'Exploding Kittens' turns a simple card game into a wild cartoon

Tom Ellis as Godcat and Ally Maki as Greta in Netflix's Exploding Kittens.

Netflix

The best-selling card game Exploding Kittens has been adapted into a new Netflix animated series. It does plenty of its own world-building: God (Tom Ellis) and the devil (Sasheer Zamata) are sent to earth, where they take the form of talking cats — and meddle in the lives of a struggling family.

Transcript

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

STEPHEN THOMPSON, HOST:

The bestselling card game Exploding Kittens has now been adapted into a new Netflix series. The game is pretty simple, but the animated series does plenty of its own world-building. On the show, God and the devil are sent to earth, where they take the form of talking cats and meddle in the lives of a struggling family. I'm Stephen Thompson, and today we are talking about "Exploding Kittens" on POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR.

Joining me today is Regina Barber. She's a host and reporter for NPR's science podcast, Short Wave. Hey, Regina.

REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Hey. I love cats.

(LAUGHTER)

THOMPSON: Me too. Also with us, Jeff Yang. He's a cultural critic and author of "The Golden Screen: The Movies That Made Asian America." Welcome back, Jeff.

JEFF YANG: Thank you. Such a pleasure.

THOMPSON: It is a pleasure to have you both. So in "Exploding Kittens," things aren't going so well on earth, and up in heaven, God is getting the blame. So he gets sent down in the form of a cat to prove that he can still help humanity, mostly by attempting to improve the lives of a single family. But his efforts are complicated by the fact that the spawn of Satan has also been sent up to earth and also reconstituted in cat form. God and Godcat are played by Tom Ellis, while the Antichrist, known as Devilcat, is played by Sasheer Zamata.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EXPLODING KITTENS")

TOM ELLIS: (As Godcat) You dare tip over my food bowl?

SASHEER ZAMATA: (As Devilcat) Who, me? Beelzebub, Lady Of Darkness, whose mission on earth is to torture you? (Evil laughter).

THOMPSON: Godcat and Devilcat both get to know the Higgins family. Mom Abbie, played by Suzy Nakamura, is a former Navy Seal with a thirst for adventure.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EXPLODING KITTENS")

SUZY NAKAMURA: (As Abbie Higgins) We don't pray in this family. We catch prey - mostly rats from the hole I dug out back. It's how I maintain our supply of rat jerky.

THOMPSON: Dad Marv, played by Mark Proksch - you might remember him as the energy vampire from "What We Do In The Shadows" - is a tabletop game enthusiast.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EXPLODING KITTENS")

MARK PROKSCH: (As Marv Higgins) OK. My board game is fairly simple once you master the first 70 rules or so.

THOMPSON: Daughter Greta, played by Ally Maki, is brilliant but bad at emotion.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EXPLODING KITTENS")

ALLY MAKI: (As Greta Higgins) Travis, go home and get my welding apron - oh, and my cyanide tablets in case things go sideways. They're in my Hello Kitty pencil box.

THOMPSON: And son Travis, played by Kenny Yates, is fixated with going viral on the internet.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EXPLODING KITTENS")

KENNY YATES: (As Travis Higgins) Hey, shoutout to Buttsmasher6969 for liking my stream. Remember to hit that like button, and I'll write your name on my forehead.

THOMPSON: "Exploding Kittens" is streaming now on Netflix. Jeff Yang, I'm going to start with you. What did you think of the show?

YANG: I know this may sound a little shocking because the history of success for game-/toy-inspired screen projects is, to say the least, limited.

THOMPSON: Sure.

YANG: I mean, yes, you know, "Barbie" and "The Lego Movie," and I think we all want to forget that a live-action adaptation of Battleship actually happened. And I apologize for reminding you that it did (laughter).

THOMPSON: It sure did.

BARBER: Yeah. Yeah.

YANG: Honestly, I actually enjoyed this. And I was surprised. And I think the key is, in some ways, how far you're willing to stray away from the premise of whatever the plaything was while still squeezing out some of the sort of juicy flavor of the original. And "Exploding Kittens" does that pretty well, in no small part because I think that creator Matt Inman's fingerprints are all over this. And...

THOMPSON: Yeah.

