So I was thinking about the name Marlo for the Welcome Home company and wondered if it meant anything. Looking up the name Marlo on baby names immediately relates to a woman named Marlo Thomas:

"Free To Be... You and Me," huh. I looked that up and it brought up an album made in 1972 and a multimedia TV special that was made in 1974.

The whole supporting gender neutrality seems to relate to Welcome Home a lot along with the usage of the word "You" that is also important in Welcome Home. But what really struck me was the year that the TV special was made in 1974. That was the same year Welcome Home immediately was taken off the air:

I went and watched the "Free to Be You and Me" TV special and I was really amazed by how similar it was to what was show in the new hidden commercials video on www.awayfrompryingeyes.net (spoilers for the new update). Here are some screenshots of the TV special and the Welcome Home images. I think they really show an inspiration for some of Welcome Home:

It's kind of hard to describe how similar the TV special is to what was shown with the Welcome Home commercials without someone just watching the old special but I think Welcome Home got a sort of inspiration from the TV special. It is kind of dystopian how the old "Free to Be You and Me" special pushed for tolerance and love with commercials that bled straight into the programming and how back at the time there was still a lot of controversy around these gender ideas. The ideas were important though and I think Welcome Home maybe was inspired by this but may go more into the true horror of the gender issues in real life that will surround the characters of Welcome Home. That or the old TV program was just a pretty big inspiration for the style. Who knows?

Marlo

I noticed that in the merchandise section the manufacturer has two options: Marlo and unknown. This company was under different names as well, Marlo Inc. with It’s-For-You Talking Telephone Toy, Marlo Records with Eddie’s Big Lift Storybook Record and Currently Unknown Records, and simply Marlo with Wally Darling’s Coloring Book. I feel like this company is going to have a much bigger part to the story and might be the one who made Wally aware in the first place.

hm.

Arlo/Marlo is just Gregoriah as a BIG nerd

Welcome Home, Brother Charles aka Soul Vengeance (Jamaa Fanaka, 1975)

‼️UPDATING THE WELCOME HOME UPDATE LIST AGAIN‼️

i feel like i cant keep UP just SOOOO MANY PEOPLE ARE FINDINF INFO EXTREMELY FAST so by using my personal update list and the findings of others, here’s the update list, updated for the second time!

🏡BEFORE WE JUMP IN, i’d wish to highlight some weird things i personally experienced throughout the site🏡

more than one have i heard a sound while using my headphones that sounded like faint morse code.

i feel like i’ve heard a static/white noise on the site before

after exploring the “secret” version of the site, i thought i heard a heartbeat

one more thing that’s probably important! the company who made welcome home’s merchandise—Marlo— has a logo that looks like this

hmmm totally not suspicious using wally’s colors inside of an eye inside of a home silhouette!!

the morse code i am POSITIVE about. enough of that, onto the records and bug videos!

🐛the BUGS🐛

thanks to @underscore-duendie (for searching for hours i salute u solder 🫡) and @angel-lyah ‘s VERY useful masterlist, we now have what seems like a complete collection of all the bugs!! here are all of them, in order (as screenshots tho because tumblr dot com won’t let me post all the urls)

this is @underscore-duendie ‘s post!

🏡audios!🏡

@angel-lyah ‘s list covered this VERY well, even putting all of them together in a message👏👏👏 all of these audios have wally speaking directly to us. not sure if there’s more, but here’s what was found! (this is a screenshot btw i use tumblr on my phone)

angel also put them all together stacked on top of each other! it creates a whole conversation between us and wally! go check it out!

ALSO ALSO @gandalfsbongwater informed me that if you click on the red button on the phone of the “it’s for you” toy (the merch page) it leads you to wally’s duet audio!

@angel-lyah graciously covered this hidden secret too—the safe!

