Twenty more episodes of “Adventure Time: Side Quests” arrive on Disney+ and Hulu on October 2nd, all at once. That is barely three months after the first twenty landed on June 29th. The new trailer opens with Jake stretched into a zip line across a canyon, Finn clipping on behind him, and one of them announcing that this is “the greatest idea we’ve ever had.” It is the right way to sell the show. Side Quests does not want you to follow a saga. It wants you to watch two friends do something dumb and brave for eleven minutes.
The trailer and a new piece of key art dropped on September 24th. The art shows a young Finn and Jake flying over the kingdom while treasure and medieval weapons spill out of Finn’s backpack. Outside the US the season goes to Cartoon Network and HBO Max on October 5th. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Adventure Time: Side Quests” and for the season two trailer.
Side Quests does not want you to follow a saga. It wants you to watch two friends do something dumb and brave for eleven minutes.”
Some context first because this is not the “Adventure Time” most adult fans have been watching lately. The original series ran on Cartoon Network from 2010 to 2018 and ended with a war and a lot of grief and a finale that tied up ten seasons of mythology. The follow-ups kept that weight. “Distant Lands” was four long specials. “Fionna and Cake” was a serialized multiverse story aimed squarely at grown-ups, and its second season came out in 2025. Side Quests goes the other way on purpose. It is a soft reboot set earlier in Finn’s life, and every episode stands on its own.
That choice is the whole design. Showrunner Nate Cash built the series around short, self-contained stories in the rhythm of the original show’s first seasons. The episodes run eleven minutes and there is no season arc to track and no finale to dread. The official synopsis promises Finn and Jake “wrestling toads, facing baby gladiators, and getting tangled up in one too many magic spells.” Cash has said that making it “felt like making the original Adventure Time.” That is a big claim to make about a show whose early years people still quote.
The trailer backs him up. It runs just over a minute and it is almost all jokes. After the zip line, Finn and Jake sit in Princess Bubblegum’s lab wearing matching helmets while somebody explains, “We’re going to send you into the dream world to fight the demons.” Finn’s answer is “Let’s do it!” and a little later BMO’s screen spells out the pitch in plain text: “Finn & Jake Are Back for an all New Season.” Then comes a brawl with a crowd of knights, a run across a pink candy landscape and a trip through a starry void. Each gets a few seconds before the trailer moves on.
There is a real plot hook in the middle. “Something terrible has befallen the Candy Kingdom,” a voice announces, and the next shots show why. A giant black shape with glowing yellow eyes and a mouthful of teeth looms over the heroes. Somebody else yells “Time for dessert!” as the mouth closes around Bubblegum. A voice crows, “Our heroes are finished!” A sprinkled donut gets smashed apart. It is the closest the trailer comes to stakes, and it still plays as a cartoon, not a crisis.
The voices are a mix of old and new. John DiMaggio is back as Jake, and he has voiced the dog since the pilot. The change is Finn, since Sasha Knight now plays the younger Finn, taking over from Jeremy Shada, who voiced him through the original run. The rest of the core cast returns: Tom Kenny as the Ice King, Hynden Walch as Princess Bubblegum, Olivia Olson as Marceline and Niki Yang as BMO. The Moldy Peaches perform new versions of the opening and closing themes, and Matthew Janszen writes the score.
The credits behind the camera explain why the show feels like the old one. Niki Yang does not just voice BMO. She directed seven of the first season’s twenty episodes. Pendleton Ward, who created “Adventure Time”, co-wrote and storyboarded the fourth episode, “Rescue Princess”, with her. Jesse Moynihan, one of the original series’ best-known storyboard writers, is back on two episodes, “Island of Shame” and “Punchy”. This is not a reboot handed to strangers. It is several of the people who made the original going back to where they started, and the episode titles, from “Smell Detective” to “Car Wars”, read like early-season “Adventure Time” too.
The road to the screen was long by the standards of an eleven-minute cartoon. Warner Bros. Animation announced Side Quests at the Annecy animation festival in June 2024, as part of a push to expand the franchise. A year later Annecy audiences saw a rough cut of the title sequence. The voice cast was not revealed until May 2026, a month before the premiere. Two years from announcement to air, then three months from season one to season two, is quite a change of pace.
Bubblegum gets the best exchange in the trailer. She tells the boys, “No more goofing around. I’m watching you.” Finn answers “Got it, PB” and Jake immediately asks, “Hey, you want to see me turn into a dolphin?” Somebody replies “Show me.” That is the show in four lines. The adults set a rule and Finn agrees to it and Jake undoes it in the same breath. The early seasons of the original ran on exactly that joke, and Side Quests clearly knows it.
The release plan is unusual and worth a line. “Adventure Time” is a Cartoon Network show made by Cartoon Network Studios, which is part of Warner Bros. Discovery. In the US Side Quests streams on Disney+ and Hulu, and the trailer itself carries the Disney+ and Hulu logo in the corner. Internationally it stays with Cartoon Network and HBO Max. Both seasons dropped as full binges rather than weekly episodes. For an episodic kids’ show that is the right call, because nobody needs to wait a week for a standalone story about wrestling a toad.
The speed of the renewal says the first season worked. It premiered on June 29th and the second season was ordered in July. Season one holds a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes according to CBR, and the franchise is still expanding around it. “Fionna and Cake” won an Emmy, and a new “Bubblegum and Marceline” series is in development. By October 2nd, Side Quests will have forty episodes out in a little over three months. That is a lot of Ooo in a short time.
What the trailer does not show is anything heavy. There is no Lich, no Mushroom War backstory and no hint of the sadness that made the later seasons of the original famous. That is the point and it is also the question hanging over the season. The first batch proved the formula works. The second has to prove that twenty more standalone adventures can stay fresh without the mythology that fans eventually came for. Cash’s bet is that a good eleven-minute joke is enough. Based on this trailer, it still is.
For longtime fans the appeal is simple. This is Finn and Jake before the world got complicated, when a zip line across all of Ooo counted as a plan. For younger viewers it is a clean way in, with no ten seasons of homework. October 2nd is a Friday. Twenty episodes at eleven minutes each come to under four hours, which is one long weekend on the couch.
What Do You Think? Does Side Quests work better as pure episodic fun, or do you miss the mythology of the original series? Is Sasha Knight’s younger Finn winning you over? And which is the bigger threat to the Candy Kingdom, the monster with the teeth or Jake turning into a dolphin?
See you on the next binge!
