Why The Cuphead Show! Looks So Old

Why does The Cuphead Show! look so old? Despite its release in February 2022, the show has an art style that makes it look like it was made almost a century ago. There’s a good reason for that, however, and it plays into the overall charm and aesthetic of the series.

The Cuphead Show! is a Netflix series based on the Cuphead video game. While the video game was about Cuphead and Mugman having to work as debt collectors for the Devil to save their souls, the Netflix original TV seriesis an episodic romp that gives a different interpretation of the world and characters than what was presented in the game. Season 1 premiered on February 18, 2022, and the series already has two additional seasons in development for future release.

Despite all of this happening fairly recently, The Cuphead Show! looks like a much older show, thanks to its art and character designs. This is, of course, entirely on purpose. Just like its video game source material, The Cuphead Show! is purposefully making itself look like the product of a bygone era to echo a particular aesthetic and time period. Cuphead achieving this hand-drawn aesthetic was one of its biggest selling points, and while The Cuphead Show! couldn’t imitate things in the same way, the same sort of influences are nonetheless there.

When Was The Cuphead Show! Made

The Cuphead Show! was first announced in July 2019. The Netflix original series is animated by Lighthouse Studios with stop motion provided by Screen Novelties, and the first sneak peek was shown at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2020, with the full trailer released in January 2022. All of this makes it clear that the show is a modern production that has been in development for at least two years.

Why The Cuphead Show! Looks So Old

Despite the modern production, The Cuphead Show! has the look of something that was produced roughly 100 years ago, and that’s completely intentional. Both the show and the original video game were produced by brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer at Studio MDHR, an indie game development studio, as the brothers themselves grew up loving the early golden age of hand-drawn animation a la Walt Disney Studios and Fleischer Studios – along with the works of cartoonists Ub Iwerks, Grim Natwick, and Willard Bowsky. The two decided to emulate the rubber hose animation aesthetic within Cuphead that they grew up loving, and that same aesthetic was carried over into The Cuphead Show! – to a certain extent.

While Cuphead famously used hand-drawn animation to create its rubber hose homage, The Cuphead Show! appears to use a mixture of 2D and 3D animation, likely because using only hand-drawn animation would be too costly and take too long. As much of a draw as that was for Cuphead, it caused years of delays for the game’s original release, so it makes sense that the video game-based TV show wouldn’t want to run into the same problems. That being said, every episode of The Cuphead Show! begins with a title card and ends with credits that very much resemble cartoons of the ’30s and ’40s, and the show even constantly has bits of static running through the screen as if it were being displayed on an old TV. While the show wasn’t able to pay homage to Disney and Fleischer the same way that the game could, at the very least, it was able to maintain the general idea while putting its own spin on things.