Streaming television has trained audiences to treat every revival like a contract negotiation with the past. Bring back the beloved characters, preserve the adult fans, court their children, avoid alienating newcomers, and please generate enough franchise heat to justify the tab on the quarterly report. Adventure Time: Side Quests answers that impossible brief with a surprisingly sane choice: it goes smaller.
Set during Finn and Jake’s early years in Ooo, the series avoids the aftermath of the 2018 finale and steps back from the mythology that made later Adventure Time richer, heavier, and far less casual. This is Finn entering a crossbow tournament without the skill required to survive his own confidence.
This is Jake trying to keep panic from becoming policy. This is Ice King babysitting an uncontrollable Goblin Prince, which is exactly the sort of sentence that reminds television executives why animation can do what live-action franchise management keeps trying to fake.
Nate Cash understands that the first version of Adventure Time was a strange little machine: one part heroic fantasy, one part absurdist sketch comedy, one part emotional ambush. Side Quests does not rebuild the machine from scratch. It opens the casing, cleans the gears, and lets the thing make noise again.
Small Problems, Real Feelings
The smartest social move Side Quests makes is refusing to treat childhood as a simpler moral universe. Finn’s younger self is funny because he is brave in ways that are useful and foolish in ways that are exhausting. In the crossbow story, his need to look tough turns a basic test of skill into a miniature masculinity crisis. He does not need a tragic arc to make that legible. He needs a weapon he cannot handle and a best friend watching disaster arrive in real time.
That approach works again in the episode where Finn is embarrassed after being frightened by a bee. The premise sounds tiny, yet the show uses it to discuss shame without flattening it into a lesson-card speech. The line “Shame is doo-doo! And it’s time to start flushing!” is ridiculous, naturally, because Ooo has never met an emotion it could not process through bodily nonsense. The joke lands because the feeling under it is precise. Children are not free from humiliation. They are often ruled by it.
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Side Quests also keeps the gross-out humor intact: fart jokes, butt jokes, strange bodily gags, and Jake wondering why he is thirsty after “chugging seawater nonstop.” This matters. Sanitizing Adventure Time for a new corporate home would have been the easiest bad decision available. Instead, the series lets its silliness stay slightly grubby, which is one reason it still feels alive.
Familiar Characters, Different Job Descriptions
Sasha Knight’s Finn has the hardest task here. The performance has to sound young, rash, and emotionally open without turning Finn into an imitation of Jeremy Shada’s earlier work. Knight gives him a springy certainty, especially in moments where Finn confuses courage with volume. During the crossbow episode, that vocal brightness makes the recklessness fun before the consequences catch up.
John DiMaggio returns as Jake with the kind of relaxed comic timing that can make advice sound like a nap interrupted. His best moments come when Jake tries to slow Finn down without killing the adventure’s momentum. The friendship still depends on that asymmetry: Finn charges ahead, Jake stretches around the damage, and somehow affection survives the physics.
The supporting cast benefits from the episodic reset. Ice King, voiced again by Tom Kenny, is used for chaos rather than tragic excavation. His princess obsession and flailing neediness read differently now, in an era where parasocial fixation has become an entire business model. The joke is old; the culture caught up.
Marceline covering Finn and Jake’s house in living demon toilet paper turns her prank-queen ambitions into a perfect Side Quests premise: specific, stupid, and secretly character-based. Princess Bubblegum triggering Candy Ragnarok gives her orderly intelligence a disaster engine to fight.
The girls-only tabletop roleplaying episode, with Bubblegum, Marceline, Lumpy Space Princess, and Lady Rainicorn as Dungeon Master, finds a fresh configuration for familiar characters without asking them to carry franchise lore on their backs.
A New Skin for Ooo
The animation will be the first argument fans have, because fans are generous like that. The new style keeps Finn, Jake, Princess Bubblegum, Marceline, and Ice King instantly readable, then shifts the world around them toward a more handcrafted look. The backgrounds have a painterly density that makes Ooo feel less like a preserved artifact and closer to a place being redrawn by people who actually want to play there.
The physical comedy gains from that looseness. Jake’s laughter can become grotesque for a beat. Finn’s face can stretch into a child’s entire emotional weather report. Reaction shots push past cute and into strange, which is where Adventure Time has always done its best work. The movement gives jokes a second punchline before the dialogue arrives.
The music keeps the link to the original through indie-folk textures and Finn’s Auto-Tuned singing, small sonic cues that restore memory without drowning the episode in nostalgia. This is the rare revival that understands comfort and repetition are different substances. One feeds the viewer. The other fills a slot.
The animated fantasy-comedy companion series Adventure Time: Side Quests is scheduled to make its official premier on Disney+ and Hulu on June 29, 2026. Produced by Cartoon Network Studios and spearheaded by showrunner Nate Cash, the prequel series shifts away from the dense, high-stakes serialization of recent franchise extensions to deliver a collection of lighthearted, standalone adventures. The show focuses entirely on the early childhood days of Finn the Human and his magical shapeshifting dog brother Jake as they explore the whimsical Land of Ooo, battle bizarre monsters, and interact with classic franchise mainstays.
Where to Watch Adventure Time: Side Quests Online
Full Credits
Title: Adventure Time: Side Quests
Distributor: Disney+, Hulu, Cartoon Network
Release date: June 29, 2026
Rating: TV-PG
Running time: 11 minutes per episode
Director: Victor Courtright, Niki Yang
Writers: Nate Cash, Darrick Bachman
Producers and Executive Producers: Nate Cash, Sam Register
Cast: Sasha Knight, John DiMaggio, Tom Kenny, Hynden Walch, Olivia Olson, Niki Yang, Pendleton Ward
Editors: Cartoon Network Studios Post-Production Department
Composer: Matthew Janszen
The Review
Adventure Time: Side Quests
Adventure Time: Side Quests works because it treats revival as play rather than obligation. By returning to early Ooo, it gives Finn and Jake room for foolishness, shame, bad weapon choices, demon toilet paper, and the blessed nonsense of Ice King babysitting a Goblin Prince. The lighter scale may frustrate fans who want later-season lore, yet the series keeps the franchise’s weird social intelligence intact. It is gross, sweet, elastic, and thankfully not house-trained.
PROS
- Strong Finn and Jake chemistry
- Sasha Knight fits Finn
- Expressive new animation
- Sharp episodic comedy
- Easy entry for newcomers
CONS
- Less lore-heavy ambition
- Some childish gross-out gags
- Smaller emotional stakes
- Later-season fans may miss depth
