Cuphead game creators hoped the show wouldn’t turn Cuphead into Hannibal Lecter

polygon.com:

Cuphead creators Chad and Jared Moldenhauer found their world turned inside out when they landed a deal with Netflix to produce The Cuphead Show!. Gone was the “shoot-from-the-hip style” they embraced for Cuphead’s boss fights, replaced with the very methodical storyboarding that comes with making an animated series.

In the game, Cuphead squares off against various bosses in an effort to collect their soul contract on behalf of the Devil. The Cuphead Show! allowed more nuance for the characters and the plotlines to bounce off each other in zany ways only animation could allow. The differing styles mean that neither of them sees a lot of crossover happening between the game and the new Netflix show — at least for now. “As it is, we’re finishing up the DLC, which was its own planned entity,” Jared says. “We’re not at that place of thinking, what exactly is going to be in future games, but I guess we’ll have to decide when the time comes.”

But the Netflix series does open up the possibilities for the new takes on Cuphead to exist in a kind of parallel universe. Characters could be reimagined, taken out of their locales, and put into new situations against the twin protagonists, Cuphead and Mugman.

“[We want] that ’80s style arcade game that is really fast. We’re actually thinking, What can we cut from the story? What can we remove from the dialogue to speed the player along to the game sections?” Chad says. “And on the show it’s like, no how do we build upon these characters?”

While Chad and Jared only served as advisors to the Netflix show — hashing out what characters should or shouldn’t do — they were excited to see what their characters could be outside the confines of the adversarial positioning of the video game.