Mila Kunis’ studio debuts an NFT-backed animated web series ‘The Gimmicks’

• A public NFT mint is planned for Friday, via which users could get one of 10,000 NFTs to join the show’s community
• Holders would be able to vote on the direction the show’s story takes

Web 3 animated studio Toonstar has partnered with actress Mila Kunis’ production studio, Sixth Wall, to launch an animated wrestling show that follows the lives of retired professional wrestlers, The Gimmicks.

The show’s creators aim to build an NFT community around The Gimmicks, whose members would vote on which path the storyline should take next at the end of every episode.

The show, loosely described as ‘South Park meets WWE, but interactive and greasier’ by Toonstar CEO John Attanasio, was conceptualised following the release of athletes by WWE at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Attanasio explained that when wrestlers Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson left the entertainment franchise, they reached out to Toonstar with the idea to create the animated shorts “so that they could get their stories out and keep their creative juices flowing (and preserve their sanity).”

It was then that the Gimmicks, which is similar to the Ethereum-based animated series Stoner Cats that launched mid last year, was then born.

A Solana NFT community around the TV show

Alongside the web series, Sixth Wall and Toonstar will also release a collection of NFTs to encourage involvement from the community. The NFTs are to launch on 18 March, but as opposed to Stoner Cats which charged $785 in ETH per collectable, they would be free. The potential buyers would only incur the transaction fees.

“We felt that offering a free mint would encourage a much broader range of participation by lowering the cost of entry into our crazy world. Our goal is to help create a new generation of franchise IP with blockchain communities, so we believe monetisation will come in various forms if we build character worlds that people love and want to be part of,” Toonstar CEO John Attanasio told Decrypt.

In addition to voting rights for the plot or storyline that the next instalment of the show will explore, holders of the NFTs would also enjoy some exclusivity. They will gain access to the show’s content earlier before it’s released to the general public.

As for the choice of the Solana blockchain, since the end goal is to get more people involved with the NFT space, a cheap option was required. According to Kunis, the animated wrestling show would offer a platform by which NFT and Web3 newbies could interact with the said niches.

“It goes along with our mission of onboarding new people into Web3. We know the NFT-curious can be afraid to jump in, but Toonstar’s ideas, tech, and content, combined with the low transaction fees and low environmental impact of the Solana blockchain, make this an easy entry point.” Kunis added.

The Gimmicks will also have a Facebook poke-like feature called DIC Punch – Decentralized Inclusive Community Punch. DIC Punch would be the show’s on-chain social layer.

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