Cubnet is a 2022-ongoing online series of prose stories (with a book version forthcoming) by George Coryell (aka Icy Crow), author of Kasia and Unimaa.
The stories, set in a World of Funny Animals, revolve around a children's entertainment studio and television network (the titular Cubnet), the adventures of the animal characters who work there, and the productions produced by it.
The first nine stories (plus one bonus story) can be read on Coryell's website here
(the rest will be exclusive to the forthcoming book), or you can listen to Coryell read the first story on YouTube here (video is audio-only).
These stories contain examples of:
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: So far, we have Brenda (a pink bear), Rachel (a purple rabbit), and Curtis (a blue cat, although cats can be blue in real life).
- And Knowing Is Half the Battle: The end of the episode of "Rory and the Rodents" that Brenda watches with Rachel's son and daughter in "The Obligatory Babysitting Story" has Rory and his bandmates tell the audience "say no to drugs!". Brenda quickly points out the hypocrisy.
- Babysitting Episode: "The Obligatory Babysitting Story", wherein Brenda babysits Rachel's two children, Riley and Jack, and ends up introducing them to Cubnet's back catalog.
- Band Toon: "Rory and the Rodents", an older series from The '80s, is implied to be this.
- British Rock Star: Rory Rabbit, Rachel's husband who is implied to be at least 10 years older than herMath , is implied to be this.
- Content Warnings: Given that Coryell's two previous projects were more child-friendly (although it's debatable for either of them), the hub page has this warning above all the links to the stories:PARENTS, TAKE NOTE: Despite featuring animal characters, these stories are intended for readers over age 13. While all of these stories are free of material that cannot be shown on broadcast television, some of them deal with themes that younger children are less likely to relate to and they may at times contain mild language and suggestive dialogue, which some parents may object to.
- Contractual Purity: It's implied Curtis is locked into something like this in-universe, since non-child-friendly music he made years ago has come to parents' attention. The videos are allowed to remain up on the Internet and he keeps his job, but not before educating children on the difference between children's media and media for adults, and, to him, losing whatever was left of his dignity.
- Deadpan Snarker: Brenda, oh so very much.
- Different World, Different Movies: It's possible that the reason the cast is entirely animals is to give an easy justification for the shows being different, some of which are Captain Ersatzes of well-known onesnote .
- Fake Interactivity: Parodied in the first exposure we get of a Preschool Show called "Otter Delight"note :Otter: (seemingly addressing the viewer) Can you count to 100?
Rabbit: Uh, Otter, we only have seven minutes to play today.
Otter: (presumably still addressing the viewer) Okay, can you count to seven? - For Inconvenience, Press "1": Downplayed in "The Substitute?"; when Curtis is sick the morning of a scheduled taping of his show, he calls the network to let them know, only to get a phone tree - while he's able to navigate it (although it was set up deliberately to prevent anyone from being able to get to an operator until the machine knows why they're callingnote ), he gets an operator who is adamant about sticking to her script until she realizes who she's talking to, and the machine also says that calls will be monitored for purposes of improving the network's schedule.
- Friday Night Death Slot: An In-Universe example - when Rachel's two kids ask Brenda if she wants to watch TV with them, Brenda tells them "Friday's the worst night of the week for TV - you'll know why when you're older." Riley (Rachel's daughter) points out how Friday is the best night of the week for Cubnet, which they watch if only because Rachel blocked Toonland (which Brenda wanted to watch instead) on their cable box.
- Game Show Goofballs: The story "Dollars for Scholars" recounts a disastrous episode of the titular kids' game show, wherein two teams of students (who were competing to win money to help fund their respective schools, mind you), were too stupid to answer questions that someone of their age should by all rights know the answer to (for example, they seem to think that proper nouns are things the stereotypical Gilded Age rich person would own), and after the winning school wins with 1 point after a tiebreaker round, host Alex Armadillo announces his intentions to "drown [his] anguish in the strongest beverage [his] contract will allow [him] to drink".
- Girl-Show Ghetto: Discussed in-universe in "The Pitches" by Howard and Rachel; Rachel questions the viability of "Winged Things", an action-comedy show idea involving fairies, among boys (her justification being that her young son Jack hates anything even remotely girly), whereas Howard mentions that boys like action and the show could also appeal to boys going through puberty. In the end, when Howard reveals that the guy behind the idea had the fairies be mutant butterflies who had been living in a fox boy's backyard, Jack is all for it, whereas Rachel starts to question the show's viability among girls.
