'Player Haters' Infernal Quest Begins On JustForLaughs

For those who have wondered what happened to Mario and the Princess and other classic video game characters from the 1980s, JustForLaughs.com has your answer: They’re trapped “in the futuristic online cyberspace also known as the Internet” in Player Haters, a new web series that debuted Monday.

Forced to fight their way out of the Internet against other classic video game characters, Player Haters was created by animated web series outfit CU Studios (Clock Suckers, Kung Fu Karl) and is set for a six-episode Season 1, with new installments bowing every three weeks, JFL’s Jenny Lu said. “It will complement the schedule of our ‘Lost’ parodies series.” (For more on the Lost Parodies see our coverage of The Fine Bros deal with JustForLaughs).

“In the first two episodes, which are already online, Mario, Donkey Kong and the Princess are featured, but you can expect them to visit some other classic characters … with hilarious outcomes,” she added. Future episodes, which run three to six minutes apiece, will “have Resident Evil-style zombies, Pac Mac, Gordon Freeman from ‘Half Life,’ guys from Double Dragon, possibly Mike Tyson’s Punch Out characters.”

Lu said voice cast of Player Haters is the same as the portal’s Clock Suckers

: Mike Parker, Andy Parker, Michael William, Hollie Bertram and Jason Kamen.

“They are the same voices – and the same creators,” said Lu, who added that there are no confirmed celebrity voice guests but that the new episodes are still “in the process of being written and animated, so we’ll see. CU Studios has a history of using celebrity voices, so we’ll try and have some for this series as well.” CU Studios was launched in 2000 as an animated series College University by brothers Mike and Andy Parker, who also created Kung Fu Karl and Clock Suckers.

The animated action-adventure comedy Player Haters was created after JFL received more than 100 written submissions for a pilot. “We had over 100 written submissions, from which we then went through a second round of about 25 more detailed written submissions, and then finally from that, we commissioned 13 pilots,” Lu said. “Some we commissioned a second pilot with revisions.”

Montreal-based comedy site JustForLaughs.com features part user-generated content and also distributes its own original web content like the parodies of ABC’s Lost. In time for the Super Bowl, the site also will be releasing the funniest commercials spread on Feb. 1.