Adventure Time is back for a new era of adventures for Finn and Jake, and we got to talk with the creative team behind Adventure Time: Side Quests ahead of its premiere. Cartoon Network has been in the midst of bringing back many of its most classic franchises from the 2010s with new revivals, reboots, and sequel projects. But it’s a different case for Adventure Time as the franchise has been active with all sorts of fun projects since the original TV series came to an end many years ago.
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That’s what’s made Adventure Time: Side Quests all the more intriguing as it’s taking the franchise back to its earliest days with a fun new take on Finn and Jake that fits right into the old series canon. Speaking to ComicBook ahead of its debut with Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ this month, Adventure Time: Side Quests Executive Producer Nate Cash, Supervising Director Victor Courtright, and Art Director Nick Cross opened up all about the new era of the franchise, it’s place in the canon and more. Read on for our full interview (which has been edited for clarity).
Adventure Time: Side Quests Goes Back to the Beginning
NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK: We’ve seen Adventure Time expanded upon over the years with all sorts of spinoffs, specials, and even a new movie in development. But what inspired taking Adventure Time back to its roots for Adventure Time: Side Quests?
NATE CASH: Just thinking about things to pitch within the Adventure Time universe. The thing that I was drawn to was how much I loved Finn’s voice from Seasons 1 and 2 where you felt the youth, you heard his voice crack. It was authentically a young kid in a dangerous, weird bizarre world with this wise 26-year-old magical dog. So once I wrote on just a little cue card, “Return to kid voice,” everything snowballed out from that. When Finn was 12, the tone of the episodes were different, and how he reacted to challenges was different. It was fun and funny in a very different way than the later seasons of the show, which were also amazing and exciting to watch and be a part of.
Speaking to those later seasons, they really did get more into a serialized lore and canon. I’ve been so interested in this series because while some outlets have billed it as a revival, reboot, prequel or whatever, it’s being categorized as a companion series to the original. When crafting these episodes, did you ever worry about stepping on any potential lore that might’ve been set up in the original series?
CASH: We were conscious of it. I think it was fairly easy to sidestep anything that was lore and it made it a fun challenge. There’s so many days in the week, and weeks in a year, that these are just other moments that happened in between the cracks of episodes we’ve seen. I think just knowing the lore and trying to not step on that, I don’t think it was as big of a challenge as I thought it was going to be when we started because they’re such fun characters. The dynamic between them is so fun, and it’s cool to do something that you know is just a standalone start to finish without having it fit within the puzzle pieces of a larger [world].
VICTOR COURTRIGHT: I think a lot of the people working on it were fans of the original, so they were aware of how the lore progresses and when the reveals happen. A lot of that just came naturally too. People just know not to spoil something or know that it wouldn’t make sense for this character in this moment or whatever. So just naturally out of the shared fandom of it all, we found a sweet spot, I think.
It’s so cool seeing the staff is comprised of those who worked on the original show, but with lots of new faces too. You touched on this, Victor, but how did that energy of the staff from the older series blend with the new talent and their ideas for Adventure Time: Side Quests?
COURTRIGHT: I fit into the category of I was a fan of the original when it was out, I didn’t work on it, so coming in was a huge honor. Just working with a lot of the people that worked on the original was amazingly inspiring. And everybody else, whether they worked on the original or not, was obviously inspired by it and the creative power that it had. I think it was incredible watching everybody get to experience a portion of the world and fandom that they either grew up with or helped shape who they were as an artist. It’s really incredible.
Adventure Time’s New Makeover for Side Quests
I think one of the things that took people by surprise immediately with Side Quests when the trailer came out was the look of the show where instead of the bold outlines surrounding Finn and Jake in the original art, you have instead more elaborate background visuals. Could you all talk a bit about designing the look of this new era for the show with how you settled on how Finn and Jake were going to look?
NICK CROSS: The idea going in was to give it a new look, a new polish, and make it feel like its own thing. So early on in the development, we just did some pieces to figure out, “Oh, should it be like this?” Then we thought, well, maybe just to give it a different look, maybe the characters have no outlines to help them feel like they fit in with a more painterly style? Just to give ourselves some challenge, I guess. I think just “How do we keep the look of the original show, but give it a different coat of paint?” sort of thing.
CASH: The title cards from the original series were done in this sci-fi novel fantasy style where it was more rendered and I was like, “Nick, can we do that for a whole season?” It was a massive challenge that Nick and his team rose to the occasion for. I think Nick painted a spooky forest from the Tree Trunks episode, took a background from that and rendered it in this amazing, dark, spooky…what became the look of the sho. The characters popped so much. Having them not have the outline just had these crisp, really cute, adorable characters in this spooky forest looked so cool.
One of the things I appreciate about this new style too, and it goes along with returning to the roots, is that you’ve also brought back pliability to their faces. There are so many moments where Finn and Jake look just absolutely uggo, and it’s incredible because that was the vibe of the earliest days. Was that something important that you wanted to bring back for Side Quests?
COURTRIGHT: I think a lot of that’s just coming from the range and artistry of the board artists. They’re drawing some crazy stuff. They love different things about the characters, and have their own special way of breaking them. But then in design, we did so many really amazing special poses and things like that to help solidify how you would translate this very simple character design into this really insane pose. It was so fun.
That flexibility is especially true for Jake, and with his new design and how you all twist it in this series, was that part of just letting artists dictate how Jake was going to look in particular storyboards in terms of his scale and looks from time to time?
CASH: Yeah, I think everybody draws Jake a little bit differently and then we kind of lean into that as much as we can. A lot of modern animation tries to put everything on model to the point that nothing looks like it was drawn by a human. Our challenge was Nick and his team would do a lot of special poses. We’re like, “Here’s the pose from the board that we really want to retain the essence of what is working, but it also needs to be clean and polished and ready to present on TV.” It was trying to get the whole animation studio on board with that of, “It does need to look weird sometimes.”
COURTRIGHT: He’s a very flexible character, literally a shape shifting being, but it’s really easy to tell when you push it to an extreme where it’s like “Now it’s not Jake.” So finding that balance where it’s like it’s really crazy, but it’s definitely Jake is the trick to it and it’s really fun finding that balance.
Farts and Butts
In terms of finding that balance, it also comes with the humor of Side Quests too. I do like that Side Quests makes time for the ruder and cruder humor of the earlier seasons like with the episode about toilet papers and butts. So was that something you wanted to be sure to include with Side Quests, just letting it all hang out both literally and figuratively?
CASH: Yeah, for sure. Going back to the time when Finn was a naive kid, he was also rash, excited, unpredictable, and all the things that real kids are that isn’t always represented in animation so much. When it’s cute, well-behaved kids it’s so boring to watch. Kids doing what they’re supposed to do is apparently a “theme” in animation that I don’t know why well-behaved is so popular.
Wrapping up, I’d be remiss unless I ask if you all would be interested in making more of Adventure Time: Side Quests if the opportunity arises?
COURTRIGHT: Absolutely, so if you have any connections…
CASH: Absolutely, this was a dream.
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