Review: Stoner Cats Episode 1

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
A nice old lady accidently hotboxes her house with weed she just ordered, which somehow gives all of her cats sapience and celebrity voices. Buy now to say that you own this cartoon that will be leaked everywhere for free!

OUR TAKE
I’ll be honest, when I was given this assignment, I was not aware of the unique set up or distribution model that it is being sold through. It just seemed like a slightly above average short about cats who get high, a premise that you would probably see on Newgrounds or Youtube back in the day when animators could actually make money from posting their stuff. And really, in terms of critiquing the work, all that should matter is THE WORK itself. And given that, I think that it is okay. The animation style certainly stands out, the celebrity voice cast do a fine job with what they’re given (though Chris Rock sounds like he recorded on a different planet), and the comedy is perfectly average. Not good enough to really make me laugh, but it kept my attention. So, on its own, this series doesn’t seem especially…well, special. What is it that makes this particular show about talking animals that is giving it so much attention?

Well, this is the show that is selling its episodes through the means of NFTs, Non Fungible Tokens. Like cryptocurrency, NFTs use blockchain to create verification of owning an original copy of an image or file. The idea has been a pretty highly contested and debated one, mainly on the matters of how much energy it takes to generate this proof of ownership and whether or not having that matters in such a time when the thing one can get an NFT for can be essentially replicated incredibly easy on the Internet. And yet, there has proven to be a very sizable market for NFTs in the art world, with just this first episode of Stoner Cats bringing in $8 million dollars through selling NFTs of it, which were initially the only way to see the episode. Though as you may be have guessed, we did not even pay a cent to watch the episode that has now been leaked onto Youtube, which raises the inevitable question of why it was released this way in the first place.

I’m legitimately unsure of how to feel about this. On one hand, I have concerns about the environmental effects that generating these NFTs may have, but I have also seen it be used to get people who once made no money on things that became household name memes finally be able to cash in on their internet stardom. I have no idea how this market will evolve or survive, outside of I guess that people like having proof they own something, though I’m not sure I think it’s a good idea to be releasing a series this way. This is unknown territory in a lot of ways for animation and we’re only going to know how it works by trying.