Stop-motion animation and an expansion to teen and adult audiences is paying off for Cuppa Coffee Studios (Tigga and Togga, A Very Barry Christmas), where new titles are in production for MTV Networks and E! Entertainment.

The Toronto toon house – makers of the cut-out punch-outs seen on MTV 2’s Celebrity Deathmatch – has been hired to turn out a 6 x 30 run of Rick & Steve for MTV’s gay-aimed sister channel, Logo.

The show is a spin-off of Rick & Steve the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World, a 1999 short that became something of an Internet sensation while winning awards at fests in L.A., New York and San Francisco, among others. Series creator Allan Brocka will write, Alex Gorelick (JoJo’s Circus) directs and Cuppa president Adam Shaheen is exec producer.

‘A short run, but with any [smaller] network they tend to order small amounts and see how it runs and then order more,’ says Shaheen. ‘There’s already talk of, if it does well, another season.’

The original short was about a lesbian couple looking to get pregnant via their gay friends, and was done entirely with stop-motion Lego sets and figurines, which eventually attracted the attention of a certain Danish toymaker and its lawyers.

Which explains why there are no pictures of Rick, Steve or their childless friends at www.rickandsteve.com anymore. Shaheen says the legal complications won’t affect the series, which will be animated with original, built-from-scratch sets and puppets.

‘The look of the show is completely proprietary,’ he says.

Meanwhile, eight half-hours of the tentatively titled Starveillance are in production for E!, under Deathmatch creator Eric Fogel. Fogel, who is based in New York, is writing and serving as creative director alongside animation director Andrew Horne.

Shaheen will only say that the stop-motion comedy is about supposed behind-the-scenes footage of celebrities, rendered with sophisticated sets and puppets.

‘I can’t get into too much detail or I’ll probably be shot,’ he jokes. ‘It’s a new departure for E! in that they really haven’t explored animation before. So that’s an exciting thing.’

But Cuppa has not forgotten its kid-aimed roots, and is also at work on the Flash-animated 13 x 30 Bruno and the Banana Bunch for CBC, spun off from a series of interstitials seen on the Ceeb, TFO and Nickelodeon outlets.

Development is also underway on a pilot for the preschooler series Bailey the Wonder Dog, to be seen at MIPCOM, a feature spin-off of Cuppa’s Very Barry Christmas called The Big Stuff, and the teen-to-adult-aimed Steve the First, adapted from a CBC Radio play.

‘It’s a sort-of black comedy,’ about a young guy who survives an apocalyptic holocaust, says Shaheen, and represents the company’s next step towards smarter and older audiences.

‘We’ve been well-known for a lot of preschool stuff, and this is very much along the lines of other stuff we’re doing,’ like Celebrity Deathmatch, he says. ‘We have high hopes.’