And you're planning on mentioning Poppy the Performer:

You are incorrect.

It's Reboot.

It's always been Reboot.

Not that Sub-Williams-Street-level shock-schlock.

The whole fucking setup is homage-de-Reboot by way of Five Characters in Search of An Exit (Twilight Zone). Even the connections to "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" are surface-level at best, in a 'buncha humans trapped by an AI" way, but it ends there.

On the other hand, Caine's adventures are the equivalent of each episode of Reboot's game-cubes (not that one),

Transplanting the characters into new roles in dangerous, frightening scenarios that are meant to be enjoyable fun.

Defeat results in being transformed into a dangerous seemingly nonsapient squiggly THING.. only instead of being nullified if you lose the game, you get abstracted if you lose your grip.

There's more than a little Hexadecimal in both Caine and Gangle.

If you're doing a video based on an homage to 90s animation, it might behoove you to research the first full length all-CGI animated cartoon.

I mean, the Reboot connection is more obvious than Jax being a parody/expy of Max from Sam & Max, and that's blindingly fucking obvious.

"I'm the funny one, Sam."

I wonder what made more of an impact on GooseWorx, a highly re-run animated series that would have been on the air when they were a toddler/young gradeschooler and is also a literal milestone in CGI animation history, or an obscure chunk of sophomoric Japanese shock-art? Hmmm.

And while we're at it. While there's an AI in I have No Mouth and I Must Scream, the 'hell is other people' aspect of No Exit seems far more apt to the scenario they're in, especially in light of its semi-adaptation for the Twilight Zone:

And no, it isn't just that there's a clown.

Those that are younger will know the No Exit concept from The Good Place.

And I think the situation is going to be far more "No Exit" than it is going to be IHNMAIMS, because I don't think there's an 'out' for them to get to. Digital files never get transferred, they get copied.

1961.

Donna Douglas, posing in character as Ellie May Clampett in the silly 60s comedy The Beverly Hillbillies.

Donna Douglas in the brilliant Twilight Zone episode "Eye of the Beholder."

A good example is my favorite Twilight Zone episode, “The monsters are due on Maple street.” The whole thing is a commentary on the red scare at the time but it goes much deeper than that. It delves into human paranoia and is a great bottle neck story. You can fit it in any time period with paranoia and it can still work because it touches on universal themes of paranoia and not just the current politics of the time it came from.