Upsetting Day: Stoner Cats

I would like to be the 1900hotdog columnist who specializes in art that is also literally a crime. Personally, I might have been a fan of the web series Stoner Cats under different circumstances, but do you know who definitely wasn’t a fan of it? The SEC. They filed charges against the NFT-based webtoon that resulted in a million-dollar penalty, with the money being used to set up a fund for the victims of Stoner Cats.

Crypto crimes are not surprising, but the scale of this one is pretty impressive. The black cat on the Stoner Cats poster is voiced by Mila Kunis, who also produced the show, and the brown one is Ashton Kutcher. The woman in the middle is Jane Fonda, and to her right are Chris Rock and Seth MacFarlane, who also voices the other orange cat. I don't know how much these A-list celebrities were paid to participate in this scam, but I know the SEC determined they were paid with "Illicit Funds," aka crime money. This show was filled to the brim with celebrities and crime money. They even got Michael Bublé to cameo! He's the sweetest celebrity, and Stoner Cats made him crime-adjacent. They got a man with an angel's voice whose name sounds like it's French for Mr. Bubbly, and tainted him with their criminal enterprise.

In July of 2021, Stoner Cats produced 10,420 NFTs priced at about $800 each that sold out in thirty-five minutes. They raised over eight point two million dollars, and they framed that initial NFT offering as fundraising for the web show that would follow. Mila Kunis had been touring crappy crypto-related podcasts and YouTube shows to promote the NFTS and the "community" they planned to form around them for months. You had to own one of the NFTs to get access to the show, so over ten thousand people paid $800 for a total of forty minutes of mediocre weed jokes, which are now available for free on YouTube because, DUH. You'll never keep something this stupid from turning up for free on the internet.

I'm not an expert in securities fraud by any means, but one of the funny things about Stoner Cats is that it seems like the creation of the show was entirely to see if they could skirt SEC regulations by saying the NFTs were not really an investment but more like a physical product because they were buying access to the show, which meant they didn't need to register the offering with the SEC. The SEC said, "Stoner Cats wanted all the benefits of offering and selling a security to the public but ignored the legal responsibilities that come with doing so." Stoner Cats seems absolutely affronted by the idea that they're not just cute little art guys making art. The SEC required that they post about being fined on their website, and they did, but right next to it, they posted a link to their dissent.

Stoner Cat's argument is that the guidance from the SEC wasn't clear and "Whether an artist is selling numbered versions of physical prints for fans to display on their walls or NFTs for fans to display on social media, she deserves clear guidance about whether and how securities laws apply." Basically they tried to "there's no law that says a dog can't play basketball" the SEC and lost. The laws did, in fact, say that if you go on every crypto podcast on earth to advertise your regular art project, it is actually a product you are trying to sell as an investment and not just a pretty picture, Mila Kunis. Maybe don't go on a YouTube show called "Coindesk Spotlight Sponsored By Nexo" to advertise access to your cartoon that may or may not fluctuate in price (wink)?

Now that the general public has access to this work of art valued at over eight hundred dollars for 40 minutes of content, let's see if it's actually worth $20 per minute of entertainment which would be the most expensive entertainment that doesn't literally make you cum. The episode begins with Ms. Stoner, a woman suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's, getting high on medical marijuana with her five extremely famous cats. In the first episode, all of Chris Rock's audio sounds like it was recorded on a Dell laptop at a Panera Bread.

The premise of the show is a pretty enormous bummer. Ms. Stoner is sort of like Mr. Bean if, instead of being a silly little guy, he had a serious and incurable disease that caused his cognitive impairment, and it sort of hung over the entire show like a ghostly apparition of death. Ms. Stoner's cats gain human consciousness from an experimental strain of weed she is sent by accident and use their expanded abilities to take care of Ms. Stoner as she starts little fires and almost wrecks her car… you know, general fun adventures!

The cats have to keep smoking the experimental weed to stay smart, so there are a lot of wacky antics where they try to get more of the experimental weed by breaking into the sci-fi facility it came from. The facility is guarded by spooky robots called SEC bots, which might have been foreshadowing of Stoner Cats future troubles, or might have just been a nod to the fact that most crypto bros don't like the SEC in general, for crime reasons. For the same reason Tony Soprano isn't wild about the FBI.

The artwork isn't too bad for an NFT project. It's simple, but kind of cute. And, at least at times, interesting to look at. There's a weird laziness that I think the creators thought was cool permeating the whole thing. If they have to use any number in the series, a mile marker on the highway, or a notation of the passage of time, it's always 420. There's a delivery driver with a name tag that just says whatever. If I had paid eight hundred dollars to watch a show where the fact that the producers were lazy was an in-joke, I'd be pretty pissed, but, again, I got it for free on Youtube, so I guess we're good.

The main bad guy of Stoner Cats is Ms. Stoner's nephew Chad, who's trying to steal her will, put her in a cheap nursing home, and take all of her money. Again, I'm not sure elder abuse is the laugh-out-loud topic the creators of this show intended. Everything turns out fine because the Stoner Cats straight-up murder that guy. It's a wild forty minutes.

Don't worry; there are also normal stoner cartoon antics that are also not funny, like when one of the cats needs fertilizer to grow more of the weed that makes them smart, so he tries to trick all of the cats into eating laxatives, but the Chris Rock cat eats all of the laxatives and then shits all over Chad's face. This is before they murdered Chad but after the Michael Bublé cameo. I'm still so mad that they dragged Michael Bublé into this.

The big reveal at the end of the season, which is the length of one episode of a regular cartoon, is that the cats have been sending themselves messages from an alternate timeline dystopian future to help their past selves kill Chad. Profound messages like, "Stop Chad," "Chad must be stopped," and "DON'T TOUCHY THA KUSHY," which, thank Gawd, is not even how the cats talk because that would make the show even more unbearable. I mean, could you imagine?

One of the things Mila Kunis said about this show during the press tour was that because Stoner Cats wouldn't be airing on traditional TV, they wouldn't have to worry about any kind of censorship, but there's nothing in this show edgy or shocking enough that they couldn't put it on late night cable. The idea that this show was so new and crazy that they could only create it with help from the blockchain is severely damaged by the existence of the show Slacker Cats, which people online often mix it up with.

Not only could you make this show on cable, but they pretty much did, and it ran for two seasons in 2007 on ABC Family. It had double the episodes and nine times the length of content, and it only cost seven thousand dollars to watch. No, wait, sorry, it was free. Oh well, at least Stoner Cats did what it set out to do: make Mila Kunis roughly three million dollars after production costs and the SEC fine. Art wins again!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Velo, who just locked down a killer tight five on how catnip is like weed for cats and is already under investigation by the SEC.

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