Haat Films

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
/wiki/Haat Filmscreator

Hat Films are a trio of British gamers who have several series on Minecraft, Magicka, and Trine and now have a podcast of their own. They are:

  • Ross Hornby (djh3max): In terms of character, Ross is essentially the Straight Man and the unofficial leader of the group. In their Minecraft videos, his skin portrays him as a very hairy man.
  • Chris Trott (Trottimus): Could be considered The Chick of the group as he is usually portrayed as the least violent and even called weepy-eyed on occasion. His skin in Minecraft is that of a walrus in a labcoat.
  • Alex Smith (Alsmiffy): In Minecraft, he is an odd fellow. He is very violent and yet, soft-spoken, although he rarely says anything profound. His skin is that of a green man with no mouth wearing a suit, but is not a creeper or even a goblin. He's just Green. In one special video, his vision is shown to filter everything as a hell-ish nightmare world.

Some of their Minecraft adventures include:

  • Forsaken Lands: Their very first Minecraft adventure, on one of the more famous Minecraft adventure maps.
  • Survival Island: Their first livestream.
  • Skylands: Another well-known adventure map, and the sequel to the Forsaken Lands adventures. The gang explore the amazing floating Skylands... And die. A lot. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Skyblock: One of the more interesting "challenge" maps, the trio find themselves on a single block of dirt in the air, with a chest (containing a block of ice and a bucket of lava), and a tree. Their task is to create a cobblestone generator, get to the other tiny island in the distance, and complete various challenges. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? A lot, in fact.
  • An Epic Hatventure: Rather than do a pre-existing adventure map this time, the trio are going through a brand new adventure map made just for them by Fyre UK (which will be released to the public in time, and Fyre UK will also release timelapses of the building of the map over time). Complete with challenge dungeons with puzzles, and an Overseer guiding them along their path through pre-recorded messages, the Hat Trio put to use what they've learned over the course of their previous adventures. They still die a lot.

They can be found here.

Haat Films provides examples of the following tropes:
  • Alliteration: In the standard description for the Forsaken Lands videos, we get "A band of brave British lads".
  • Amazing Technicolor Population: Alsmiffy has green skin.
  • Ascended Fanboys: Ever since Minecraft's Beta 1.7 update, the Hatters have been making official trailers for Mojang.
  • Author Avatars: Well duh. It's Minecraft.
  • The Cameo: Simon and Lewis appear in the Minecon trailer.
    • Not to mention several other Minecraft players and celebrities.
  • Catch Phrase: "Good day!", as well as "Buttery biscuit base," which is a reference to this video.
  • Chromatic Arrangement: Outside of Minecraft, they tend to pick characters that are Color-Coded for Your Convenience. Ross is usually blue, Alex green, and Chris either red or orange.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Chris does one at the start of Skylands Episode 8 when he's announcing their plans. He and Ross have a duel of Cluster F Bombs later in the episode.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Sometimes, the gang can come up with some rather clever things. In Skyblock, they created a cobblestone tower designed to make enemy mobs fall to their death so they can easily farm the loot with limited risk. In Epic Hatventure, Alex, of all people, creates a "diving bell" that allows the group to go deep underwater to recover Chris' stuff.
  • Cutting the Knot: In Epic Hatventure, dungeons have one main rule, to prevent the trio from breaking puzzles - no breaking or placing blocks. However, the boys consider situations where it is impossible to progress without doing so as an exception to the rule, such as in the second dungeon where a Creeper blew up the redstone wiring connecting a switch to a door they needed to get past, and so they broke down the door.
  • Dead Baby Comedy: Quite literally in Skylands — when blowing up the Rustic Sky dungeon, the boys joke about there being babies on the dungeon when it explodes.
  • Double Entendre: The guys get some mileage out of jokes about "getting wood," "boning" wolves, and "porking" each other (throwing a pork chop to someone), and when Chris resorts to punching a Creeper to death after his sword breaks, he says "I just fisted a Creeper!"
  • Five-Man Band:
  • Funny Background Event: In Skylands episode 29, while Chris is fighting a spider with a golden record, Ross gets blown up and killed after teleporting from the spawn. Twice.
  • Good Bad Bugs: In Skylands, Ross falls down a hole and finds himself face-to-face with a Creeper... who doesn't explode. The others throw some blocks to Ross and he quickly builds his way out of the hole, during which the Creeper continues to just look around at the Hatters without exploding or even starting its timer. They name it Fred the Passive Creeper.
    • Near the end of the Skylands playthrough, Ross and Alex spot an Enchantment Table floating in mid-air, out of the blue, much to their bewilderment, since Skylands was made long before that particular block was implemented in Minecraft.
  • Hurricane of Puns: Episode 31 of Skylands has a hurricane of "leaf" puns.
  • Hostile Weather: Here , the boys are attacked by an angry lightning storm durring their Skyblock playthrough.
    • "Lightning storm" is an understatement. It was More Dakka in lightning form. As it happens, Ross was in the perfect place to see it happen and to watch Alex and Chris burn to death. It was so Crazy Awesome that Ross and Alex actually get annoyed with Chris for stopping the thunderstorm and execute him by knocking him off the tower.
  • If I Can't Have You: In one Skylands episode, Alex kills a wolf that Ross just tamed, claiming that he had already fed the wolf a bone and then Ross swooped in and stole it with a second bone.
  • Improbable Weapon Users: The guys tend to become these often during the Skylands videos, especially in the dungeons.
  • Kill It with Fire: In the Forsaken Lands episode 12, Chris attempts this on some skeletons. It backfires.
    • Skylands episode 17 could be alternately titled "Everybody Gets Killed With Fire, Including The Protagonists, Several Times."
  • Laser-Guided Karma: Alex's attempts at setting things on fire sometimes do result in him getting set on fire as well. This is especially evident when he finally gets his hands on a flint and Epic Hatventure and try to set a forest on fire... He sets himself on fire as well.
  • Large Ham: Whenever Ross tries to read the Overseer's messages in Epic Hatventure, he does it in an epic, deep voice.
  • Mad Bomber: If something is exploding, chances are good that it's Alex's doing. He's even shown holding a stick of dynamite in the Skylands intro.
  • Mercy Kill: In episode 17 of Skylands, Chris catches fire for the umpteenth time and Ross gets tired of watching him bumble around screaming, so he finally just beats him to death with a torch.
  • Minor Injury Overreaction: Which is caused by the dissonance between virtual-world injury and real-world injury: In Skylands, the lads spend a lot of time falling off cliffs and screaming their heads off. Then at one point Alex screams yet again, and when the others ask if he died again, he replies, "No but I just jammed my knee into my desk!"
  • No Sense of Direction: Sometimes, all three of these guys. Especially evident in Episode 7 of Epic Hatventure where the whole group ends up spending most of the episode going around in a circle.
  • No Mouth: Alex.
  • Oh Crap: In Skylands, whenever a certain Mascot Mook appears, the boys all start screaming "CREEEEEPEEEEEEER!"
  • Only Sane Man: Ross and Chris take turns in this role.
  • Platform Hell: In Epic Hatventure, the very first dungeon is basically a set of these, in two parts. The first part is a timed platforming segment to get to the other side of a chasm (with the platforms only extending outwards for a short amount of time), and the second segment is of jumping onto platforms over lava. Hilarity Ensues. The first part required one and roughly a quarter episodes to get through. The other half ended up in two episodes because Ross and Chris had to go back over to grab the stuff they left behind in a chest... Which then they lost half off thanks to Chris mis-timing a jump.
    • It returns in the Forgotten City's mansion, in the Royal Study. Two questions are hidden behind jumping puzzles. Chris dies again.
  • Pyromaniac: Alex has a habit of burning things down, like this and soon after this.
    • In episode 17 of Skylands:

