Back in 2021, RuPaul’s Drag Race ventured into new creative territories and explored untapped marketing strategies to excite our audience and engage them with different and unique types of content. Animation was an area we had yet to explore and we knew this would be the year where we would experiment in this medium. Our original objective was to create an original animated short that supported the upcoming All Winners season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, while also creating a piece of content that could standalone and be evergreen in its entertainment value. After it’s incredible success, we have since created an original animated short every year since and seen each iteration grow and engage the audiences in new ways. A major goal of the latest 2024 short was twofold: expand our talent reach from the participating queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race to permanent judge Michelle Visage, plus to create a short around Halloween, right in the wake of the finale of the first Global All Stars.
As always, we partnered with Brooklyn-based animation studio, Cartuna, to create the original aesthetic of this piece, inspired by vintage animation like the intro to the 1960s television series ‘Bewitched.’ Despite her busy schedule, Michelle Visage was eager to participate, voicing every role in the short in a tour de force performance. Knowing how involved the animation process is from past experiences, as well as how long the revision and note process takes, made this learned journey the most dynamic yet. This was a truly collaborative effort from MTV, Cartuna as well as Michelle herself, as we all set out to create the ultimate Halloween short for the eager Drag Race audience that consume these shorts, comment on them, and share across multiple social media platforms. As Drag Race star Alyssa Edwards was crowned the first Global All Star, our audience was surprised with this original drop, days after the airing of the finale which helped lead to increased engagement and positive sentiment. Michelle would share in its release and socialization, and an exclusive feature on Collider helped build the excitement to its inevitable launch on the RuPaul’s Drag Race YouTube channel the week of Halloween.
These animated shorts continue to do well with the RuPaul’s Drag Race audience, and ‘Michelle & The Draghouls’ is no exception. Once again, the overwhelmingly positive sentiment, and high engagement across social media, has cemented these original animated shorts as part of the quintessential online experience of Drag Race. The fandom is truly comparable to no other reality competition series in how they consume media. ‘Michelle & The Draghouls’ took the learnings of the previous three executions and exemplified the best of this yearly collaboration with Cartuna. The incredible talent pool of Drag Race continues to be eager to participate in these scripted undertakings. Due to its success, work has already begun on a 2025 original animated short that will once again surprise our audience and maximize the success of ‘Michelle & The Draghouls’ with each of these incredible animated undertakings.
