Oh my, oh my
The cartoonization of Cuphead seems to make sense. Its style is, after all, directly derived from the Golden Age of Animation. Before television, Saturday mornings were dominated by cartoons that shown in theaters before to the main feature. Or, more precisely, what I experienced as a youngster was the VHS transfers of those cartoons.
Yes, you know who like cartoons from the Golden Age of animation? This woman. Know what has a passing resemblance to a cartoon from the Golden Age? This is \i>The Cuphead Show.Netflix just added a game called The Cuphead Show to their library of streaming titles. Castlevania was modeled on a NES game where narrative was conveyed by text crawls, and it came out rather well. Compared to Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, the Cuphead game had a more compelling story that saw Cuphead and his brother Mugman losing a wager with the devil. They must gather bounties on other souls around the Inkwell Islands in order to keep their souls.
The program mostly skips over it. A story element that appears from time to time in the episodes is that Cuphead owes his soul to the Devil after making a mistake in a game of skeeball. However, instead of making amends, Cuphead accomplishes virtually nothing. It's a comedy of circumstances. Every week, Cuphead and Mugman alternate between watching the kids and tending to Elder Kettle's garden. I would characterize the whole program as "predictable" since both of things unfold in predictable ways.
The bosses from the games are included in The Cuphead Show, albeit their roles have been drastically altered to the point where they only appear as token appearances. The odd music appears, and while it's not bothersome, it's also not really memorable.
Could you have had a program where the main plot point was boss battles? Indeed. That's what a lot of animation from the Golden Age was. During the first years of the Popeye cartoon series, Popeye and Bluto were always in competition with each other, eventually outsmarting each other.
Rather, Cuphead and Mugman find themselves in familiar circumstances. There's not much connecting it to the nostalgia for vintage cartoons that the game leaned heavily on. The animation more closely resembles Spongebob Squarepants or \i>Ren & Stimpy. It doesn't even seem to try to emulate the visual language used in the early cartoon films. Yes, it will make allusions to it, but these are generally in the form of the flowers dancing or the devil pulling his face in annoyance.
Typically, the comedy is more akin to contemporary cartoons. Although I don't think The Cuphead Show should delete frames and apply a muted filter to its sound to make it seem like an old reel, their decision to do so just strips the show of its individuality. What is available on {i>The Cuphead Show? I suppose stop motion backdrops, which are used sporadically.
The fact that it's rated TV-Y7, which baffles me a little, might be contributing to the issue. By today's standards, Golden Age cartoons were often quite violent, and I doubt that many kids play Cuphead. Perhaps I'm mistaken. Perhaps they have data showing kids adore it. I assumed they were only playing games like Minecraft and Roblox these days.
Nevertheless, this leads to a lack of cleverness in The Cuphead Show's humor. I doubt I smiled at any of them, but then, I'm a humorless prude. To use that old term again, the jokes are predictable. Perhaps this is because references to vintage cartoons will seem novel to kids who are graded for The Cuphead Show.
The Cuphead Show is nothing more than a squandered chance. The game pays homage to the Golden Age of Animation, yet it lacks a distinct identity as a whole. It's not really trying to draw a distinction between cartoons from before television and those from now; instead, it merely tries to mention a few things that made the game unique, and the rest is just packing peanuts.
All this aims to accomplish, in my opinion, is "make Cuphead into a cartoon." Even yet, there doesn't appear to have been much of a desire to incorporate any of the unique elements of that game into the animation. Where does The Cuphead Show fit in, I'm not sure. I fail to understand the point of this. This is a circumstance where the cup is half-full, but it's filled with dishwater. I still don't want to drink it, but at least we got something. If you'd like, you may sample it when it launches on Netflix on February 18, 2022.