Max Gilardi

Max Gilardi (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.

Early life and education
Gilardi was born in Massachusetts in 1988. 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.

Career
Gilardi, under the name "HotDiggedyDemon", first started creating Flash animations in the early 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. 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.

In 2010, he created the Wacky Game Jokez, 4 Kidz! series, also known as WGJ4K, 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, he co-hosted the Wisenheimers podcast with fellow animator Yotam Perel, also known as LazyPillow or LazyMuffin, from 2010 to 2012.

In 2011, Gilardi was contacted by Nickelodeon asking if he would be interested in pitching an animated series to the television network. Gilardi traveled to the Nickelodeon Animation Studio in Burbank, California to pitch a cartoon featuring his original character "Fishworth", however, plans for this and other concepts ultimately fell through and a show would not be picked up. He would return to Nickelodeon for a short period of freelance work on SpongeBob SquarePants. In an interview with YouTuber Dovendraw in August 2023, Gilardi stated that in retrospect, having a TV show was a "crazy upheaval" he wasn't sure he was capable of.

From 2011 to 2013, he 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. 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.

He also gained notability for his comedic parodies of video games like Five Nights at Freddy's, Cuphead, and Animal Crossing, due to their dark nature and subversive themes. The Animal Crossing parody has Isabelle, an innocent character in the game, worshiping Karl Marx.

Gilardi has over two million subscribers on YouTube. The majority of his videos are self-made: written, animated, and voiced by himself. In his more recent projects, he has experimented with 3D animation in conjuction with his 2D work. On September 2, 2016, Gilardi launched a new YouTube series titled Brain Dump in which he reviews movies and other media, often satirically. 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.

On November 6, 2023, Gilardi started a series of live streams called Relax with Max through his YouTube channel, previously on Twitch, where he plays video games and interacts with his audience in real time. 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. He also announced there are no current plans for future episodes of Brain Dump, putting the series on indefinite hiatus while he continues his focus on Relax With Max.

Gilardi has cited Craig McCracken, Matt Groening, John Kricfalusi, Jhonen Vasquez, Danny Antonucci, Genndy Tartakovsky, United Productions of America, Hanna-Barbera, Junji Ito, Akira Toriyama, Bill Watterson, and early Charles Schulz as influences on his art and animation.