I EXPLORED I DISCOVERED ITS REALLY WEIRD AND IT LOOKS LIKE THIS (really bad screenshot edition)

there’s nothing to click on except the “it’s in here” button. at least, not that i know of. here are the images found on the site! (side note uhh what are those things in the background of the white screen?? like, next to the pictures?)

THERE ARE MORE IMAGES BUT ONCE AGAIN TUMBLR DOT COM ONLY LETS ME UPLOAD A CERTAIN AMOUNT. I WILL REBLOG THIS WITH THE REST OF THE IMAGES.

Julie sings to Sally (and possibly other neighbors) over the phone before bed🌸💫

I have not seen anyone talking about this, and I am so surprised! However, I did notice something odd…

This excerpt is directly from the transcript of Happy Haunting to Boo and Yours. In this transcript, Sally says no to all the neighbors silly suggestions as to why they all stay indoors at night. However! If you listen to the audio itself, you will hear Sally say “What!? No, sometimes, and no!” Interesting! So Julie and Sally sing to each other good night before bed? According to Sally they do “sometimes”.

The transcript is not accurately conveying what was said, but why? I think this line was censored because the implications of two femme characters singing good night to each other was a little too gay for Playfellow and Marlo’s comfort. There have been theories around censorship in Welcome Home, and how possible queer relationships are being hidden from the audience, and I think this is a great and subtle example. It’s possible even that the audio WHRP heard truly did have Sally say “no” to all three responses. We already know that WHRP can’t hear a huge chunk of this story, so they may also be oblivious to the smaller differences that we, the audience, are hearing.

I will be lookout for more subtle queerness, especially in the next update! Did y’all notice any other differences in the transcript? Please do tell!

TLDR: Eddie's self-consciousness about his place in the neighbourhood and lack of identity cause him to momentarily panic which lead to him seeing beyond the reality of the neighbourhood and becoming somewhat self-aware that his world isn't "real".

This is gonna be rambly btw..

So about Eddie,

Eddie rather became self-conscious of himself or self-aware.

We see from the commercials that Eddie doesn't know how to deal with himself. He is constantly look to help someone or do his job. Eddie is also one of the few characters that has no known origin. Eddie is described as absent-minded and forgetting where he is from, it a running joke. Eddie is the only other neighbour that doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the wacky cast. This update was clearly meant for Eddie. It's him on the cereal box puzzle that sends us to the website that shows us him struggle. This has lead me to come to the possibility that Eddie has self-identity besides being the mailman (What a conclusion I know...).

I'm not going to argue on who became self-aware first just because there is no clear cut evidence on just how Welcome Home crew/Marlo/and other associates were able to get this footage or manipulate these scenes. This is all going on the fact that Sally spoke of monsters in the woods walking around the neighbourhood while they all sleep. Julie never refuted this so she at least knows it's not her family. And the neighbours can clearly interact with the narrator in the Storybook Records. There is a clear disconnect on if the Neighbourhood is REAL, I'm not gonna get deep in that subject but it's confusing at least for me.

Besides Eddie, Frank is the other neighbour with no other known point of organ. Everyone else has a family member or home noted except for Frank and Eddie. Unlike Eddie, Frank fits into the stuck-up nerd archetype of wacky and zany characters you would see on a kids show. Eddie's Post Office is also the only one not decorated for Homewarming. So once Eddie sits down at the Homeswarming Party and the Narrator says he is happy is when I think Eddie starts to think about how happy he is. He really starts to think about it. My theory is that Eddie, hearing what the narrator is saying, really starts to think about if he is happy and that leads him into a spiral of just who he is. And for a moment he starts to see everything for what it is, the cartoon reality breaks and he sees the world in puppet form (the version of the neighbours we see). Frank coming over to talk to him is what solidifies this for me. He calls him "Eddie." Frank breaks the "script" and if the Frank Bug Theory is true, Frank should already be partly aware at this point (again not gonna get into it but I do believe if not Frank, Barnaby was the first to notice). Eddie says "I should go home." really quietly before Narrator takes over at that point. The transcript makes it a point to mention the panic and strain in his voice while images of Home pop up. Home knows and whoever controls Home (if something does) is also aware of it and ends the broadcast.

