Lost Eli Roth Cartoon Chowdaheads Resurrected by CryptTV
Steve Barton
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Before Eli Roth gave us flicks like Cabin Fever, Hostel, and The Green Inferno, he dabbled in the more animated world of darkness with things like “The Rotten Fruit” and the now newly resurrected “Chowdaheads.” Interested? Read on for the skinny!
CryptTV is bringing the 90’s back with the long overdue release of Eli Roth’s animated series “Chowdaheads.” The first of eight episodes of the never aired, pre-Cabin Fever show premiered today on CryptTV’s Facebook channel. Originally set to air during a 3-hour episode of WCW wrestling, “Chowdaheads” was pulled at the last minute and never found a home. But all these years later Roth is able to air “Chowdaheads” through the digital network and remembers the inspiration for the show and the ordeal it went through.
“Long before Cabin Fever, my friend Noah Belson and I created a show called ‘Chowdaheads’ and produced a series of short episodes for WCW wrestling. We wrote and voiced all the episodes, and I directed them and did the character design. We had an amazing team of animators who worked with me, animating the style I wanted for the show, which was somewhere between ‘Beavis and Butthead’ and Yellow Submarine, if that makes sense. The original pitch came from an idea we developed called ‘Massholes,’ which was basically ‘King of the Hill’ but set in Massachusetts,” Roth said.
“Our dream was to create an animated show like ‘South Park’ or ‘The Simpsons’ based on the kids who beat us up and terrorized us throughout our youth in Boston. WCW loved the idea, and at the time… their show ‘WCW Nitro’ was the #1 show on TV with 35 million viewers a week. We were going to air during the 3-hour broadcast, much like ‘The Simpsons’ started as interstitial shorts on’The Tracy Ullman Show.’ We finished all eight episodes, it was announced in Variety on a Friday, and over the weekend the head of WCW was fired and the show was put on hold. I of course had told everyone I ever met in my life to watch Monday’s ‘WCW Nitro,’ and people were furious that they sat through three hours of wrestling waiting for a cartoon that never materialized.”
Roth continues, “MTV flirted with taking the show there, but at the time they were finishing up ‘Beavis and Butthead’ and moving to this new craze called ‘reality’ TV where you just filmed regular people doing stuff. There was talk of taking the show elsewhere, but because we took our episode ideas and tailored them to run during wrestling with characters that were rapidly becoming outdated, it made less and less sense to people. I still love this idea and thought it would be fun for people to see another side of my directing, which actually predates Cabin Fever. For a while I was known as ‘animation guy,’ and my agents tried to sell me as some kind of up and coming Trey Parker or Mike Judge, but it was not meant to be. My destiny was to make films. ‘The Rotten Fruit’ was very much a reaction to this, where we had to tone down a lot of the violence and language to make it safe for TV. Apparently someone in standards & practices at TNT noticed that the title ‘Massholes’ had the word ‘assholes’ in it. So here it is, in all its glory, our tribute to Boston and WCW wrestling… ‘Chowdaheads.’”
CryptTV is an original for digital genre network co-founded by Roth and Jack Davis and has a strategic partnership with Blumhouse Productions. CryptTV releases its videos primarily through Facebook, where it has amassed over 500,000 subscribers. You can also find videos on CryptTV.com. Be sure to follow CryptTV on Twitter for on-the-go updates.
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