Aqua Teen Hunger Force Creators Talk Returning for Season 12, A Quiet Place Parody and More

Aqua Teen Hunger Force is returning for its highly anticipated Season 12 to Adult Swim very soon, and the creators behind it all have opened up about their big comeback! The Adult Swim original animated series was once the longest running series for the network before it wrapped up with Season 11 back in 2015, but now it’s back to take that crown once more with a new batch of episodes. This is only the latest comeback for Aqua Teen Hunger Force in a string of surprising new projects seen released in the last few years that proved the franchise works in many different ways. 

Following the releases of Aqua Donk Side Pieces and Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm over the last couple of years, Adult Swim announced that Aqua Teen Hunger Force is coming back for a five episode long Season 12 of the series. With fans hoping to see more of the franchise ever since it came to an end back in 2015, this is also one of the most anticipated comebacks in recent memory for many Adult Swim fans. Thankfully, series creators Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro opened up with ComicBook.com about the big come back for Season 12. 

Read on for our talk with Aqua Teen Hunger Force’s Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro about the series’ returning (which has been edited for clarity), the parody of A Quiet Place and much more! Let us know all of your thoughts about the new episodes in the comments, and you can even reach out to me directly about all things animation and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!

Returning for Season 12

NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK.COM: So jumping right in, it’s been a good couple of years for Aqua Teen. You came back with [Aqua Donk Side Pieces], and of course, [Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm], but Season 12 is the first new actual season in quite a while. So how did it feel for you to get that Season 12 order and actually work on these new episodes?

MATT MAIELLARO: Man, it just felt like [Matt does the riff from “The Ocean” by Led Zeppelin from Houses of the Holy]. 

DAVE WILLIS: Nick writes parenthetically, “Matt does the riff from ‘The Ocean’ by Led Zeppelin from Houses of the Holy.”

I was just trying to make that calculation in my head right now [laughs]. So it is funny though, the press materials for Season 12 mentioned that it picks up after Season 11, which was a wild thing because that finale killed everybody and then left Frylock and Carl immortal. But did that really happen? They were just watching the episode themselves and it all ended abruptly. So with these new episodes, was there an attempt to even follow that up or is this just like a clean slate that both, fans like me who’ve been watching it and new Adult Swim viewers, can jump into?

WILLIS: Did any of those drawings really happen, Nick?

I walked into that. I did.

WILLIS: Who put the show description up because I love that. I just want to put that as the every episode description from now on.

A Quiet Place or A Quiet Shake?

So the five episodes though, I got to admit, it’s a little brutal for me as a fan…

WILLIS: Should have been 20, right?

Yeah…

WILLIS: That’s what we said.

So with five episodes though, was there a particular idea that you had in mind that you were like, “Oh, we need to get this across in just this short order just in case”?

MAIELLARO: Well, we finally got to make our original movie into a cartoon called A Quiet Place. That was stolen from us while we were on leave, so we weren’t able to put it together. That was our idea and those people are about to get their A handed to them.

See, I was wondering about that. There were a lot of similarities in between the two…

MAIELLARO: Their movie’s very similar to our episode, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s why it’s in court. That’s why it’s in court.

I think the aliens might’ve been different though. 

MAIELLARO: They took liberties. They overheard our conversations. I don’t even know the names of the people who made that abomination, but we’re about to find out their names because we’re going to be meeting them in person in court. It was John Krasinski, the guy from The Office. 

WILLIS: Ol’ John Krasinski. If you have a Google search for John Krasinski, like Emily Blunt probably does, he’ll hear about this. Matt has been flinging accusations left and right.

MAIELLARO: Because I’ve had it. I’ve had enough of it. That movie comes out, everybody’s like, “Wow, that’s so original.” It’s like, yeah, because it came from us. He also ripped off the look like that the characters will do when our characters will look at the camera and just go [Maiellaro stares at camera]. He stole that in The Office.

Aqua Teen was doing that stuff before The Office? 

WILLIS: Well before, long before he was born. Back in the eighties we did it.

New Tech for Season 12

I don’t think I know when he was born. I couldn’t speak to that. 

MAIELLARO: We can find out.  I have a machine here that will tell me.

Oh, really? That’s good…

WILLIS: Consult with the pocket oracle.

