By
Bhushan Akolkar
May 10th, 2024
John Attanasio, the CEO of Toonstar, speaking to reporters after the announcement, described the Mila Kunis-backed show as “South Park meets WWE, but interactive and greasier.”
Animation studio Toonstar in collaboration with Sixth Wall, the digital arm of actress Mila Kunis’ Orchard Farm Productions has announced the launch of the Gimmicks, a new Solana NFT animated wrestling series.
According to Toonstar, a Web3 animation studio, the Gimmicks is an animated web series about retired professional wrestlers attempting to reclaim or reciprocate their glory days in the ring. The new animated series will make use of Solana NFTs which will include a “choose your own adventure” mode which will allow fans to vote on the storyline, characters, and plots in each episode.
John Attanasio, the CEO of Toonstar, speaking to reporters after the announcement, described the Mila Kunis-backed show as “South Park meets WWE, but interactive and greasier.” Attanasio added that the inspiration behind the Gimmicks came about after WWE fired pro wrestlers Luke “Doc” Gallows and Karl “Machine Gun” Anderson just as the COVID-19 outbreak began.
“They reached out about collaborating on some animated shorts for social media so that they could get their stories out and keep their creative juices flowing, and preserve their sanity,” Attanasio stated.
Toonstar then started working on the concept for The Gimmicks, which features Gallows and Anderson as well as other wrestlers FKA Enzo Amore and Rocky Romero as voice actors. The actress’s latest animated series is written by Dave Ihlenfeld and David Wright, who previously worked on the popular animated hits Family Guy and The Simpsons.
Mila Kunis started her journey into the crypto space last summer when she used an NFT collection to crowdfund her cartoon series “Stoner Cats,” token-gating the episodes. The cartoon project lived on Ethereum and featured herself, her husband Ashton Kutcher, and Jane Fonda as voice actors alongside guest appearances including Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.
“I see the tech and community that comes with NFTs and Web3 allowing for the audience to directly communicate with and inform creators of what they like and what they don’t,” Kunis stated after the announcement adding that there is space for traditional film and television development as well as this more wild west fun chaos that comes along with developing in Web3.
Kunis stated that no one currently has the ideas that push the potential of Web3 or create content as fun as Toonstar does, and no one can turn around content as quickly. “The Gimmicks allows us to experiment with what it looks like to create in and around a community, taking the tech seriously but keeping the content fun,” she stated.
Lisa Sterbakov, a partner of Sixth Wall described The Gimmicks as “an iteration on the Stoner Cats [concept] with the ability for even more community engagement and audience interaction.”