Still reeling from the cancellation of Venture Bros, animation fans are getting a one-two punch from Adult Swim, who today announced that Mike Tyson Mysteries will not continue past its fourth season. News of the cancellation broke on The Modern Moron Podcast. The episode was recorded in May and the cancellation decision was apparently made around the first of the year (so it isn’t pandemic-related), but it was not widely reported on, and so the news is just now making its way out into the wider world following the cancellation of Venture Bros. and the discourse that has followed that decision.
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The series launched in 2014 on Adult Swim but, like a number of the network’s projects, its production and release schedule is not a straightforward yearly thing. The fourth season premiered on June 30, 2019, and the finale aired in February of this year. Apparently writer Larry Dorf, creator Hugh Davidson, and some other talent from the series pitched another show to Warner Bros. Animation back in May.
“Well, I was a writer for Mike Tyson Mysteries,” Dorf said during the podcast (via PopCulture). “Mike Tyson Mysteries is not a show anymore. It’s been canceled. … It was very fun. It was a funny show, but it’s all done.”
In the series, Mike Tyson plays a (literal) cartoon caricature of himself as a retired boxer who solves mysteries with a ragtag group of supporting charactes at his side. He is generally depicted as being good natured but dumb, often making mistakes that will shape the direction of his investigations (like confusing Elon Musk with Elton John). He’s also a well of eccentricities, forgetting the names of other characters on the show and having a bear for a pet. Tyson, who voices himself, is joined by Norm McDonald as an alcoholic pigeon; Rachel Ramras as Tyson’s adopted daughter Yung Hee, and Community standout Jim Rash as the Marquess of Queensberry (voiced by Jim Rash), a ghost with a bad attitude who provides what insight he can into the mysteries.
Adult Swim recently aired the two-hundredth episode of the long-running stop-motion series Robot Chicken, which is kind of the elder statesman of the network. The show, created by Seth Green and former Wizard magazine editor Matthew Senreich, features a revolving cast of characters and actors doing sketch comedy. Other series currently on Adult Swim include Squidbillies, YOLO Crystal Fantasy, and the live-action comedy Beef House.
