prokopetz:

I think a detail that a lot of fans miss about Cuphead is exactly why King Dice is “the Devil’s right-hand man”. From a modern perspective, he doesn’t seem to be doing anything particularly bad – but attitudes toward gambling in America were very different in the era that Cuphead is calling back to.

While the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s is well known, it’s less often remarked upon that the moral panic of the early 20th Century also targeted gambling. In many states, most forms of gambling were straight-up illegal, and the penalty for violating those laws could carry the kind of prison sentences usually reserved for trafficking in hard drugs. Casinos were less respectable than brothels, and anyone who gambled habitually was assumed as a matter of course to be involved in organised crime, and probably some sort of weird sex pervert on top of it.

That attitudes are so different today is the result of a decades-long public relations campaign to rehabilitate gambling’s image. The modern notion of the casino as a fun holiday destination is so far removed from the previous century’s squalid vice dens, we might as well be living on a different planet!