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Interview: Scoring Netflix’s ‘Exploding Kittens’ with Composers Jina An & Shirley Song

Welcome to a new Geektown Behind The Scenes podcast. This week I’m chatting with Jina An & Shirley Song, the composers behind Netflix's brilliant adult animated series Exploding Kittens.


If you haven’t yet caught ‘Exploding Kittens’, the series is inspired by the beloved card game from Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal webcomic, Elan Lee, and Shane Small. After a meeting in heaven, there is a general consensus that Earth sucks, so God (voiced by the wonderful Tom Ellis from ‘Lucifer’) gets fired and sent to Earth to reconnect with humanity. The catch? He’s trapped in the body of a chubby house cat. As part of Godcat’s rehabilitation, he moves in with a dysfunctional family and tries to solve their problems, but ends up spending a lot of time chasing laser pointers. And to top it off, Godcat’s next-door neighbour, who is also a cat, turns out to be none other than his nemesis, the Antichrist. It is brilliant, hilariously funny, and Season 1 is all on Netflix right now!


Jina and Shirley have been composing together pretty much since college, and were tasked with creating a soundtrack that captures the show's explosive energy. This also involved them touching on a huge array of musical genres like 8-bit nostalgia, energetic Cajun flair, heavy metal rock, and both choral and orchestral scores to bring the madcap adventures and quirky characters to life.


Outside of ‘Exploding Kittens’, the duo are also known for working on the beloved Netflix series ‘XO, Kitty’, and have a number of other projects coming up which we talk about in the interview.

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