Bravest Warriors
Cast & Key People
Our Review
Ask a Cartoon Network person what Pendleton Ward made after Adventure Time and they will say Fionna and Cake. Ask someone who lived on the early internet and they will say Bravest Warriors, the Frederator web series that ran from 2012 to 2018, started life in the same Nicktoons Random! Cartoons incubator as Adventure Time’s pilot, and quietly assembled one of the strangest, most generous comedy catalogs on the internet. Four teenage heroes for hire, Beth, Chris, Danny and Wallow, warp through the year 3085 saving adorable aliens and their tiny worlds, powered literally by their emotions, which is a premise nobody else has had the nerve to take seriously. IMDb users think it is wonderful: 8.1 from nearly four thousand votes.
The reason the show works where most web cartoons evaporate is Catbug, a cat rabbit hybrid voiced by Sam Lavagnino, who exists in a state of permanent sugar mania, eats peanut butter squares, and narrates his own away teams. He could have been a one note meme across 82 episodes and instead became the best comic creation of the Cartoon Hangover era, a character whose manic surface hides a writer’s understanding that comedy and existential dread share a nervous system. The four leads hold their own beside him: Beth the engineer with the robot hand, Chris the golden retriever jock with real depth, Danny the horned womanizer with a bruise under it, Wallow the Rastafarian plant whose chill hides the show’s feeling.
The history matters too. Fred Seibert produced, Breehn Burns ran the first three seasons, the theme song is by Peter Berkman of Anamanaguchi, and the whole thing pioneered the free distribution model: seasons one and two premiered on Frederator’s Cartoon Hangover YouTube channel, seasons three and four moved to VRV, with the fifty two episode final season animated in Canada by Nelvana. The later seasons are shorter in format and stranger in ambition, season three alone is six episodes of genuinely risky stories about the team falling apart, and the fourth season’s paired eleven minute episodes let the team dynamics drift somewhere genuinely adult.
Eight out of ten, and it is free: Frederator keeps the series up on its official YouTube channel, which makes it the highest rated cartoon you can watch tonight without a subscription. Start at Time Slime and give it six episodes before judging, because the fourth wall is thinner than it looks and the feelings sneaky.