Adventure Time: Side Quests looks like a throwback to the early seasons, and it’s not on Cartoon Network
The new Finn and Jake series promises lighter, standalone episodes like the show’s beginnings. But it lands June 29 on Hulu and Disney+, the first Adventure Time to premiere outside the Warner Bros. ecosystem entirely.
Finn and Jake are back, and they’re punching evil in the butt again. Literally. That’s the pitch.
Adventure Time: Side Quests drops June 29 in the US, and everything about it reads as a deliberate trip back to the beginning. Standalone episodes. Silly quests. The Ice King getting socked. Light, episodic, monster-of-the-week stuff.
The press materials say the quiet part out loud. The series “builds on the spirit of the early seasons,“ delivering self-contained adventures designed to introduce a new generation to Ooo while giving old fans what they loved first.
The trailer backs it up. Finn flips around the treehouse vowing to punch the Ice King in the gut, and BMO and Princess Bubblegum turn up to help. It’s a love letter to the Adventure Time of 2010, before things got heavy.
Why Adventure Time got so dark and existential
Because it absolutely did. The show that started as a goofy kid having sword fights with his stretchy dog turned into one of the most emotionally devastating things on television, and that wasn’t an accident.
Adventure Time ran 10 seasons from 2010 to 2018. Somewhere in the middle it stopped being a problem-of-the-week comedy and became a sprawling serialized epic about memory loss, trauma, abandonment, the apocalypse that created Ooo, and the slow tragedy of the Ice King being a good man erased by his own magic crown.
It got sad. Beautifully, on purpose, the-Marceline-and-Simon-stuff-still-wrecks-people sad.
So what happened at the top? Creator Pendleton Ward stepped down as showrunner during Season 5, telling Rolling Stone the job was wearing on his quality of life. He didn’t vanish, he stayed on as a writer, storyboard artist, and voice actor, but the chair passed to Adam Muto, his CalArts classmate who’d been on the show since the pilot and was, by Ward’s own design, groomed to take over.
Muto ran it from Season 5 through the finale.
Was the darkening a result of creative changes at the top?
Partly, but the honest answer is messier than “new boss made it depressing,” and it’s worth getting right.
The serialization, the lore, the heavy emotional arcs, a lot of that tracked with Muto’s era. But Muto himself has said the move from episodic to “lore-heavy” storytelling came from multiple directions. Some of it was the creative team. Some of it was the network.
Here’s the wrinkle nobody expects: Cartoon Network was reportedly resistant to the serialized turn at first, because it made individual episodes harder to promote. The lore-heavy Adventure Time people canonize as the show’s golden run was something the network had to be talked into.
And it worked. Season one averaged about 2 million viewers an episode. Once it serialized, it climbed past 3 million and became the cultural juggernaut everybody remembers. The darkness paid off creatively and commercially, which is why “Side Quests goes back to the start” is a genuine swing, not an obvious one.
Why Adventure Time: Side Quests isn’t on Cartoon Network
Now the part that should make you raise an eyebrow. The US home for Side Quests isn’t Cartoon Network. It isn’t even HBO Max. It’s Hulu and Disney+, premiering June 29.
Read that again. A series produced by Cartoon Network Studios, a Warner Bros. Discovery property, the crown jewel of CN’s entire animation legacy, is debuting on Disney’s streamers. Outside the US it airs on Cartoon Network and HBO Max as you’d expect. But in America, the company that made it handed it to a direct competitor.
This is a first. As reported around the launch, it marks the first time an Adventure Time show has premiered outside the Warner Bros. ecosystem. The thing was even announced back at the 2024 Annecy festival with no network attached at all.
Why does this keep happening? Because Warner Bros. Discovery has spent the last few years pulling back hard on kids’ and family animation. The earlier spinoffs, Distant Lands and Fionna and Cake, went to HBO Max, and then HBO Max started shedding the very kids’ content that would house something like this. When your own corporate parent is exiting the room, you sell the furniture to whoever’s still buying.
So Warner makes the cartoon and licenses its most beloved animated brand to Disney and Hulu, because the alternative is letting it sit on a shelf. It’s the same outsourcing logic eating legacy media everywhere: keep the IP, rent out the distribution, and hope nobody notices you no longer have a home for your own crown jewel.
The good news, and it’s real, is that the cartoon itself looks great. Showrunner Nate Cash said making Side Quests felt like making the original Adventure Time, “like hanging out with art school buddies making professional cartoons.“ That’s exactly the energy that made the early seasons sing.
Finn and Jake are coming home to the tone that started it all. They’re just doing it on someone else’s channel, because their own one didn’t have room for them anymore.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Deadline (May 2026), verified for the Hulu/Disney+ June 29 US premiere, the Annecy 2024 announcement, and the WBD pullback on kids’ and family animation
TheWrap (June 2026), verified for the trailer details, the first-time-outside-Warner framing, and the early-seasons callback
Advanced Television and Skwigly (May 2026), verified for the October 5 international Cartoon Network/HBO Max date and the showrunner statement
FormatBiz (May 2026), verified for the Nate Cash and Vanessa Brookman quotes and the Darrick Bachman story-editor credit
ScreenRant via The Direct (October 2023), verified for Muto’s account of the network resisting serialization and the viewership figures
Rolling Stone via Cinemablend and TV Tropes (2014), verified for Pendleton Ward stepping down in Season 5 due to burnout and Muto’s succession