The Cuphead Show certainly isn’t a wallop
It feels like it makes sense that Cuphead would get a cartoon. After all, its style is directly lifted from the Golden Age of Animation. Cartoons that existed before the television sucked them all into Saturday mornings when they played in theatres before the actual feature. Or, more specifically, the VHS transfers of those cartoons, which is something I got to experience as a child.
That’s right, do you know who loves Golden Age cartoons? This gal. Do you know what only superficially resembles a Golden Age cartoon? The Cuphead Show.
The Cuphead Show is Netflix’s latest transfer of a game to their streaming service. Castlevania turned out great, and it was based on an NES game that told its story through a text crawl. The Cuphead game had more narrative than Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, showing Cuphead and his brother Mugman losing a bet with the devil. In order to retain their souls, they have to collect bounties on other souls throughout the Inkwell Islands.
That’s mostly dropped in the show. Cuphead does owe his soul to the Devil after flubbing a game of skeeball – a plot device that crops up in the occasional episodes – but rather than work off his debt, Cuphead does… very little at all. It’s a situational comedy. One week Cuphead and Mugman are babysitting and another they’re taking care of Elder Kettle’s garden. Both of those play out in predictable ways, which is the word I’d wrap the whole show in: “predictable.”
The bosses from the games get tied into The Cuphead Show, albeit their roles are changed completely to the point where they just seem like token inclusions. There’s the occasional song, and while they aren’t annoying, they aren’t particularly memorable either.
Could you have had a show based
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