YANG: ...Honestly, I feel like the casting does this. I mean, there are a lot of things we've seen before here, but the voice acting is, for the most part, pretty superb. So I watched and found myself kind of clicking next episode, which on Netflix is kind of your...

THOMPSON: That is the barometer. Are you...

YANG: (Laughter) Exactly.

THOMPSON: How do you feel about that little white pill at the corner of the screen?

YANG: As it slowly fills up, do I click on it? Yes.

THOMPSON: (Laughter) Nice. Thank you, Jeff. What do you think, Regina?

BARBER: I - (laughter) this is surprising me. I love cartoons. I love cats, as I said in the intro. I saw that white bar, and I would cringe.

THOMPSON: Oh, no.

YANG: (Laughter).

BARBER: That is the word I would use for this show. And I'm sorry, Matt, the creator. It was a sea of cringe for me. I did not care about this family. I even like the voice actors. I agree with Jeff that there was pretty good voice acting. It's just that the lines, the writing was just so painful.

THOMPSON: Wow.

BARBER: The celebrity and restaurant references, like Sbarro and, like, Tom Cruise and Roseanne Barr. Like, I can't. It was killing me. And I didn't go in with very high expectations either. My daughter had played the game, but I could not enjoy this until the very end. I think it got better towards the end.

THOMPSON: Oh, no. Well, I agree with you that it improves toward the end. I think the last episode is probably the strongest.

BARBER: I agree.

THOMPSON: For me, I'm more with Jeff on this. I really - sorry Regina. You're the odd person out.

BARBER: I know. It's the first time. Like, seriously. I like almost everything. This is why it surprised me, my visceral reaction.

THOMPSON: For me, it's interesting that both of you indicated that you came in with lower expectations...

BARBER: Yeah.

THOMPSON: ...Or came in kind of not necessarily expecting to love it. For me, I came in really excited about this project because, and this is my opinion of it coming out of it, is that it's cobbled together from a bunch of spare parts.

YANG: Yes.

BARBER: Yes.

THOMPSON: But it's a bunch of spare parts that I really like. Matthew Inman, the co-creator of this show and the co-creator of the card game, did a webcomic called The Oatmeal.

BARBER: Right.

YANG: Yes.

THOMPSON: Which I really love and which has given me a lot of joy over the years. I think he is - he's somebody I'm always going to be interested in whatever he does. The show's co-creator, Shane Kosakowski, worked on "You're The Worst" and "The Muppets," both of which I enjoyed. The executive producers include Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, who've, you know, done "King Of The Hill" and a ton of other stuff that I've really enjoyed. Tom Kenny and Jill Talley from "SpongeBob" are in the voice cast. They were on "Mr. Show." I love them. I'm interested in anything they touch. Many of the concepts and gags echo "The Good Place."

YANG: The best.

THOMPSON: Which is my - one of my favorite shows of all time.

BARBER: I think they try to echo "The Good Place."

YANG: (Laughter).

THOMPSON: I agree that among the times that I think this show isn't quite getting it is when they do that, and I think that was better on "The Good Place."

BARBER: Yeah.

THOMPSON: That joke was better on "The Good Place."

YANG: Yeah.

BARBER: Yeah.

THOMPSON: But, like, at the same time, like, there are so many component parts of this show that I enjoy. I'm interested in this show continuing and them kind of working out some of the kinks. I think, for me, maybe the biggest flaw of this show - Regina touched on it - is the...

BARBER: Thank you. Thanks.

THOMPSON: ...Is the pop culture carbon dating...

BARBER: Oh, Lord.

THOMPSON: ...Where you can tell exactly when a show was made based on its pop culture references. And to me, it feels like this show has been in the works for a long time because...

BARBER: Yeah.

THOMPSON: ...You have, like, jokes about Elon Musk and jokes about...

BARBER: Yeah.

THOMPSON: ...Karens and jokes about - there's, like, Guy Fieri jokes. And anytime it kind of works in the real world, it feels stale to me.

YANG: I agree with you that it definitely feels of a period. I know that some might say, oh, well, that's dated, but maybe it's after the pandemic and everything - I feel like a lot of culture has accelerated very rapidly. Like, we're now living in...

THOMPSON: Yeah.

YANG: ...A sort of high-velocity sea of memes that pop up and disappear very rapidly. And meanwhile, you've got Gen Z, who are kind of mining our childhood for nostalgia by proxy. And...

