SNEAK PEEK
- With its animated sitcom “The Nouners,” Nouns is making a splash on television.
- The vibrant pixel characters from the Nouns project are used in the adult-targeted cartoon “The Nouners.”
- The $15,000 USDC request to cover the cost of the pilot episode was granted by the DAO’s Small Grants committee.
Nouns, an open-source intellectual property (IP) built on a variety of Ethereum NFTs, is breaking into the television market with “The Nouners,” an animated sitcom for adults. The program remains true to its roots by only making the pilot episode available via an NFT access pass. Independent creators generated the project, initially funded by a grant from the Nouns DAO community.
In “The Nouners,” a cartoon geared towards adults, the colorful pixel characters from the Nouns project are used. These characters are based on a range of things and creatures; all wear boxy glasses (or “Noggles”).
In the 11-minute pilot episode, which adopts a somewhat snarky tone, the creators present several projects to try and extend the Nouns brand in a lo-fi way to go along with the pixelated avatars. They’re pitching to a supreme deity in this instance, but with a “Wizard of Oz”-style twist with lots of profanity, sex, drugs, and other mature themes.
The Nouns DAO, a group of Nouns NFT owners who collectively control a treasury of roughly $43 million worth of ETH as of this writing, is the organization to which “The Nouners” was pitched. The projects that are supported by that treasury include, among many other things, toys, comic novels, a parade float, and brand alliances.
The idea for “The Nouners” originated with Executive Producer Mike Rekola and his team, who last August submitted a one-minute animatic and the concept to the DAO. Because Nouns was created under a Creative Commons 0 (CC0) license, anyone can use the IP to produce a project similar to this one without the DAO’s consent. It is completely open source.
But in this instance, the DAO’s Small Grants Committee granted the $15,000 USDC request to pay for the pilot episode. According to co-showrunner Sean Flanagan, the premise of the pilot episode was influenced by his experiences navigating the DAO proposal process and communicating with online pseudonyms.
