For example, the boss characters Ribby and Croaks, two frog brothers and boxers, were turned into restaurateurs trying to give up their boxing profession out of love for their mother in their spotlight episode named after them. But he and his team were given relative freedom to reimagine the characters and play with what the audience knew about them from the original games. Wasson pitched every idea for the characters to the Moldenhauers, who had guidelines and rules for the basics of how their creations should behave. As such, the characters didn’t have much in terms of defined personalities, and the writing team was free to flesh out both the central figures of the show and the story that connects them. The original game is very focused on gameplay, with a minimal plot that mostly serves to justify its murderers’ row of colorful, challenging boss battles. While “Cuphead” gave Wasson and his team a strong basis in terms of its visual style, they had more to experiment with in terms of story and character relationships. “And we were like, ‘All right, these are the guys, clearly.’”įrank Todaro as Mugman, Tru Valentino as Cuphead and Joe Hanna as Elder Kettle in “The Cuphead Show!” COURTESY OF NETFLIX “As soon as we met those guys they were like ‘Oh my God, the Fleischer backgrounds!’ We’ve been waiting our entire careers to do this,” Wasson recalls. Wasson says the models were designed by the company Screen Novelties, and the designers of the shots were harcore fans of the Golden Age cartoons who jumped at the chance to design them. This aesthetic choice is based on old Fleischer Studios shorts where the animators built 3D sets on rotating panels in order to shoot panning shots. One of the most striking techniques the show uses is stop motion backgrounds for a few key scenes and establishing shots, giving the show a certain storybook feel. But beyond the references, all of the techniques, from the art direction to the Kansas City Jazz-inspired score, is lifted as directly as possible from that period of animation. For example, a memorable short in the middle of the season features a recreation of “ The Skeleton Dance,” one of the most famous shorts in the history of Walt Disney Animation. “The Cuphead Show” is filled with references and homages to classic Golden Age cartoons. So we basically had to figure out how to digitally pull that off.” “It’s real animation, the backgrounds are all hand-made watercolors. “That animation style is really no-holds barred,” Wasson says. The show was done on computers, via a process called Harmony Animation, but the entire series was handmade and drawn, and the drawing count was incredibly high in order to evoke the spirit and feel of traditional hand-and-paper animation. The shorts of “Cuphead” features a hybrid of the rubber hose style and more modern animation techniques, in order to pull off stories and shots that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. “We interviewed a lot of people, and Dave and Cosmo stood out as the perfect team, where it got to a point where we knew they knew how to roll with it without needing much input.”Īccording to Wasson, the rubber hose style of animation is defined by characters who lack shoulders and knees the style is called “rubber hose” because their limbs are essentially bouncy cylinders that don’t have to obey anatomical rules. “We knew that was going to be the key, that we could find talented people that understood the same kind of language, talking about these early cartoons,” Chad Moldenhauer says. ![]() The brothers conducted extensive interviews to find a creative head for the show, but knew when they met Wasson that he and his co-executive producer Cosmo Segurson that they would be a perfect fit to translate their game to television. According to Chad, Netflix approached them about creating a “Cuphead” series shortly after the game launched, and while they initially assumed a deal would never come to fruition, their licensing company King Features and its president C.J Kettler worked to eventually make it a reality for them. ![]() The developers of the “Cuphead” game, brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, serve as executive producers on the Netflix adaptation.
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