BARBER: That's true.

YANG: ...I kind of found...

THOMPSON: Yeah.

YANG: ...This to be more of...

THOMPSON: True.

YANG: ...A period piece in some ways than feeling dated.

BARBER: (Laughter).

YANG: I know that sounds weird, right? It's very near-term nostalgia for me...

BARBER: You're right.

YANG: ...You know?

BARBER: It's like secondhand nostalgia.

YANG: Exactly. And I don't think that that limits it for me. I don't feel when I see these references like, oh, my God, they're so old and lame. It's more like, oh, so, that's when this is set.

THOMPSON: This is set in 2015, maybe.

YANG: Yeah. Exactly.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

YANG: (Laughter) And one of the reasons why I feel that this show works a bit like a near-term period piece as opposed to just dated, old-joke, hackneyed stuff is that it clearly is in a world that feels simpler than ours, even though it's intended to be chaotic and complex. This feels a bit like a pre-Trump world, you know, a world of these non-hyperpolarized views of reality that I feel like from, you know, the 2020s on, don't feel like they land the same way. When I step into this, the stakes just seem a little bit lower, even to the point of, like, oh, when they're having armageddon, it's like a meat bot and a toilet paper, you know, droid mecha basically attacking each other on a stage full of tartar sauce. Like, OK, you're cringing, even as I'm saying that, but...

BARBER: Yeah. No, I was cringing at the voices...

YANG: (Laughter).

BARBER: ...And, like, I knew those scenes. And I was, like, covering my eyes. I mean, I will go back to "King Of The Hill" because I actually loved "King Of The Hill" because it kind of made fun of this idea of the white redneck. But, he was - you know, Hank was a very complex character, and he had complex friends. And I really loved the writing in "King Of The Hill." And I saw that Mike Judge was related to this show, and I was excited. But I think the writing here is just so, like you said, simple, but I'll take it even further. It's so surface-level and redundant. The father is dumb. And he's, like, weird and a nerd and...

THOMPSON: He's not dumb. He's clumsy.

BARBER: The father is clumsy. He has a dead-end job. You know, he's obviously not on the same level as his wife. His wife, like, why is she - why are they together? And actually, like, the first few episodes, they barely even hang out.

THOMPSON: But that's part of their arc on the show, is, like, the Godcat comes down and is trying to bring the family together.

BARBER: But they only even talk to each other in the second-to-last one, right? Like, I just think they started noticing all these flaws in their story, and then they tried to fix them towards the end. Like, I think that this show would have been, like, much more enjoyable for me - not a sea of cringe - if we just had focused on the cats and heaven and hell. Like, they could have had, like, a different family every week or something. Like, I just did not find anything about the family redeeming.

YANG: The things I kind of liked about the family - right? - are actually, in some ways, linked to their provenance from "King Of The Hill" in a lot of ways, right? I feel like Marv, the dad, who's, like, a gaming nerd - works at Big Bulk - he's not that far leap from, you know, our beloved Bill Dauterive. You know, he's like this kind of balding...

BARBER: Oh, but that's so sad.

THOMPSON: (Laughter).

YANG: The guy got a job at Mega Lo Mart, you know? Big Bulk here.

THOMPSON: Bill Dauterive - one of the greatest characters in animation history.

BARBER: Yeah.

YANG: Yes. Amazing. And then what if you took Bill Dauterive and then kind of married him to a combination of Peggy Hill/Dale Gribble, you know? That's...

THOMPSON: That is quite a combination you have concocted there, my friend.

YANG: That's the way it played out to me. And I do think that that Mark Proksch and Suzy Nakamura, who is, like, one of my favorite people and actors of all time, they really do bring those characters to life. I agree that the relationship between the two seems preposterous. Like, why?

BARBER: And I'm kind of tired of that. I think maybe men - some men aren't. And I am.

(LAUGHTER)

YANG: I hear you in that. And I think it is one of the bigger problems of the show, that because the characters are created in such a way that they feel as if they're sort of pulled from stock, and then the dialogue and the humor feels very Muppetsy in a way, right? - lots of these sort of silly puns and kind of, like, turn-to-the-camera observations.

BARBER: Yeah. And they're not followed up, to me, enough.

YANG: Yeah.

BARBER: Like, I don't like "Family Guy," which is, you know, something that makes me stand out in my generation.