- Gratuitous Japanese: At the beginning of the episode of "Funny Bunnies" that Brenda writes, a frustrated Sarcasm Bunny tells Wordplay Bunny and Silly Bunny "Sayonara, tomodachi."Translation
- Instructional Film: The orientation video the creative staff are shown is like this - it outright encourages the staff to produce lowest-common denominator programs to draw high ratings, and based on the fact that it talks about "this new era of cable television", it seems to be from around the early 1980s (which, incidentally, was around the time Nickelodeon launched in real life).Video narrator: Many acclaimed Saturday morning cartoons were cancelled prematurely because they were drawing the wrong audience, which the toy and junk food companies that sponsored those shows were not happy about.
Brenda: (thinking to herself) You don't say. - Interspecies Friendship: Brenda (a bear) has a poodle as her apartmentmate (it's implied they've known each other since childhood), while Curtis (a cat) has a weasel as his apartmentmate.
- Kids' Show Mascot Parody: Cowboy Cat, Curtis's stage persona, is implied to be like this based on some of the advice Curtis gives to Brenda.
- Latex Perfection: In the episode of "Funny Bunnies" that Brenda writes with suggestions from Jack and Riley, Wicked Wolf fully disguised himself as a catperson with the alias "Clever Cat". Lampshaded when two of the Bunnies happen to catch Sarcasm Bunny on the local public access channel:Wordplay Bunny: I don't know, Silly Bunny, something seems fishy here. Especially that latex-looking catperson...
- Lazy Alias: In a way; the alias under which Brenda credits Jack and Riley's contributions to a script for "Funny Bunnies", O.U.T. Fox-Rabbit, clearly looks like "outfox rabbit", which is exactly what she and Howard were doing to Rachel. And yet Rachel doesn't figure it out. Well, at least not until after the episode is broadcast.
- Mama Bear: In the lost episode of "Otter Delight", which was briefly removed from the website until it returned as bonus content, Otter's father warns him of this trope when he brings home a nest of falcon eggs. The mother falcon, upon finding Otter with her nest, almost attacks him until she realizes she can't violate BS&P - though she does warn him that she would be much less merciful towards him if he ever did anything like that with her nest again.
- Mature Animal Story: Downplayed - while there's not much that's inappropriate aside from some mild profanity, the fact that all the stories so far deal with a work environment and the focus characters are all adults are indications that this work is aimed at a more mature audience.
- Merchandise-Driven: Several in-universe examples:
- The orientation video in "New Employee Training", clearly from The '80s, tells incoming employees to make sure the programs are marketable to toy companies.
- A Product-Promotion Parade at the end of an episode of "Rory and the Rodents" shilling action figures based on the show.
- This line from "Sarcasm Bunny's Blunder":Silly Bunny: NOOOOO! You can't go! How else are we going to sell toys... I mean, fight evil?
- Brenda mentions in "The Scandal?" that "Rory and the Rodents" was made with the sole purpose of hawking merchandise.Context
- Missing Episode: In-universe, "Otter Finds a Nest!" (which was temporarily removed from the website in November 2022, making it an actual example, until it was reinstated as bonus content), which is presented as an episode of "Otter Delight" that only aired once in 1997 and was pulled from circulation immediately, wherein Otter discovers a nest of falcon eggs, brings it home to his parents to help him figure out what they are, and is told to return the nest before the mother falcon can find out he stole it. While trying to return the nest before the mother falcon can find out what happened to it, he almost gets attacked by the mother falcon until she realizes she can't violate Cubnet Junior's Standards and Practices.
- Most Common Card Game: When Jack and Riley are playing cards after losing their screen time for the weekend:Jack: Anyway, got any threes?
Riley: Jack, we're playing Rummy.
Jack: Oh! Uh... how do you play that?
