As speculation continues to swirl around the future of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and their perceived values, blue chip projects like Cool Cats are hoping to reshape the narrative by creating their own.

For Cool Cats, the “coming back to story” is predicated on the idea that NFTs launched at a misunderstood hash in the NFT timeline—a time when the focus was on characters but not the worlds in which those characters existed. While the characters might have been visually appealing, they lacked story.

And if you don’t have a story in traditional Hollywood, what do you really have?

For its new animated series The Milk Chug, Cool Cats takes its iconic imagery and combines it with Emmy Award-winning animation studio Titmouse (Big Mouth, The Venture Bros.) to launch a storyline that provides audiences the “why” behind the characters. The first season outlines the world across 13 episodes on the Cool Cats’ YouTube channel, a move aiming to further bridge the digital and physical worlds—this time through storytelling—by making the show accessible to anyone, anywhere.

Another aim of the project is to layer in a reputable cast to bring the animations to life and provide legitimacy to the project. The series is using voice actors including Maggie Lawson (Psych), Zeno Robinson (Dragon Ball Super), Dana Snyder (Aqua Teen Hunger Force), Natasha Leggero (Ugly Americans) and Dan Stevens (Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire). And while the star power is impressive, it’s only part of the story.

Interestingly, it might be the storytelling itself that becomes the medium through which widespread web3 adoption takes place. Audiences do not care where a story comes from if the story is well told. That’s fantastic news for web3 and NFT-originating projects because suddenly the tech backends to these projects that have largely been front and center can finally take a backseat—paving the way for mainstream audiences to connect with the projects on the basis of captivating storytelling, not tech.

“The goal is to prove what we’ve always believed—that web3 as a technology should never be at the forefront of anything,” The Milk Chug executive producer Shara Senderoff said to me during a recent conversation. “Our view is that the best way to create a mainstream, loveable group of characters is through storytelling.”

Senderoff—who began her career in the film and television industry—believes The Milk Chug can become a new benchmark for how an NFT-originating project like Cool Cats can organically traverse through traditional media systems. By focusing on storytelling, the assumption is a project will be largely unaffected by any negative associations or misunderstanding around NFTs because the focus is not on NFTs.

“In Hollywood, you never just introduce a character,” Senderoff said. “You need to introduce a reason why you understand the character’s ‘why,’ why they’re the hero or the antagonist. The NFTs will end up having more utility because we’re now introducing foundational pieces of unbelievable storytelling.”

Unlike previous attempts to use NFT intellectual property (IP) as a basis for traditional content—such as Stoner Cats, which raised money through NFT sales to fund the creation of its animated series and was subsequently entangled in a regulatory lawsuit—Cool Cats possessed a pre-existing and well-established brand, character and community before expanding into the television medium. Cool Cats NFT holders did not need to fund the creation of the series—the creation is part of the brand’s evolution funded by the brand itself. In this way, The Milk Chug is simply the latest example of how the Cool Cats brand is continuing to become more immersed in culture on its own.

Last year, Cool Cats was the first NFT brand to have a float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—a milestone that helped further demonstrate the power of a web3 brand’s potential, especially for an originating NFT project. With The Milk Chug, the hope is that the series continues to elevate the Cool Cats brand beyond the limiting scope of being an NFT. In doing so, the opportunity exists for storytelling to not only be the vehicle that brings new audiences into the web3 space, but to be the vehicle that delivers further value to NFT projects through the widespread distribution of branding.

“The blue chips are all going back to story because when you have a brand that’s coveted, it becomes valuable,” Senderoff said. ”We started speculating how much NFTs should be worth before they were worth anything. So now, we need to go back and baseline.”