterfly. The short film is an example of the butterfly effect.
• The Stinger:
  • Technically they don’t come after the credits, but the “secret videos” uploaded to Guy Collins’ youtube channel serve as ones for various shorts; each secret video is a thirty-second clip showing something that happened after each short ended, often wrapping things up with a final gag.
  • “The Progress Bar” has a more traditional example- stick around to the end of the card promoting a few other shorts in the series, and you’ll see the elevator’s OS update be abruptly interrupted by a power cut.
• Stray Animal Story: “Stray” tells of a stray cat who longs for love, and believes that his only chance to make humans care about him is to become a star in a viral Internet clip.
• Surveillance Station Slacker: The CSIRO man in charge of monitoring the signal from the Voyager probes is seen nodding off near the beginning of “Voyager”, although it’s downplayed as most of the interesting events of the short are kept from Earth due to Voyager losing his signal, and the next time we see the man he’s awake.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: The secret videos for “Voyager” and “Clippy” introduce a female Voyager probe and paperclip, respectively; they each resemble the male stars of the shorts except for having eyelashes and, for some reason, hair.
• Time-Passes Montage: The secret video for “Bagger 288” has one focusing on Bagger’s wreckage, as the city he saved is fixed and the place he crashed down is turned into a memorial park for him.
• Travel Montage: “Bagger 288” has two- one where Bagger 288 is fresh out of the strip mine and heading towards anywhere interesting (which includes a scene of it “walking” on an elevated freeway), and a second where it sadly leaves the city before finding a nice uninhabited place to settle down in- only to be “attacked” by a group of people protesting mining.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: At one point in “Stray”, the cat distracts a group of people walking into a building labeled “Youtube Commenters Anonymous”.
• Verbed Title: “Overtaken” has one.
• Your Size May Vary:
  • In “Clippy”, the titular paperclip goes from being somewhere between knee- and waist-height to a human to being the size of an actual paperclip depending on the scene.
  • “Bagger 288” isn’t very good at keeping track of exactly how big Bagger is supposed to be, even ignoring the Travel Montage scenes where he’s deliberately outlandishly large. Additionally, he seems to have shrunk quite a bit in the secret video