Riley: You know what, we'll play blackjack. Big Brother Remus taught me how to play that one. - Out Sick: In "The Substitute?", Curtis is sick the morning of a scheduled taping of "Cowboy Cat's Kids Club" and, after he tells the network to "put someone else on like they do with those talk shows", Howard Hawk (the head of the creative department) puts Rachel (one of the network executives) on as host (probably to get revenge on her for vetoing some of his ideas), and after that fails, the network ultimately fills what would have been the new episode's timeslot with a rerun of a Preschool Show from The '90s called "Otter Delight".
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The PIN to access the voicemail box for pitches is "1980" - which, as the text points out, is the year Cubnet was founded.
- Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Brenda and Curtis, respectively.
- Pointy-Haired Boss: Rachel has a few traits of this; she thinks she knows better than the head of the creative department over what belongs in shows on the network because she's a mother and he's a 38-year-old bachelor, thus vetoing many of his decisions, but at the same time she's smart enough to realize that firing an employee responsible for a gain in good publicity would probably cause a PR disaster and/or the fired employee being poached by Toonland (although it's implied that this scenario has happened before).
- Predators Are Mean: The villain of Funny Bunnies is Wicked Wolf, a criminal predator; albeit their crimes are implied to be more human in nature, rather than actually feeding on anybody.
- Product-Promotion Parade: At the end of an episode of "Rory and the Rodents", we see one of these shilling a line of action figures based on the show. Jack quickly wants them for Winter Solstice despite them being collector's items by the time the story is set.
- Rhetorical Request Blunder: At the start of the fifth story, Rachel finishes her argument with Howard by saying "If you can think of a better way to find out what kids like, I'd like to see it!" And by gum, she gets her wish.
- The Rival: Toonland appears to be this to Cubnet, given that Rachel mentions it in the same context as network competition.
- Shout-Out: Besides the homages to existing shows:
- Brenda and Paulette's names are a possible reference to the authors of the Franklin books, Paulette Bourgeois and Brenda Clark.
- In the first story, Brenda mistakenly calls Curtis "Cowboy Curtis" instead of "Cowboy Cat".
- In "The Obligatory Babysitting Story", in what we see of an episode of "Rory and the Rodents", the chipmunk member of The Rodents paraphrases the standard ending line from The Powerpuff Girls (1998) (minus the "once again", though it's implied that it's the first episode).
- In "Dollars for Scholars", both teams think "isosceles" is the type of triangle the Pythagorean Theorem applies to, a reference to Scarecrow incorrectly reciting it in The Wizard of Oz.
- "Groovy Gopher" is a possible reference to Cool Cat, given how both of them started out as a vanity-published book series that attempts to teach life lessons to children.
- 65-Episode Cartoon: Brenda mentions "Rory and the Rodents" was one of these, pointing out how it aired for this length with no controversy despite being based on a band that made music clearly for more mature listeners.
- Species Last Name: Everybody. Real life names like Brenda Bear and Rachel Rabbit are indistinguishable from fictional names or stage names, like Cowboy Cat and Groovy Gopher.
- That Cloud Looks Like...: In the lost episode of "Otter Delight", Otter's friends are described as doing this, describing them as a fish, a steak, and a cotton ball, with a fourth one about to be described before Otter shows up with the nest of falcon eggs he "borrowed".
- Think of the Censors!: In-universe, two examples:
- In "Dollars for Scholars", Alex cuts off a contestant before he can say "69" in exactly the context you're thinking of.
- In the lost episode of "Otter Delight", this is one of the reasons why the mother falcon doesn't attack Otter - although when Otter said "think of the children watching this!", he was referring to the mother falcon's chicks.
- Vanity Publishing: It's very heavily implied that the "Groovy Gopher" books were published like this, given that author Darren Deer asks Cubnet how to write them a check like he did for the publisher. Arguably a case of Self-Deprecation as well, since Coryell's previous two books were vanity-published through Amazon.
- Worth It: While Jack and Riley lose their screen time for the weekend as a result of helping Brenda make their mother look like a fool, they consider having helped make an episode of a show on Cubnet to be worth the punishment - and then there's the money Brenda indirectly gave them.
- You Mean "Xmas": The animalfolk celebrate the winter solstice exactly the same as Christmas (though this is justified since Christianity presumably never existed in their universe).
- YouTube Kids' Channel: Alluded to in passing by Curtis in "The Scandal?" as "one of those highly inappropriate videos being made overseas that's illegally using our network's content among others".
