For years now, people have proclaimed their love for various animated shows. Sometimes its for an adult animated show such as Family Guy and other times its kids born in the 1990s reminiscing about Rugrats. Not too long in the future, people may be calling an animated series by Starbucks their favorite animated show.
Wait, what?
That’s right, Starbucks is getting ready to release its very own animated series. On top of that, three writers from The Simpsons, which is arguably one of the best animated series of all time, are coming together to write the series.
According to a Starbucks press release, John Frink, Joel H. Cohen, and Rob LaZebnik all write for The Simpsons and often find themselves working at a Starbucks in Los Angeles. While procrastinating on The Simpsons, they were inspired to write Starbucks’ first-ever animated series.
“As much as we are supposed to be working, we are even better at procrastinating,” said LaZebnik. “Looking around, you can’t help but see the vibe in there – the partners (employees), the regular customers, the flow of morning traffic. We thought we could bring that to life in a really fun way.”
The series will be titled “1st & Main” and will feature a collection of animated shorts that focus on what happens when people go to Starbucks throughout their day all over the country. It’s scheduled to debut on December 16th as a seven-episode series. An odd twist in this series is the characters aren’t people and instead animals.
Here are three main characters:
Julie – The “1st & Main” store manager who is a bear
Chet – A beagle who is a contractor and knows everyone in the story
Diego – A barista cat with a man bun and loves brewing up the best beverages
That cat with a man bun is too on point.
“Starbucks talks about the ‘third place’ between work and home,” said Cohen, “That’s ultimately the theme of the series: every person at every table has a story. At our table, we are the three weird guys watching the other tables.”
All seven episodes will be about 90 seconds, which Starbucks prides as “the length of time it takes to place a Starbucks order.”
“Telling a story in that amount of time is tricky, because it’s so brief, and you still want a beginning, a middle and an end. We tried it without an end, but that didn’t feel satisfying,” said LaZebnik.
“Obviously, we want something that will be funny and resonate with viewers,” Frink added. “So we tried to come up with simple, small stories that pay off quickly with the right amount of humor and emotion in them. Also, writing longer stuff takes more effort, so we went shorter.”
Oddly enough, this is Starbucks’ second original content series. Back in September the coffee company released a 10-part series known as “Upstanders” that was about “ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities.”
Introducing “1st & Main,” Starbucks first-ever animated series https://t.co/h9qzvsfMB8 pic.twitter.com/3PYtmfzZyX
— Starbucks News (@StarbucksNews) December 14, 2016
