The video game Cuphead was a 2017 side-scrolling platformer/shooter that looked amazing as hell but was difficult as hell, with The A.V. Club’s critic (who, truth be told, was pretty bad at the game) saying that it was like “Contra by way of Fleischer cartoons from the 1930s.” Cuphead wasn’t cruel with its difficulty in the way that some infamously difficult video games can be, but the demands it put on a player’s reflexes and patience still meant it was unlikely that the average person would be able to really experience all of the cool enemy designs and animations that Cuphead had to offer.
Until now! Netflix has released a teaser for its cartoon adaptation of Cuphead, the video game that looks like a cartoon, and while that’s sort of like pulling a Street Fighter: The Movie the video game, this at least looks less crappy than that did. Actually, that might be underselling it, because—appropriately enough—this looks pretty amazing. The animation seems fairly early in this 46-second clip that Netflix shared on Twitter, but what’s in there certainly looks like a faithful recreation of… the sort of stuff Cuphead was a faithful recreation of.
The Cuphead Show!, which is executive produced by the game creators at StudioMDHR, does not yet have a release date.