‘Adventure Time: Side Quests’ Goes Back to the Beginning to Recreate Finn and Jake Comedy Magic (EXCLUSIVE BTS)

NOTE: This article features some minor spoilers for the very end of the “Joey Waffles” episode.

On September 3, 2018, Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time and the Land of Ooo called it quits after 10 seasons and almost 300 episodes. Of course, you can’t keep the crazy down forever. Fans have gotten spin-offs like Adventure Time: Distant Lands and Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, with more to come in Adventure Time: Bubblegum and Marceline. But now it’s “go time,” prequel style, for Finn (Sasha Knight), Jake the Dog (John DiMaggio), the Ice King (Tom Kenny), and the rest of the gang in Adventure Time: Side Quests, premiering today, June 29, on Disney+ and Hulu in the U.S.

Returning to the world is Adventure Time: Side Quests executive producer and showrunner Nate Cash (Over the Garden Wall), who worked as a storyboard artist during the original series’ run. Joining him are art director Nick Cross (The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie) and supervising director Victor Courtright (ThunderCats Roar), who have all embraced a loose, experimental approach to this prequel series, taking viewers back to the days when Finn and Jake were young, fearless, and eager for adventure.

“It was really exciting to come up with the idea of returning Finn to a kid voice, and everything snowballed from that,” Cash tells Cartoon Brew about where the series development took them. “Finn when he was younger, brash and kind of dumb, that’s fun and ripe for comedy. And then the relationship he has with Jake is so fun. For me, it was really cool to return to the unexpectedness of the early episodes where everything felt like it was just for that moment.”

Courtright agrees, saying the early seasons of Adventure Time had a variety they admired because the series was still finding its footing.

“It was still discovering itself and still discovering the lands around it with new characters,” he says.

“Going back into that mentality with both people from the original show and new people who are fans of the original show adds to that variety of interests,” he says of the standalone feel of Side Quests. “There’s every kind of fan on this show. People are drawn to it for all sorts of different reasons. All the amazing artists, writers, board artists, and animators bring something different, and you get that variety. It just naturally comes out. So we go all over the place, and there are so many different wonderful tones and types of stories that we explore.”

Trying to align an older series with new creative goals is always a challenge when technology and production pipelines have changed so much. Cross says that was true here as well.

“A lot of it was, how do we make it more volumetric and painterly? From the very beginning, it was, ‘How do we put a new spin on the show?'” he says. “We wanted it to be Adventure Time, the original look of the show, so we didn’t change the character designs or the background design. It’s all the same. But how we rendered it was different.”

Cross continues, “It’s a little bit like putting a different coat of paint on the original show in a lot of ways. But it’s a very difficult thing to do. Anytime you try to do a really painterly style, that’s not geared toward a series turnaround. We’re lucky we brought back a lot of the original character designers from the show, so we had a really good team. I’m most proud that we had a really good design team, and that made a challenging show much less challenging.”

“Joey Waffles” End Credits Feature ‘Ballad of a Reformed Ice King’

Peppered throughout Adventure Time: Side Quests are plenty of examples of the animation team getting weird and creative whenever possible. Cash confirms there is an episode animated completely in-house by two artists.

“That was an amazing experience, and the episode turned out so cool,” he says. “It’s just showing that you can still do hand-drawn animation locally, which is something the industry forgets about.”

There’s also a lot to watch during the episode credits, especially after “Joey Waffles,” when a major character reveal is essentially explained through an original song, sung by the Ice King, that plays over crayon-drawn credits.

Cash confirms the song was originally meant to appear during the episode itself, but the final edit was simply too tight.

“If I’m remembering correctly, we were like, ‘We just can’t fit the song in there.’ And we made that decision before going into the record where Tom Kenny showed up to sing it.”

He says Courtright suggested moving it to the end credits, which ultimately saved the sequence.

“Now it’s so good. It earned how we figured out how to do it,” Cash says with a laugh.

Keith Pakiz storyboarded the sequence and wrote the song. Courtright says the crayon look grew naturally from Pakiz’s drawings.

“The idea to do it with crayon is the obvious answer because the singer in question is in this very childish brain space and singing this very, very dumb song,” he says with a laugh. “The drawings are so, so silly, so using a very basic drawing implement to do lovingly rendered versions of really stupid drawings created this magical space.”

Courtright confirms the drawings are all 100% crayon on paper.

“But then I sort of comped everything digitally using After Effects. But not just digital animation,” he clarifies. “I literally made little paper cutouts and puppeted them around in front of the camera and used that like motion capture to get that natural organic quality of the motion. Joey Waffles walking around looks like he’s on a popsicle stick because he literally was motion-captured from a popsicle stick.”