Chris: All right guys, is there anything we can do to improve our situation?
Alex: Set everything on fire.

    • And of course, about 30 seconds later, guess what happens. And they're in a huge dungeon that's mostly made of wood.
    • The first thing Alex does when they arrive in the Ascension Woods is to set it on fire.

Alex: It's the Ascension Burnt now!

    • Alex tries to set the first forest he sees on fire once he gets the flint and tinder in Epic Hatventure. Not only does it seem to fail, he also sets himself on fire in the process. And then he proceeds to start plenty of fires in the Forgotten City's mansion, though they never get around to spreading anywhere because Chris and Ross are putting them out.
  • Real Life Writes the Plot: At one point Ross lost a bunch of his Skylands footage, so the next few episodes became "Walrus-Vision Week/Fortnight."
  • Running Gag:
    • In Skylands, there's the death counter and the end-of-episode tally to see who had the fewest deaths. Other Minecraft adventure series after that continue this trend.
    • Their advertisements for non-existant musical recordings that are only available in really obscure or out-dated formats.
    • Trottimus being a male walrus who nevertheless has milk-producing teats, and his other odd walrus-related attributes.
    • And of course, Alex's love of setting things on fire and/or blowing them up, to the point where anytime something is on fire, the others immediately assume it was Alex's doing.
  • Screams Like a Little Girl: Chris gives these high-pitched bloodcurdling screams whenever he falls off a cliff in Skylands. Which is frequently.
    • Alex and Ross also get in a few good ear-splitting screams when falling into the abyss of Skylands.
  • Shoot the Dog: Friendly wolves generally do not survive very long - a few episodes at most. The most common cause seems to be Alex.
  • Shmuck Bait: In one episode of Skylands, the boys start encouraging their viewers to stick their laptops in the microwave in order to enable the "Night Vision" mod.
  • Shout-Out: When the boys keep catching fire in the wooden Skylands dungeon, they keep singing "The Lord is my shepherd."
    • Skylands Episode 2 has a shout-out to Monsters, Inc..
    • Their Skylands episodes also contain frequent impersonations of and references to Gollum/Smeagol/Andy Serkis.
  • Sir Swearsalot: Despite being The Chick of the group, Chris is also the one who swears the most.
  • Sound Effect Bleep
  • Stuff Blowing Up: After clearing a dungeon in the Skylands, they load it with TNT and detonate it.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: In-universe: When the guys make it to the mountain section of Skylands and actually manage to acquire resources and build a tree-house without constantly dying and losing everything, they joke that they're going to lose subscribers because they're actually playing the game properly for once.
  • Time Lapse: The guys make these occasionally. They even have a playlist for them.
  • Token Evil Teammate: While "evil" is an overstatement, Alex is by far the one most likely to cause mayhem by griefing his teammates, killing their tamed wolves, setting fires, blowing things up, intentionally jumping off cliffs to his death, etc.
  • Unreliable Narrator: The Overseer in Epic Hatventure seems to have a tendency to make fun of the trio.
  • Unwinnable By Mistake: First played straight in Skyblock, where the trio unwittingly screw themselves over by losing one of the resources needed for a cobblestone generator, forcing them to start from scratch again.