It makes the most sense to me that the odd ones out, Frank and Eddie, would be the ones to notice something is off but unlike Frank who seems to be (hypothetically) holding it together, this reality break absolutely destroyed Eddie. Now the question is, what will they do with Eddie?

Edits: you can hear Eddie speak, I just couldn’t 🤷🏾‍♀️

Ok I’m too stupid to figure it out so lmk if someone does

Mioa

R

E

T

Yg

Pyer

Fsnew

N

Www

This is what I’ve got ik it’s supposed to spell homewarming

Wally’s sitting on blood

The clock face is the same as the decoder

Marlo only cares about the profit and not the content

Wally can express sadness

Eddie dear is completely gone and ignored in homewarming they say they’ve seen all the neighbors but they don’t talk to him

The welcome home logo is dirty

Idk help me out🤷‍♂️

my extremely disorganized welcome home theory!!!

this may sound crazy but please hear me out

there are three main points to this, all of which ill elaborate on under the cut!

one of the companies, either marlo or playfellow workshop, clearly tried to make a lot of changes to the show. this includes heavy merchandising, forcing julie/frank to be read as a couple, and cutting eddie from the show.

i think that once a character no longer appears on the air, they are forced into a sort of subliminal bond with their own home, isolating them and making them essentially unable to leave. we see this with eddie's situation.

if all of this is true, i may have a very good idea for the direction in which the story of welcome home will lead.

quick disclaimer beforehand : obviously, our knowledge on this is constantly growing and expanding! this is not my "entire opinion" on the story nor do i think this is the cold hard truth. these are simply my ideas!

in general, i think the idea of the offness coming from anything internal of the show , like the characters or home, is a far stretch .. more likely, it's coming from the people making the show itself.

my theory is that either playfellow workshop or marlo was taking control of the show , probably towards the end of its run, and making massive changes in the interest of maximizing profit. first of all the commercials clips feel off in and of themselves to me, because we can see that they literally partnered with anything in order to sell it. this is most clearly Weird in the sleeping pills wally clip, but also all over - of course this could just be that it was a popular show and wanted to make bank, but personally i think it was one of the companies pushing for more brand deals and more merchandise and more money.

this, of course, leads directly into the eddie/frank situation. as many different people have stated, this was the 1970s, and if there was any ability in the show for them to be read as a couple this could get a ton of backlash. i'm willing to bet that the company tried first of all to push julie/frank to be more easily read as a couple, then later deciding on either diminishing eddie's role a TON or deleting him completely.

and like, think about it. unfortunately, most of the characters don't really harbor any huge friendship towards him, at least not in the clips we've seen. while having positive relations with poppy, julie, frank and wally, he doesn't have as much as an outright "gimmick" or thing to sell as the others.

julie's excitable, sally's theatrical, frank's stubborn, howdy's charismatic, barnaby's funny, poppy's sweet, wally's reserved but polite, and eddie. "talks a lot". if you're an executive and you're going to cut one character from a show, especially in the interest of Not looking like theres Anything gay in your show, which would you choose?

NOW for the second part:

my believe about home, and furthermore all the homes in the series - but more directly Home - is that i think they act as sort of devices that the company can use to manipulate the characters. my theory about the eddie situation in the recent update is that it takes place in the midst of when the company was attempting to cut him from the show.

and when we see eddie in the midst of his breakdown, he's VERY tied to the post office (his home basically). he's isolated and literally states at a point during it that he assumes everyone's outside and playing in the snow, but never makes any attempt to go out and check - as if it doesn't even cross his mind. he expresses some kind of paranoid need to stay at the post office and not leave, even for a moment, which he also talks about in the videos.

