Post-Barbie, we are firmly in the renaissance of “game and toy” media. This has always existed to some degree, and to varying levels of success—see: G.I. Joe, Battleship—but Greta Gerwig really proved you could make something out of some flimsy IP and have it be good and lucrative. Now Mattel is out here entertaining pitches about Uno and Bass Fishin’, of all things. Enter Exploding Kittens, a quirky 21st century card game with no existing storyline to draw from but an inexplicable Netflix deal nonetheless. If you were playing a rousing round of Exploding Kittens, you probably wouldn’t have imagined it becoming an animated series produced by Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, of all people. Yet here we are: Exploding Kittens is a real show with a real trailer, and it’s about God, for some reason?
“Earth sucks, so God (Tom Ellis) gets fired and sent to Earth to reconnect with humanity. The catch? He’s trapped in the body of a chubby house cat,” the synopsis for the animated comedy reads. “As part of his rehabilitation, he moves in with a dysfunctional family and tries to solve their problems, but ends up spending a lot of time chasing laser pointers. And to top it off, Godcat’s next-door neighbor, who is also a cat, turns out to be none other than his nemesis, the Antichrist. The result is the ultimate fight between good versus evil…except, Godcat (Ellis) is distracted by a pigeon he saw in the yard and Devilcat (Sasheer Zamata) is busy napping on someone’s laptop.”
If you’ve played Exploding Kittens, the animation style in this trailer will be familiar to you. The rest of it is kind of a swerve, although who knew what to expect from this going in, so there weren’t really any expectations to swerve. There are indeed lots of explosions, colorful feline characters, and bodily excretions. And, weirdly, a divine battle between good and evil. (This is obviously a departure for Ellis, who played the devil on his last show, Lucifer.)
Lucy Liu was attached to this project at some point, but in the two years this show has been developing, she apparently dropped out. The voice cast is rounded out by Suzy Nakamura (Abbie), Mark Proksch (Marv), Ally Maki (Greta), and Kenny Yates (Travis). Judge and Daniels of King Of The Hill fame serve as executive producers, while Shane Kosakowski (You’re The Worst) and Matthew Inman (co-creator of the card game) serve as showrunners. The series will premiere in July 2024.
