Netflix today debuted the official trailer for Exploding Kittens— the new adult animated comedy series based on the best-selling card game from The Oatmeal. The 2D toon is set to premiere in July.
Synopsis: Earth sucks, so God gets fired and sent to Earth to reconnect with humanity. The catch? He’s trapped in the body of a chubby house cat. 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 is distracted by a pigeon he saw in the yard and Devilcat is busy napping on someone’s laptop.
“I always had ambitions of turning The Oatmeal into some kind of TV series, because it’s a webcomic with actual stories. I never thought it would come from Exploding Kittens, though …” franchise co-creator Matthew Inman told Netflix fan blog Tudum.
“The card game is super fun, but it doesn’t really have a cohesive story. It’s mostly just random jokes and a lot of cats blowing things up. So, my philosophy for the show was to focus on a story that people would want to hear, rather than trying to ham-fist the card game into a narrative. This is how I landed on the idea of God being stuck in a cat body. Also, that story worked out well for the ethos of the game — because the stakes are high and Godcat blows up a lot of stuff. That being said, we snuck a ton of Easter eggs into the series for fans of the game. There are hidden objects all over the place, as well as a bunch of our other games referenced in the series.”
The series voice stars Lucifer‘s Tom Ellis as Godcat and Sasheer Zamata (Saturday Night Live, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur) as Devilcat, as well as Suzy Nakamura (Avenue 5, Inside Job) as Abbie, Mark Proksch (What We Do in the Shadows, Dream Corp LLC) as Marv, Ally Maki (Wrecked, Hit-Monkey) as Greta and Kenny Yates (Zoom, Return to Monkey Island video game) as Travis.
Shane Kosakowski and Inman are showrunners for the series. Executive producers are Mike Judge, Greg Daniels and Dustin Davis of Bandera Entertainment; Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping for the Chernin Entertainment Group; and executive producers and creators of the Exploding Kittens franchise, Elan Lee and The Oatmeal’s Inman.
