Max Gilardi

Max John Gilardi (/dʒɪˈlɑːrdi/ jil-AR-dee; born January 28, 1988), also known as Max G or his Internet pseudonym HotDiggedyDemon, is an American internet personality, YouTuber, cartoonist, animator, and voice actor. He is best known for his PONY.MOV web series, a parody of the popular children's animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, other viral videos, and his media analysis series known as Brain Dump.

Gilardi was born in Massachusetts in 1988.^{[1][‡ 3]} He is of Italian descent and has an older sister. He attended the Art Institute of Boston briefly before dropping out after one of four years in an animation major.^{[‡ 4]}

Gilardi, under the name "HotDiggedyDemon", first started creating Flash animations in the mid-2000s on Newgrounds as a teenager. Among shorts, he would experiment in launching his own original cartoon. These early efforts included Adam Android, about a superpowered robot boy, and Spookyville USA, about a town of monsters.^[2] In 2007, he began uploading his work to his YouTube channel. That year, he created the Jerry series, a collection of web animations detailing the terrible and mundane life of a man named Jerry, and people related to him.^[1][2]

In 2010, he created the Wacky Game Jokez, 4 Kidz! series,^[2] starring a fictional criminal named Mickey the Dick who is kidnapped by a corporation specializing in video-game parody content. In addition to creating animations, Gilardi co-hosted the Wisenheimers podcast with fellow animator Yotam Perel, also known as LazyPillow or LazyMuffin, from 2010 to 2012.^{[‡ 5]}

From 2011 to 2013, Gilardi gained notoriety for releasing his six-part video parody of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, PONY.MOV, an adult animated dark comedy web series in the art style of John Kricfalusi and Spümcø's The Ren & Stimpy Show.^[3][4][2] The series obtained a spin-off in the form of a Tumblr webcomic, Ask Jappleack, and each video highlights a different character from the main cast of the television series. Gilardi also gained notability for his comedic parodies of video games such as Five Nights at Freddy's, Cuphead,^[5] and Animal Crossing, due to their dark nature and subversive themes. The Animal Crossing parody has Isabelle, an innocent character in the game, worshipping Karl Marx.^[6][7]

The majority of Gilardi's YouTube videos are self-made: written, animated, and voiced by himself.^{[‡ 4]} In his more recent projects, he has experimented with 3D animation in conjunction with his 2D work.^[2][8]

On September 2, 2016, Gilardi launched a new YouTube series titled Brain Dump in which he reviews movies and other media, often satirically.^{[‡ 6]} The series has since become the main focus of Gilardi's channel, with an overarching narrative exploring his career and the show's three main characters. Brain Dump stars Gilardi himself, a ghost named Goofball, and a living television named Burnbot. In 2018, Gilardi released the video THE APU THAT I KNOW - Brain Dump, a 45-minute documentary about The Simpsons character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. It explores the 30-year history of the show and offers a critique of the 2017 documentary The Problem with Apu by Hari Kondabolu.^[9]

On May 3, 2024, Gilardi revealed that he had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia during one of his live streams, which had affected the scope of his animated work.^{[‡ 7]} In December 2022, Gilardi came out as bisexual.^{[‡ 8]}

In the text, these references are preceded by a double dagger (‡):

• Official website
• Max Gilardi at IMDb