Well, speaking of good tech, one of the things fans had noticed was that the characters look way more fluid than they ever did. In Plantasm, you guys experimented with all sorts of different art styles, more so than we’ve seen in the past. And then in Season 12, the premiere has this whole new look for “Shaketopia.” Was it easier for those kinds of experiments now that the work on Plantasm had already been done and set up?

MAIELLARO: It was refreshing. We retooled Plantasm with just sort of a glossy better look. The characters are more fluid, as you said, and when they brought that back this season, we wanted to keep that and keep it because it just felt more like something we always wanted to do, but weren’t able to do because we were constricted by boas. Because we did it in Florida. The first 11 seasons we did down in Florida. It was hot. The machines would rust, the snakes were everywhere.

Well, is it better this time around with no boas? 

MAIELLARO: It’s still tough because we’re still having flashbacks of the boas.

Was there a particular kind of style that you wanted to mess around with more? 

WILLIS: Stop-motion. We want the show to be stop-motion from now on, but that’d be biting Robot Chicken‘s style, right?

Anything After Season 12?

One thing I do, of course, have to ask though is with Season 12 being just five episodes, would you be interested in making more?

WILLIS: Yes

MAIELLARO: Yeah.

WILLIS: But we’d have to get green lit today. There’s a clock on this deal. They have to get back to us by midnight or else we’ll make episodes and destroy them in front of them to show them how little…

MAIELLARO: We’ll spend our own money to make them.

WILLIS: That’s right. We’ll spend our own money to make them and then never show them to anyone. Destroy them, run them over a magnet in front of them.

I feel bad because [this interview] will go up long after this conversation. So if it goes up after the deadline and you’ve already done this, I’m sorry. I apologize for that in advance.

MAIELLARO: Look, if they know where their money is made, they’ll be calling us.

So that’s the other thing too. With Side Pieces, new episodes and a movie, what else is there to explore for Aqua Teen? 

MAIELLARO: The Ride.

Aqua Teen: The Ride? That’d be cool. 

MAIELLARO: We’re talking to Disney right now. and Warner Brothers is really annoyed about it.

WILLIS: The Carl’s Jr meal…the Aqua Teen meal finally comes full circle into real food.

MAIELLARO: We’re willing to do The Ride for Discovery World if they call us by midnight. Have you ever been to Discovery World? It’s just nature documentaries.

WILLIS: It’s in Orlando. It costs like $76 to enter, and you go in and you have to work on refurbishing a kitchen all day long for Chip and Joanna. An animatronic Chip and Joanna.

What to Look Out For

As a final question, let’s say someone new jumps into Aqua Teen for the first time, what’s something that you hope they pick up on the most?

WILLIS: That it’s a secret language that’s spoken by only the Illuminati. And hopefully if you watch it and rewatch it, if you really binge it, you start at episode one and just keep really watching, you pick up on the language that’s being… there’s sort of a code language. That’s all I’m going to say about it. You have to binge the shows though. You really got to start at episode one and pick up the clues and follow the clues and really obsess yourself with it. And I think if you do that, you’ll find that you’ll certainly boost our numbers, but you’ll also pick up on what we’re trying to say in our implicit language.

It’s good to know that there’s a treasure hunt in Aqua Teen. 

WILLIS: It’s more like that Dan Brown book, Angels and Demons. There’s a secret and it’s like National Treasure. In certain important documents like King Tut’ss tomb, or the U.S. Constitution, or the entirety of Aqua Teen, there is certain immortal truths that are spoken, but in an implicit silent language. You just got to watch the hell out of the show to really get it.

MAIELLARO: Yeah, really got to watch, watch, watch, watch.

WILLIS: Watch, watch, watch, watch. Even when you want to go to bed, don’t, watch. Because it changes.

MAILLARO: There is a way to save yourself. There’s a message in there. There’s a way to save from what’s coming and stuff.

WILLIS: It’s like The Da Vinci Code.

MAIELLARO: It is. It’s like Jigsaw in Saw II.

Saw II specifically? [laughs]

MAIELLARO: Yeah [laughs]. 

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Season 12 premieres on Adult Swim on Sunday, November 26th at 11:30PM EST.