Former Xbox designer Elan Lee and The Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman launched the first “Exploding Kittens” card game in 2015 via Kickstarter and raised $8.7 million for the initial game in the first 30 days. Since then, they’ve released nearly 30 tabletop games and a handful of digital games and have sold more than 36 million games globally.
On Friday, Netflix will launch an “Exploding Kittens” TV series, which will coincide with updates to its streamer’s “Exploding Kittens” mobile game, incorporating playable characters from the new show into the format.
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For Wednesday’s episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast, “Exploding Kittens” masterminds Lee and Inman spoke with Variety‘s Senior Business Writer, TV and Video Games Jennifer Maas about how their company adapted its best-selling table top game into a Netflix series and video game while maintaining its primary business as a consumer products brand.
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The nine-episode first season of Netflix’s “Exploding Kittens” animated comedy series follows the story of Godcat (Tom Ellis) and Devilcat (Sasheer Zamata), and 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.”
Inman is showrunner on the series alongside Shane Kosakowski, with additional executive producers including Lee, Mike Judge, Greg Daniels and Dustin Davis of Bandera Entertainment, and Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping for the Chernin Entertainment Group.
“All we ever really aspired to do, at least at first, was make a bunch of card games… Once the Netflix show really solidified, Matt started to lead the show team, as far as, here’s what these characters sound like, here’s how they behave, here’s how they move, here’s what the world actually looks like, instead of just a bunch of static images,” Lee told “Strictly Business.” “And armed with that, we were able to start saying, OK, this is a world instead of just a bunch of comics, this is an actual world. So that means we can start making games, more games, more moving games — digital games, mobile games, VR games. We can start exploring where else these characters might live, and how our audience might be able to experience them. And so it was like this neat little one-two punch: Let’s start by building a really strong audience, building simple, fast, easy, fun party games, expand that into the world of TV, and then now we can expand that whole IP outwards because now we know what it looks and sounds like.”
Inman calls the past four and a half years of making the “Exploding Kittens” TV series, “the greatest film class” he’s ever been to, because he got to “actively learn” on the job.
“Where rubber meets the road, in terms of difficulty, was when you make a web comic, people hear whatever voice they want to hear in their head when they read your comic. And usually, it’s a very funny voice, if it’s well written,” Inman said. “In television or animation, they hear whatever voice the actor is saying, or the way the character is moving, and it can all break a joke or make a joke. So that was where I had to be really diligent and good about making sure the comedy comes through because there’s tons of funny jokes that are written in the script and then when they’re performed, they kind of change or break down. That’s the same with the art. I draw people a certain way; I have a signature kind of inbred-frog-eyed look to everything that I draw. And I needed to make sure that inbred-frog-eyed look was well ingrained into everyone at Netflix, and it was. It’s on my office door.”
“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.