Feeling lost? Well, fear not.  If you’ve read the ”About” page and character bios, and have been watching HUSTLE so far, you’re probably aware that we specialize in a certain breed of self-referential humour.  And self-reference can leave a person feeling a little out of the loop if they don’t know the source of the refrences.  So I’m here to help, with a list of the videos you may want to watch to bring yourself up to speed with our characters and refrences.

HUSTLE has evolved out of a series of LoadingReadyRun videos we’ve made over the years, in which the cast played exaggerated versions of themselves.  The clearest example of this sort of video can be found in the Matt/Graham room-mate videos We produced during Season 5.  These videos would lay the groundwork for the character dynamics btween Graham and myself.  These Videos include:

Moving Out, Bandwidth Exceeded, Format War, and Son of a Bitch.

Paul’s character, the mad-scientist-y tinkerer type, also has a fairly rich history in our videos, including Brain Transplants Made Easy,  and Bagel Time.  Installation Anxiety is the quintessential video in this series.

You can trace the development of the other characters in films like Easy Bake Spore, Morning After, Worst Homosexual,  A Little Too Human, and Pull Yourself Together.

So that covers the history of the characters, but what about the in-episode references?  Well, there’s some videos you may want to watch through to get these as well.  I’ll break the references Up by episode.

Episode 1 - Laundry:

The only real references in this episode are to character establishers lisetd above, the Room-mate Quadrilogy, and maybe The Worst Homosexual.  There is also a brief reference, in the form of a voicemail message, to Those Games We Played.

Episode 2 - Red:

You’ll find the core reference in this episode is to: Rap-Star 64K (along with the other 64k Raps).

Episode 3 - Critical:

This episode doesn’t directly reference any previous videos, so you get off easy on this one.   We did re-use the music from How to Talk Like a Pirate, though, and it’s a great video, so go watch it.  ARR.  We did also reference This Skittles Commercial.

Episode 4 - Fixer:

This episode has a neccessary pre-requisite.  In 2007 we went to the Penny-Arcade Child’s Play Charity Dinner after conducting the first Desert Bus for Hope. While there, we filmed Lock Out, guest starring Jerry Holkis and Wil Wheaton.  Wil Wheaton reprised his role from Lock Out in this episode, as the LRR crew returns to the 2008 charity dinner.  Mostly though, this episode just follows up on previous episodes of HUSTLE.

Episode 5 - Street:

This is another episode that stays fairly self contained.  No real references to other videos that I can think of off the top of my head, aside from Paul rapping “This is Why I’m Paul” from Rapstar 64k, and a line lifted from AWESOME! We… Shot This.

Episode 6 - Viral: 

This is where things get fun, references all over the place.  For those not old enough to remember the 80’s, and early 90’s there’s Captain Planet and the Power Rangers. The happy ball comes from Inside D&D 4th Ed. There’s the obvious Warriors of Darkness, from The Truce, and Rapid Fire 2.  We also reference The Con, and Three PS3’s (I’ve linked the ripped off YouTube version with over a million views, and almost the same number of death threats.) .  To the extent that we intentionally named it in the scene, there’s a Geometry Wars reference. Oh, and you’ll find the baby meercats here.  Also, because we’re cool like that, if we talk about making fake virals and putting them on Youtube, it’s safe to assume we’re actually going to do it.  They are as follows: My Girlfriend Games, YouTube is Stupid! And so are its users, I heard you liek tits, The boy who cried wolf, Things On My Head, YOU HAVE SPACE JUMP!, and our biggest success story,  Epic Nunchuk Fail, which has found its way to Break.com, collegehumor.com, and failblog.org.

So, that about sums it up.  I’ll try to update when new episodes come out to document the references we’re making, just so everyone stays up to speed.  Enjoy!

-Matt