The Cyanide & Happiness Show

The Cyanide & Happiness Show
Genre	Black comedy Satire Sketch comedy Animation
Created by	Rob DenBleyker Dave McElfatrick Matt Melvin Kris Wilson
Voices of	Dave McElfatrick Rob DenBleyker Kris Wilson Joel Watson Jennie Mae Sweat Wildrose Hamilton Zach Prescott
Theme music composer	Dan Paladin
Opening theme	"I Like Your Hat"
Ending theme	"I Like Your Hat" (extended)
Composer(s)	Steve Lehmann
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	3
No. of episodes	31
Production
Executive producer(s)	Dave McElfatrick Kris Wilson Rob DenBleyker Gary Binkow
Producer(s)	Greg Slagel
Running time	10-15 minutes (Internet version) 22 minutes (TV version)
Production company(s)	Explosm Entertainment Collective Digital Studio (Season 1) Studio 71 (Season 2–present)
Release
Original network	YouTube (2014–15) Seeso (2016–17) VRV (2017–present)
Picture format	1080p (16:9)
Original release	November 12, 2014 – present
External links
Website

The Cyanide & Happiness Show is an animated comedy web series created by Rob DenBleyker, Dave McElfatrick, Matt Melvin and Kris Wilson, based on their webcomic Cyanide & Happiness. Each episode consists of a few short stories that have little to no connection to each other (with the exception of six episodes from Season 3, which were a story arc). The creators described the goal of each episode to be "to extract the human excretion known as laughter from your face hole via fast-paced weird comedy."^[1]

The Cyanide & Happiness Show was funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign. The first season was initially released on YouTube from November 12, 2014 to January 21, 2015. The show was later acquired by Seeso, which produced second and third seasons before selling the show to VRV in mid-2017.

Production

The Explosm team has been creating short videos based on Cyanide & Happiness for years before working on the full show. The Explosm YouTube channel had over 3.6 million subscribers and 490 million views before The Cyanide & Happiness Show started airing.^[2] Some of these short videos, such as "Junk Mail" and "Confession", have proven "overwhelmingly popular" among fans of the webcomic.^[3]

The Cyanide & Happiness Show was funded by the means of a Kickstarter campaign in early 2013, where it collected a total of $770,309. This was more than three times the initial goal and broke the record of most money ever funded for an animated series on Kickstarter.^[4][5] Among the "zany gift offerings" given to Kickstarter backers was an "all-expenses-paid trip to Dallas for a Banana Bar Crawl replete with a banana costume, scepter, and crown".^[6]

When the Explosm team sat down to plan the first season, they realized 50 percent of the writing for it was already done, with some ideas being over five years old. Many of the stories used in The Cyanide and Happiness Show resulted from the team trying to make each other laugh while in a bar. Due to Wilson living in Fort Collins, Colorado, numerous plane rides and Skype calls had taken place during this process. As the show began to take shape, the team drew out management positions for themselves. McElfatrick was put in charge of art, DenBleyker covered animation and Wilson managed sound design and voice acting, but as the project went on, these roles loosened up. The team hired contributors from the United States, India and South Korea for various processes.^[3]

Release

The creators originally attempted to negotiate a TV series deal with cable networks, but due to "concerns about artistic compromise",^[6] their efforts were fruitless. One of the creators wrote:

"We walked away from the first two [networks] due to rights and creative control issues. We thought that we could settle those issues in the third deal, but things didn’t quite work out as we hoped. We’re starting to realize that TV as an industry just isn’t compatible with what we want to do with our animation: deliver it conveniently to a global audience, something we’ve been doing all along with our comics these past eight years. That's just the nature of television versus the Internet, I suppose."

— Explosm^[7]

The first episode of The Cyanide and Happiness Show premiered in an Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Richardson, Texas, on 12 November 2014.^[3] Episodes of the series are released on YouTube, but are also available for DRM-free, low-price download. These downloads were released shortly before the episodes are uploaded to YouTube. According to the creators, once bought, people are free to copy, edit and spread the material to their liking.^[8]

The second season of The Cyanide and Happiness Show, which started in December 2015, was made available through the Seeso streaming service rather than YouTube. NBCUniversal Cable senior vice president Parra Hadden noted that, shortly after it was announced that The Cyanide and Happiness Show would be hosted on Seeso, the website saw a very large surge in traffic.^[9] Seeso renewed the series for a third season later in 2016.^[10] Because Seeso is planning to shut down by the end of 2017, The Cyanide & Happiness show has become available on the streaming service VRV.^[11]

In some countries outside the United States, the series is aired on TV, as a 22-minute series, conjoining two episodes into one.

Reception

Imad Kahn of The Daily Dot described Cyanide & Happiness videos as an "odd, but hilarious, mix of abrupt black humor that's overtly weird and doesn't pretend to be profound. It really does feel like a group of writers with free reign [sic] to animate whatever their twisted minds can think of."^[2]

Episodes

References