when he finally DOES leave for the party, (which, btw, he only does because sally literally grabbed him and brought him there) , he starts seeing all the awful shit he sees (as we know) . INCLUDING HOME. and towards the end of it, all he says to frank is that he wants to go [ to his ] home.

what does all this mean??? im so glad u asked. basically i think that creators' actions upon the show affect the world of welcome home in subliminal ways that the characters aren't directly aware of happening (until, of course, they are.) in this case, if a character is cut from the show or their screen time is limited, they experience being subliminally forced to stay in their own home. if they try to leave, they start witnessing visceral, terrifying things that they can't explain, persuading them to return back home. back where it's "safe".

wally's home in particular, i think, enforces this the most. home is sentient so the company can probably carry out their desires more directly with him than any of the other houses (which are just structures, pretty much). i DON'T think home harbors any ill will themselves, but moreso is just carrying out what "needs to be done."

more evidence for this:

this theory is also entwined with how wally interacts with us, the people on the site, because he mentions in places like the guestbook, etc that he hasn't seen other members of the neighborhood in so long. but that doesn't mean they're not there.

so if a singular being cut from the show means that they are forced to stay in their own home and not go outside, then the show being taken off the air would, in theory, mean that everyone would be forced to stay in their own homes. for decades. wally reaching out to us could very likely be a cry for help and/or last try after years of isolation. (it would also explain why he's so much more off putting/tired/different than his in-show appearances.)

one last thing!!!! i think if that's what's going, on it could explain this sentence from the summary, unchanged since the beginning. i've never really understood this line or what it could mean, but -

this is a HUGE far cry. but i think it's possible that, if i'm right, at some point down the line the characters (still in the neighborhood) will actually try to leave their homes, or they have already, which would cause the "distortion/nightmarish memory". i mean we definitely could describe eddie's hallucination(?) as that so .

yeah i hope you enjoyed 20 minutes of me rambling ... please ask questions if some (or all) of this didn't make sense cuz im not rly sure if this is coherent lol. this also isnt all the thoughts i have about this theory but this post is too long as is lol. thanks so much for reading this far if you have!!!

Welcome Home Predictions (spoilers for homewarming update!!)

So something I've noticed up until this point is that, with every secret and clue we've gotten to unraveling the mystery behind Welcome Home, from Wally's drawings, to the bugs leading to footage of the neighbors, to images that formed URL for the "away from prying eyes" site, it's not out the realm of possibility that we've been receiving these breadcrumbs from someone, my guess being from the characters or from one singular character. And i also noticed that the way we recieve these clues correspond to a particular character.

-Drawings/phone calls: Wally and his love of art, as well as his attachment to "you".

-Bugs: Frank and his vast knowledge of the insects of their world

-Images/letters: Eddie, being the one providing the decoder wheel and him being the mailman, he delivers "letters"

What I'm hoping will happen is that the more we progress through this story, the more secrets and messages we receive from the cast. What we'll actually be getting, I haven't a clue. But, I have an idea of what form these secrets might take.

Julie: Flowers (possibly leading to secret links like Frank's bugs), or interactive games, either on the WHRP site or through the prying eyes site

Howdy: An inside view of his store with clickable products

Sunny: Scripts for her plays/Marlo records

Poppy: Something related to food, maybe old recipe cards that need unscrambling

Barnaby: Filling out answers for jokes, kinda like that worksheet that led to the safe.

Anyways thats my two sense I can't wait for the next update wahoo!!

*spoilers for the Welcome Home Update*

Once again we have evidence of Eddie being overworked and having trouble fitting in in the neighourhood. (images are from the welcome home wishbook)

Also, Marlo (the company making the welcome home merch in-universe) has quite a suspicious-looking logo-

Okay.

Who are we really talking to in the world of Welcome Home?

If it was a show mixed with puppets and animated segments, is there a separation between the two's sentiences?? The physical puppets could be stored away somewhere, while we're communicating with the ones on the other side of the screen.

