Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi’s new special, Entergalactic, is a singular work: an animated event that shares its name with an album that Mescudi is releasing alongside the Netflix title. “Entergalactic” is also a word with a long history for the hip-hop artist and actor, who invented the term, which manages to be both familiar and cryptically inviting. “The title came from my first album, the song that I did called ‘Enter Galactic,’ ” Mescudi tells Tudum. “The song was about me meeting this girl for the first time, and us doing shrooms and making love.” 

The animated iteration of “Enter Galactic” loosely shares that subject matter, with Mescudi’s cartoon alter ego, Jabari, falling into a situationship with his neighbor Meadow; the pair’s love affair is rendered by way of the special’s lavish animation. “I use the term Entergalactic to describe that feeling, that powerful magnetic feeling that you have when you meet someone,” Mescudi says.

The special offers another vivid realization of Mescudi’s understanding of the term, with Jabari and Meadow traveling through whole universes together without ever leaving their own realities. “Throughout the narrative, it became this world that’s in Jabari’s head,” says Entergalactic director Fletcher Moules. “And then that’s somewhere we’re able to take the audience, and he’s able to take Meadow there as well.”

Executive producer Kenya Barris has a similar takeaway. “The song ‘Enter Galactic’ was a while ago,” Barris tells us. “But the idea of love, it makes you feel intergalactic. It makes you feel like you’re in your own world, you’re in your own universe.” And blowing a love story up to that metaphorical scale can make the stakes feel as high as they do when you’re in a young relationship. “That’s where we want these characters to live,” Barris continues. “And that’s why when they have their moments of falling apart, [we feel] like the universe is coming apart.”

If this all sounds a little abstract, don’t worry — Mescudi thinks that’s part of the appeal. “It’s kind of spacey,” he says. “It’s supposed to feel like that love is intergalactic, [it] feels out of this world, other-worldly. I guess that’s the rapper in me. I just kind of created my own word and my own description for it.” We’re lucky he’s taking us along for the ride.

Entergalactic is streaming on Netflix now.

Reporting by Ariana Romero.