The Cuphead Show's New Products Are A Hot Sauce Lover's Dream
Unlike your more modern-day games that try to go above and beyond by making everything from their characters and environment as real as possible, "The Cuphead Show" fully embraces the surreal, the strange, and the downright cartoonish. Based on the 2017 game titled "Cuphead" from Studio MDHR, "The Cuphead Show" harkens back to the days of the classic 1930s color cartoons of Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney, and the Fleischer brothers. The basic premise of the show follows the titular character Cuphead and his brother and best friend Mugman as they traverse the zany watercolor world of the Inkwell Isles, meeting a bevy of colorful characters such as a pack of free-loading vegetables, con artist pigs, and even the Devil himself.
While some sources such as The Guardian may call the show a "fast, funny spinoff" of the original game and others such as Mashable call it a "perfectly cute waste of a video game," it's clear "The Cuphead Show" – and its original video game incarnation – have found a legion of fans. Clearly, Netflix also wanted a taste, as "The Cuphead Show" was launched on the platform in February. The Cuphead series also comes with merch, including books, dolls, and even vinyl recordings of the game's jazzy soundtrack. Besides the standard forms of merch, "The Cuphead Show" is literally adding flavor with hot sauce and coffee.
You can pack a wallop with these hot sauces
According to Destructoid, Jade City Foods and "The Cuphead Show" crew have come together to release six hot sauce flavors and three flavors of Cuphead-themed coffee. Each bottle of hot sauce is decorated with a drawing of the game's and the show's characters, ranging from the Cab Calloway-influenced King Dice, the sneering and sly Devil, and of course the brothers Cuphead and Mugman.
Perhaps in keeping with the character motifs, the sauces named after the heroes of the game – i.e., Ms. Chalice's "Nothin' But Trouble" and Mugman's "Quit While You're Ahead" – are all somewhat sweeter-sounding hot sauces, adding flavors such as blue raspberry and blueberries to help tone down the heat. By contrast, The Devil's ominously named "Soul Collector" contains Carolina Reaper peppers to Ghost peppers, whose deathly hot names arguably add to the fire-and-brimstone theme.
The coffee comes in three flavors, following more of the routine "dark, medium, and light" varieties than any sort of wild experimentation. The three varieties are Cuphead's "Looking for Fun" dark roast, Ms. Chalice's "Sunshine Blend" medium coffee, and Mugman's "Good Times Blend" light roast coffee. The Cuphead coffees and hot sauces are sold on the Inkwell Isles Store website. The sauces run from $16 to $18 dollars a bottle (and $90 for a six-pack), and the coffee costs $20 a box.