THOMPSON: Sure.

BARBER: But I think it's better written than this show. Like, I think that their references, they kind of follow them up. There is a bit after the reference. And I think here in this show, like you said, they turn to the camera, and they were done. And I'm like, what else is there to this?

THOMPSON: Yeah. I think it does share that flaw with the "Family Guy." Where the "Family Guy" works for me the least is in its references, kind of...

BARBER: Right.

THOMPSON: ...References in lieu of jokes.

BARBER: Right. Exactly.

THOMPSON: And for me anytime this thing steered too much into references, it tended to lose me. Though I did think - and some of this is just an appreciation of the voice cast, I did think some of those bits worked well. I think the idea of the kid who went viral...

BARBER: Oof.

THOMPSON: ...You know, who went viral at the exact wrong time at, like, age 6, I thought was really funny and kind of strangely moving.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EXPLODING KITTENS")

YATES: (As Travis Higgins) You put your right foot in. You take your right foot out. You do the Horky Porky and you turn yourself around.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: (As character) The Horky Porky?

(LAUGHTER)

PROKSCH: (As Marv Higgins) Since then, he's been trying to get internet famous for something else.

THOMPSON: Part of my appreciation of Marv, the dad character, is just a love of everything Mark Proksch touches. He's one of the many funniest things about "What We Do In The Shadows." I found this voice cast so agreeable that that papered over some of the script issues for me. And it sounds like Regina is never going to smash that little white button in the corner if this comes back for a season two.

BARBER: No.

THOMPSON: But I will, in part, out of hope that it kind of builds on these raw materials.

YANG: It very much feels like the kind of cast that animation fans sort of want - right? - in the sense that you've got some very clearly above-the-name obvious voices. Honestly, shoutout whoever cast Lucifer, Tom Ellis, as Godcat.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EXPLODING KITTENS")

ELLIS: (As Godcat) Behold. I am the holiest of holy molys. I am God.

NAKAMURA: (As Abbie Higgins) Jesus Christ.

ELLIS: (As Godcat) Does this beard look like a goatee to you? I said I'm God.

BARBER: He's the only one I knew who it was, actually.

YANG: Instantly, right? And the fact that he's God now is kind of hilarious. I think that they combine that with voices who are less recognizable - you know, people who are more kind of traditional voice actors. And there has been a big pushback recently in the animation fan world against the, oh, let's just cast every single voice with somebody who...

THOMPSON: Everybody's a celebrity.

YANG: Exactly. There are actors who are really, really good character actors here, like Mark Proksch, like Suzy Nakamura, like Ally Maki. And then there's some people who I think I've only heard them maybe in, like, animated spaces, and they're also really good. So I did want to say that Sasheer Zamata as Devilcat is maybe the only casting that rings a little flatter for me, if only because I can't not hear her as Sasheer Zamata in every line she reads.

BARBER: I actually liked her talking to Karen. That's, like, one of the few things I liked. I liked how she's like, what is Karen going to do?

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EXPLODING KITTENS")

ZAMATA: (As Devilcat) Buckle up, Greta. Hurricane Karen is headed straight for you. I've never seen a creature this evil, and I've been to a taping of "Ellen."

BARBER: I will say there is one line that I wrote down, and I think it's the best line of the whole show. And it's by Tom Ellis. And he says, I want to say I love you, but I don't have the time.

YANG: (Laughter).

THOMPSON: You're like, I'm just - I'm keeping that one. I'm putting that one in my shirt pocket.

YANG: That's a T-shirt (laughter).

THOMPSON: Regina, I can't wait to join you for Season 2.

(LAUGHTER)

THOMPSON: All right. Well, we want to know what you think about "Exploiting Kittens." We got a full range of opinions here. Find us at facebook.com/pchh. That brings us to the end of our show. Regina Barber, Jeff Yang, thanks so much for being here.

YANG: Thanks for having us.

BARBER: Thank you so much. I had a great time.

THOMPSON: We want to take a moment to thank our POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR+ subscribers. We appreciate you so much for showing your support of NPR. If you haven't signed up yet, want to show your support and listen to this show without any sponsor breaks, head over to plus.npr.org/happyhour, or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Hafsa Fathima and edited by Jessica Reedy. Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all tomorrow. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.