Drop What You’re Doing and Watch ‘Bigtop Burger’

Worthikids

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching Bigtop Burger.

Believe it or not, there are little corners of joy on the internet. And one of those corners is Bigtop Burger, an episodic animated web series on YouTube about a food truck run by clowns.

Buoyed by an invitingly casual, low-stakes tone, the series follows the day-to-day of the Bigtop Burger food truck. Which, of course, means battling super-sized elk, street-racing rivals, and breaking the rules of physics — you see, the boss, Steve, may or may not be from another dimension.

The recurring cast includes the upbeat Penny (voiced by Lindsay Small-Butera), the sardonic Billie (Olivia Craighead), and the chill if irritable Tim (Tim Batt). Series creator Ian Worthington provides the voice of Steve. Guests have included the likes of comedian Guy Montgomery and YouTube sensations like Chris Fleming, SungWon Cho, and Tom “Featureman” Willett.

The show offers a perfect balance of wholesome content and surreal madness. Despite all the insanity, you get a sense that the gang really does care for one another. It’s a unique blend of sincere positivity and batshit absurdism that scratches a flash era itch while keeping things warm and fuzzy.

Watch all five episodes of Bigtop Burger here:

Who made this?

Bigtop Burger is the creation of Michigan-based animator, voiceover actor, and musician Ian Worthington, better known as Worthikids. Working in the open-source computer graphics software Blender, Worthington’s style has increasingly blurred the line between 3D models and a 2D “look.” You can, and should, subscribe to Worthikids on YouTube. If you like what you see, you can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram, where he regularly posts making-of content.

More Videos Like This

• Everything Worthikids makes is straight-up gold. So, it’s hard not to recommend his entire library of original short films. For my money, these two are must-watches: witches figuring out how Tinder works and what happened to Emperor Palpatine after Darth Vader threw him down that Death Star shaft
• Worthikids has some bananas creative videos that imitate Rankin/Bass Productions stop-motion films (think 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). Watch the ooky-spooky Hatbox Troubles
• Other Worthikids videos make use of existing audio. My favorite is this terrifyingly expressive re-creation of an episode of Monster Factory, a YouTube show run by Polygon where the McElroy brothers do ungodly things with video game character creators
• If you’re thinking to yourself, “God, that end credits song rips — where do I listen to that?” The answer is WorthikidsMusic

Related Topics: Animation, The Queue

Meg has been writing professionally about all things film-related since 2016. She is a Senior Contributor at Film School Rejects as well as a Curator for One Perfect Shot. She has attended international film festivals such as TIFF, Hot Docs, and the Nitrate Picture Show as a member of the press. In her day job as an archivist and records manager, she regularly works with physical media and is committed to ensuring ongoing physical media accessibility in the digital age. You can find more of Meg's work at Cinema Scope, Dead Central, and Nonfics. She has also appeared on a number of film-related podcasts, including All the President's Minutes, Zodiac: Chronicle, Cannes I Kick It?, and Junk Filter. Her work has been shared on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, Business Insider, and CherryPicks. Meg has a B.A. from the University of King's College and a Master of Information degree from the University of Toronto.