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It’s a Huggy Wuggy horror show.
Parents are going through plush animal hell over a horror video game character named Huggy Wuggy. With a blue and red mouth, the shaggy monster shows off razor-sharp teeth when he smiles in the game Poppy Playtime.
Players solve puzzles to find the maniacal mascot, who then pops out of vents and chases them around. Scenes from the video game have popped up on YouTube and social media — and young children have reportedly been watching, according to reports from police.
Now, more knockoffs of the plush toy are infiltrating the streets of New York at souvenirs stands and internationally at street vendors, according to the New York Times. Created by Mob Entertainment, a video game studio, Poppy Playtime is set in an abandoned toy factory where Huggy Wuggy, one of the villains, goes missing. Moments from the game shared on social media are hardly PG and easy for parents to overlook because of the bear-like creature’s innocent-sounding name.
“It’s clearly a toy designed to be cute that has been twisted and warped and now it has this mouthful of horrible jagged teeth,” Jenna Stoeber, a horror media and video game expert, told the Times about Huggy Wuggy’s frightening countenance.
After Poppy Playtime was released in October 2021, a YouTube influencer posted a video of himself playing the game to his millions of followers, which garnered 33 million views. One month later, counterfeits of the creepy doll were hitting stands, with Drake Vogl, a licensing assistant at Mob Entertainment, noting that the company developed its own merch to meet demand.
“We’ve had to fight trademark and copyright squatters worldwide,” Vogl told the Times, with a colleague adding that “upwards of 50,000” dolls and toys were exported from China and seized by customs.
What’s worse, the scary doll is tricking parents who assume Poppy Playtime is just as innocent as Peppa Pig when the name pops up on YouTube and TikTok. One YouTube edit appeared to show a scene from the kid’s show “Peppa Pig,” Newsweek reported last year.
“One song includes the lyrics ‘I could hug you here forever, till you breathe your last breath together,’” Newsweek reported about a Huggy Wuggy song.
YouTube has scrubbed some of its kids’ content so young audiences don’t find Poppy Playtime videos on its children’s vertical, YouTube Kids and parents can turn off the autoplay feature, according to the Times. Still, there are creators lurking to scare little kids.
“There’s a lot of creators out there that will just create videos that are meant to game the algorithm for small children whose parents put an iPad in front of them and let YouTube videos play while they make dinners,” Ted Hentschke, head of productions at horror game publisher DreadXP, told the newspaper.
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