There is an armageddon between a good cat and an evil cat in the middle of a supermarket aisle in the second episode of Exploding Kittens. The evil cat puts on an armour of all things raw meat from the deli section,”Time to meat your maker” she roars. The good cat for his defence straps on everything soft and pillowy from toilet paper to diapers: “All day comfort and protection” he retorts. It’s a ridiculous and hilarious escalation of cat zoomies if you’ve ever seen a cat go nuts around the house.
Mathew Inman is the creator of the game Exploding Kittens and the co-showrunner of the Netflix adaptation. He is a cartoonist who has published comic booksooks including How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you and Why my cat is more impressive than your baby and making board games in between. His genre of humour is rib-tickling for being entertainingly rude and, half the time, bawdy.
Creative artists fall under such a broad umbrella. As a cartoonist, of course, Inman is one. He created The Oatmeal 15 years ago where he uploads his comics, then he compiled some of them into books and created board games, a couple during the pandemic too. All are in his signature style of drawing, which is not very pretty. The Netflix show is based on not a comic book but in fact one of his board games.
Creativity is fun though and who in this age of grey boundaries isn’t up for some fun? It is fun to turn the mundane into something that appears exciting and make money off of the marketing. The entire influencer industry has us sold on the idea. Even if you were an unthinking idiot before social media, you know how you must live now and enjoy life enough to share it on your socials.
Exploding Kittens starts off with a lot of creativity and fun. In the show, mostly the characteristic irreverent humour of The Oatmeal comics is what makes you laugh out loud and often. For two episodes. I can’t really hold it against anyone that a brand new, much-anticipated-by-fans animated show deflates its own bubble of enthusiasm and novelty as soon as three out of nine episodes. It’s quite the token disappointment in this age of nose-diving on-screen originality. It runs out of fresh and witty quips about modern lifestyle and popular culture references about as soon as it loses a central plot.
The biggest letdown is that the cat jokes peter out just as soon! Based on the adventures of two cats exiled to earth from heaven and hell and having kittens in its title I expected all things cat to delight me through the entirety of the show. Inman’s usual jokes on the spell cats cast on human beings and their antics as pets (laser pointer hypnosis or pushing things off counter tables and any surface for no reason) peak in the first couple of solid episodes. The narrative sadly begins to focus more on the boring human family whose lives the cats are orchestrating, each for their own gain.
The Higgins are a dumb, dysfunctional American family depicting the run-of-the-mill “funny” (not) idiosyncrasies. The daughter is like Lisa Simpson but nowhere near as interesting, the mother is an ex-Navy SEAL but evokes no intrigue. The father is an utter loser with his head filled with fantasy board games ideas and there’s a gormless son who wants to be famous online. None of them know how to connect to each other and neither does the audience. The family add up to nothing but forgettable props to push the arc further. In fact if they were written for only that purpose the show could have turned itself around. However, as mentioned before, the script gives them more narrative space than the amusing capers of the cats from the hereafter. It’s a missed opportunity for sure. Having said that, it’s also only the first season. Perhaps Inman had to make some reluctant compromises in order to air the show. Of course, the essence of his wit and concept was doused in order to make it more commercially palatable. Didn’t I say in these tepid times of disappointment and lack of originality, marketing will tell you what to do with yourself?
What the two lead cats have in common with the Higginses is that they too are not doing their jobs well. But the cats are actually rulers of heaven and hell. So the board up there kicks them out on probation to earth to show their mettle, in the bodies of cats. The good cat is the answer to the Higginses accidental prayers of becoming closer. But it is Beelzebub the cat from hell who shows them how worse things could be without having each other in their lives. Through the portals of hell, each of the family members travel to unpleasant memories and experiences to realize the importance of family. It really is as corny as it sounds. The moral of the story should have been disrespectful and banal in order to deliver a punch. Instead the episodes that place each familiy member at the centre come off as aimless and boring.