Adventure Time: Side Quests
Cast & Key People
Our Review
Every Adventure Time revival since the 2018 finale has asked something of the audience. Distant Lands wanted you to catch up on a decade of lore, Fionna and Cake wanted you to accept a parallel world that swaps the genders, and both were genuinely good in ways that rewarded homework. Adventure Time: Side Quests, the Disney+ and Hulu companion that premiered June 29, 2026, asks nothing at all. It drops young Finn and a pre-dad Jake into self-contained nonsense for eleven minutes an episode and trusts the jokes to land without footnotes. The critics loved it, a perfect hundred percent from seven reviews at an 8.6 average. IMDb sits lower, 7.3 on a young vote base of a few dozen, which is what a kids shelf premiere looks like before word of mouth fills in.
The recasting question is answered in the first three minutes. Sasha Knight, taking Finn over from Jeremy Shada, does not imitate the old performance, and that turns out to be the whole trick: this Finn is younger, less scarred, all springy confidence and no irony, which fits a show set in the earliest chronology. John DiMaggio returning as Jake is the bridge the revival needed, that half asleep delivery that makes life advice sound like a nap interrupted. The rest of the company is home: Hynden Walch, Tom Kenny, Olivia Olson, Niki Yang as BMO.
Showrunner Nate Cash, whose resume runs through SpongeBob, Over the Garden Wall and Tiny Toons Looniversity, understood the assignment exactly: the original was first a cartoon, second a quest show, third a philosophy seminar in disguise, and this one sticks to the first two. Finn enters a crossbow tournament he is terrible at and turns it into a masculinity crisis. Marceline dumps a clingy demon toilet paper monster on the boys. Jake gets ghost-sensing powers and becomes the endangered party. Ice King babysits the Goblin Prince. The gross out gags survived the Disney acquisition intact, which reviewers kept flagging and which is the single best signal that this is not a merchandise protection measure.
Eight out of ten. It will never do the emotional ambush of the original’s best hours and it does not try, and fans who want lore will find the smaller stakes frustrating. As a return ticket to Ooo it works: funny, elastic, weird, and friendly to a seven year old and a thirty year old at the same time. Season one is twenty episodes, all up now on Disney+ and Hulu, with a second season listed for October 2, 2026. Put it on and let the nonsense carry you.