The Cuphead Show! is weak-tea homage

polygon.com:

Inspired by the rubber hose limbs and the spooky qualities of early Disney and Fleischer Studios animation, the video game Cuphead made a splash with its striking art style and punishing run-and-gun gameplay. There aren’t many like it — painstakingly hand drawn with pencil and paper and animated on ones (the full 24 frames of drawings per second, rather than the more common 12), filtered through ’80s style side-scrolling game design of uncompromising difficulty. The boss fights proved particularly memorable, conjuring up surrealist but vintage feeling monsters to humble the player. And now, perhaps somewhat inevitably, it has an animated show. The new Netflix series is spearheaded by Time Squad creator Dave Wasson.

As in the game, the story of The Cuphead Show! takes place on the “Inkwell Isles” (the opening song sings in rhyme that it’s “just off the coast,” around 29 miles). Cuphead (Tru Valentino) and Mugman (Frank T. Todaro) are a precocious pair of brothers living under the guardianship of the elderly Kettle, and it doesn’t take them long to fall into debt to The Devil (Luke Millington Drake), who means to collect on what he’s owed: Cuphead’s soul.

After the introduction of this mostly one-sided feud the series remains a mostly disconnected series of vignettes, centralized around problems of the brothers’ own making and whatever new oddball (usually, one of the game’s bosses) that they run into as a result. Each episode takes about 20 seconds to set up that something is set to go destructively wrong.

It should, hypothetically, be a lot of chaotic fun: the two mugs head to a malevolent carnival — a “Carn-EVIL?!”, as Mugman realizes in horror — or an equally malevolent gameshow hosted by the slick-talking Dice King