Here's the Thing About The Cuphead Show! on Netflix

Gamers love Cuphead. Or gamers love to hate Cuphead. It really depends how much someone's appreciation for rubber hose animation and whimsical characters outweighs their disdain for continuous boss fights that occasionally devolve into sheer bullet hell (or vice versa). Since the game was released in 2017, it has been nominated for dozens of awards and taken home nearly half of them. The resounding success quickly spiraled into the announcement of The Cuphead Show! in 2019. Now, nearly three years later, the series has finally arrived on Netflix. If you've made it this far, it's probably safe to assume that you'd like to know a little bit more about the series, so let's make this your official minor spoiler warning for what's ahead.

So, here's the thing about The Cuphead Show!...

To be perfectly honest, I wasn't really sure what to expect going into The Cuphead Show!. The game itself had plenty of charming characters and settings to be translated to the television format, and the story of Cuphead and Mugman losing their souls to the Devil is a simple enough setup to carry over. The changes made to the story are relatively minor, and all of them serve to even out the game's lack of real character development and pacing. When it comes down to what The Cuphead Show! does best, it's that it never really tries to be Cuphead at all.

The characters and landscapes are all there, but The Cuphead Show! is not its predecessor. Rather than trying to tie together a stream of seemingly random, ultimately disjointed characters in any sort of overarching plot, the series provides viewers with the barebones setup of Cuphead owing his soul to the Devil before veering off into only occasionally connected territory. Many of the game's iconic bosses have nothing to do with the Devil, nor do they work to ground the series in any meaningful way. Villains such as the Root Pack are featured for a single episode before being discarded. Even King Dice, a prominent figure and the Devil's righthand man in the video game, is relegated to a single appearance. All the while, the Devil himself plays very much the same sort of background role, even in episodes that feature him.

It may sound like a recipe for disaster, but all of this is genuinely a good thing. Cuphead is an amazing game for a whole host of reasons, but none of them besides the aesthetic and most basic premise make for an amazing series. If The Cuphead Show! had followed the storyline of the game, it simply wouldn't be fun. Villain of the week premises have worked for decades, even when strung together into a grander plot, yet Cuphead isn't capable of supporting that weight with its flimsy foundation.

The characters from the game are all memorable for their astounding design and epic confrontations, and that's about it. There was never any greater insight into their lives or motivations, at least not before The Cuphead Show!. It's clear that the series used the game as a framework for what it would become, but it doesn't appear to have ever been a defining feature of it. Nothing from the game couldn't be expanded upon or altered as the show needed it to be, because nothing from the game was ever so fully fleshed out that changing it would be anathema to the source material. If anything, the game was merely a brightly colored, rubber hose Mad Lib more so than a tried and true blueprint for what actually worked.

That The Cuphead Show! was given so much room for creative freedom isn't especially surprising, yet it being so successfully executed with so little to build on certainly is. There is also the fact that the series doesn't try to force any greater consequence than whatever Cuphead and Mugman are facing at any given time which speaks to it being able to thrive without forcing the audience's hand. Sure, the final episode of the first season ends on a cliffhanger, and several episodes establish ongoing concepts that are more than just running gags, but none of that ever feels disingenuous to the viewer. Rather, it all reads as an organic if not outlandish sprawl headed up by two squeaky, ill-prepared cups with no idea what they're really doing. Rereading that sentence, the series might actually be about literally everyone the very first time they play the game. Or it's just about funny cups, whichever interpretation you prefer.

The Cuphead Show! starring Tru Valentino, Frank Todaro, and Grey Griffin is currently available on Netflix.

John Dodge writes about all sorts of things right here on Vocal. He writes mostly about comics over at CBR.com. You can also find him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.