Can the consciousnesses of the animated characters transfer to the real world? Maybe their puppet counterparts? That would make more sense for evidence being mailed - it's all already in the physical world, just hidden. Could things be transported from the animated to physical world, though??

Does each different animation style make for a sort of "welcome home multiverse" situation, or do WE just see them in different styles, and they always look the same to each other? Maybe they know when they change visual styles, but see it as normal? But then why would seeing the physical reality be SO jarring if they're used to seeing their visual styles change?? (Other than the visuals being disturbing and paired with existing distress) It makes me want to say no, they either don't see the changes or they're all separate - but I'm not sure.

Could that be a reason for Wally sounding so different in this update? He sounded so stressed and aggravated in the last set of audios - so either he got "reset" in a way, these new events actually took place further in the past, or this is a different Wally.

There were some fourth wall breaks between characters and the narrator, but if those are the puppets performing, it makes sense for human actors to exist alongside the narrator - it's like the Muppets. Animated bits can still do the same thing with editing, but that would be more like the animated characters knowing the human world exists (maybe?), but not the other way around. Humans just see the animations as drawings. Even still, animated bits in our world would be made with voiceovers from their actors - so what parts of the characters gaining sentience will show them that they were never fully in control?? That their movements and voices are borrowed?? Where do the actors and characters separate?

Who were the puppeteers?? Who worked for the Playfellow Workshop? For Marlo??

Too many questions, too many dimensional layers. My head HURTS

My brain just lit up like a Homewarming tree with Sally perched on top! Everybody, hopefully, remembers the hidden caterpillar on the Welcome Home Site(I don't remember the exact page but it was a blue caterpillar on a leaf with three eyes, or at least two real eyes) and that takes you to the video of Howdy telling Barnaby and Wally about how some of his siblings were having trouble with their cousin Henry and that he needed to go to their Aunt Molly so she could set him right, for whatever he was doing that was causing distress in the Pillar family. Now, in the Homewarming update we got some more of Howdy's family members, though their names weren't what we were expecting. One of those names was for Howdy's Cousin Skedaddle, who clearly is a surfer dude beatnik type. So I'm sure you all get where I'm going but I'll add a little more to this theory stew I'm brewing. When you go the transcripts for Howdy's Holiday Hullabaloo and you read where Gam Gam Sally Tations enters, right by her name(and I HOPE it is still there) is the name Holly. Now I STRESS it is a name because it is capitalized. AS SOON as I saw this and really as soon as I heard everyone's names be greetings of some sort or statements(like Latter's name) I knew something was up. So if Holly is actually Gam Gam's real first name then who's to say all the other family members we meant don't have different names too? Like the only named cousin showing up, who seems to have a different way of thinking things that Howdy and his Siblings don't really understand, who was sent TO AN AUNT of theirs, yeah. Skedaddle's REAL name is Henry and possibly Aunt Toodaloo is Actually Wooly Aunt Molly. And how that I think about it, Skedaddle LOOKS like he'd be a Henry but would probably go by other names too to fit his lifestyle. Now I want to STRESS this is a theory based on what minimal information we have from hidden bug videos(that may or may not show what is actually happening in Home when the cameras are off and showing the truth as well) that have been fully wiped from the website and how all these names were for a song made by Playfellow and Marlo so of course they'd want to make something goofy like this since Howdy's name is both a shorthand for Howard and a greeting, aka Howdyadoo as his mom and aunt call him. Also shout out to @carnivalcarrion for their Welcome Home Winter-Spring Update stream where they pointed out "Toodaloo" possibly being Wooly Aunt Molly before we heard these names, you may have hit the right note there IF this theory has any merit. If not, well I had fun thinking about it and I hope everyone who reads this long theory enjoyed it too and got your own brains turning at what was going on in the Neighbors world and what was going on in the real world.

The Marlo logo was something smaller that caught my attention. The spiral eye in a house logo for a partner company working with Playfellow to make Welcome Home products. It's not the main company yet it seems heavily influenced by the things we've seen.