The Drinky Crow Show Premieres May 13!

Press Release

On Sunday, May 13, The Cartoon Network's popular Adult Swim animation showcase will premiere the long-awaited pilot of The Drinky Crow Show, based on cartoonist Tony Millionaire's long-running Maakies comic strip. The show's comedy is brutal, existential, and hilarious. As with animated shows like The Simpsons or Futurama, The Drinky Crow show is a fast-paced, plot-twisting laff-riot combining adventure, romance, debauchery and graphic violence - offering something for everybody!

The 11-minute pilot, titled "Mermaid," finds Drinky Crow encountering a mermaid following a broken-hearted suicide attempt on the high seas. Drinky immediately dedicates his life to meeting her again. At the moment he gives up his quest he sees his friend Uncle Gabby in the process of being eatend by a shark and thinks Gabby is his beloved mermaid. In a whirlwind of head-chopping violence, Drinky Crow rescues his friend and the good ship MAAKIES from the clutches of ferocious Napoleonic French alligators.

The Drinky Crow Show is the creation of Tony Millionaire and Eric Kaplan. Millionaire was born and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Millionaire's mentor/grandfather was an illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post and various adventure books and magazines and passed on to his grandson a knack for drawing ships and ocean scenes. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Believer, and Fantagraphics has published six Maakies collections as well as the graphic novels Billy Hazelnuts and Mighty Mite, the Ear Mite. He is a multi Harvey and Eisner Award-winner and has also created several beloved Sock Monkey books for children (from Dark Horse Comics). He lives in Pasadena, California.

Eric Kaplan grew up in Brooklyn New York. He has been a writer for Spy Magazine, The Late Show with David Letterman, Futurama, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Malcolm in the Middle and the HBO series Flight of the Conchords. He is the President of the animation studio Mirari Films, and created the internet series Zombie College which The New York Times has called "relentless and irresistible".

The May 13 pilot of The Drinky Crow Show is directed by the award-winning animation director Igor Kovalyov (co-director of The Rugrats Movie and several acclaimed international shorts) and will, ratings-willing, be the first of an ongoing Drinky Crow Show series. Future episodes will take the cast from freezing Antarctic waters (where Drinky and Uncle Gabby catch small-pox and inadvertently spread it throughout the world), to Gay Paree (where Drinky falls in love with a French princess and contracts a new strain of syphilis, which falls in love with his old strain of syphilis), to Japan (in an episode that looks like a Hiroshige print come to life), and even to Brooklyn (where Drinky and Gabby create Tony Millionaire in a fit of delirium tremens).

Millionaire's Maakies has been one of America's most popular weekly comic strips since debuting in The New York Press in 1994 (it currently runs in The Village Voice and many other papers nationwide). Simpsons creator Matt Groening says "Millionaire is so good he should be named Tony Billionaire." Novelist Dave Eggers says, "I believe Tony Millionaire can do only important things."

The theme song for The Drinky Crow Show was written and performed by They Might Be Giants, who consider the work amongst "their finest to date." The show is animated in Transylvania in GLORIOUS MAAKI-MATION: a never-before-seen hybrid of old Sunday comics, 3D animation and 2D animation.

The Drinky Crow Show stars Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby. Drinky Crow is a desperate, depressed, tormented romantic who seeks escape from the horror of being alive through killing his brain-cells with alcohol and/or bullets. Uncle Gabby is an overweight, drunken monkey sailor who devotes his life to the simple pleasures of sleep, eating, drinking, defecation, and mindless coupling. Other cast members featured in The Drinky Crow Show include: Captain Maak, the brutal, lash-weilding boss; the flirtatious, sadistic, Captain's Daughter; Phoebe Crow, Drinky's long-suffering sober girlfriend; Aunt Gabby, Gabby's equally crass monkey wife; Young Master Wentworth, an awful, five year-old rich snob who travels on the ship; Blind Pew, a blind sailor with colon cancer who always looks on the bright side of things, and Cynthia, a plucky, self-reliant fly who never stops smiling as she struggles to find love while raising a family of kids inside Uncle Gabby.