Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for December 2023, from A Merry Little Batman to the Return of Marvel Studios’ What If…?
TV Lists animation
Welcome to the ink, paint, and pixel corner of Paste TV, where we’re highlighting some of the best premium animation projects on streaming or direct-to-video aimed for teens and adults. This monthly column not only provides an overview of the new animated series to check out, but we’ve also collected some of the finest creators and voice talents in the medium to give updates, or introductions, to their series.
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Post Mortem (Aired November 17)
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off co-creators Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski drop-kicked the Scott Pilgrim fandom in the face late last month with their surprising and clever anime remix of O’Malley’s comic book series and subsequent Edgar Wright movie adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. In Part 2 of our chat with the two writers, we dig into the spoilery, nitty gritty of how they pulled off such an audacious reinvention.
When asked if anyone in the approval chain at Netflix balked at the idea of killing Scott at the end of the pilot and entirely reorienting the story, O’Malley tells Paste, “Having BenDavid with me helped a lot. He’s very good in the room. He’s very good at bluster,” he chuckles. “Even when we had nothing, we were very confident. Bit by bit, we pieced it all together. We just kind of had to believe in ourselves. And for the most part, like no one really questioned anything we did.”
Grabinski agrees and continues, “I think the fact that we felt so sure of ourselves that this was the only version of the story that we wanted to tell people, they could just tell that we really cared and really believed in the idea. And Edgar trusts Bryan, because he’s worked with him a long time and really respects his work. It felt like if the creator of Scott Pilgrim feels very strongly that this is this way to tell the story of Scott Pilgrim, then it’s kind of hard to argue with him. I think that he probably is the foremost expert on what works with Scott Pilgrim,” he deadpans.
Revisiting the characters and mythology, O’Malley says the only thing he knew he wanted to revisit from the books was fleshing out the “Evil Exes,” like the Katayanagi twins. “Other than that, we were just like, ‘What makes these guys tick? What can we do to rattle them all and figure out the parameters of who they are and what makes them fun for the audience?’”
Grabinski continues, “When you take Scott off the table, it gives you a lot of opportunity to start thinking in new ways about how to approach these conflicts, how to have people interact with each other that never had before, and how to really get down in the most interesting way with what direction everyone can go. He spent years and years and years with these characters, but there hasn’t been this blank slate where we’re in a world where Scott’s not fighting the exes,” he points out. “Yet the exes still exist, and Ramona still needs to grow up, and she still needs to get closure. How do we do that now? We just started working from that assumption.”
Excising the Scott of it all was also a product of age, O’Malley explains. “When I was young, it was much harder to imagine a world that carries on without me. It’s easier now,” he laughs. “When I was in my 20s and 30s, I would have said, ‘No, the world is only this way because Scott thinks it’s this way.’ But now we can take Scott out and see what the world around him kind of persists as, and I think we found some really fun things to do with it.”
Having been at a creative impasse with his Scott Pilgrim creation for some time before this reworking, O’Malley says the process helped him come to a better place with the beloved world.
“It was nice,” he says with genuine peace. “I enjoyed kind of bringing the characters back to life. They weren’t alive for me for so long. For many years, when people would be like, “What are they up to now?” I’d be like, ‘They’re fake! They don’t exist,’” he laughs. “But we made them real again and that, to me, is a very powerful thing that I didn’t know I had in me. With the help of the actors and Edgar and BenDavid, we made it feel real, and feel like it’s now even though it’s this old thing. It’s back. It’s this thing you thought was dead, but it’s alive. And it’s been here the whole time.”
With the incredible critical praise and fandom buzz around the project, the inevitable questions about sequels are swirling. But Grabinski says he’s not there yet. “I still haven’t thought about a Season 2,” he admits. “I’ve thought about some spinoffs. But for me, the only way to make the best version of the season was to try to make it feel like a complete story with an ending that gave you catharsis for all the thematic threads that we’ve established. Maybe someday, I’ll wake up and text Bryan a really great idea, or Bryan will do another thing. But for now, I can’t even think about that. If there’s no more TV after November 18, I wouldn’t have any regrets, which I think is the only thing that actually matters.”
O’Malley adds, “And we hate a show that just kind of ends abruptly. That drives me freaking crazy. I really wanted to have something that felt like a novel and this does.”
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Season 12 Post Mortem (Aired November 26)
One of the animated series that put Cartoon Network, and then Adult Swim, on the cultural map was Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Launched on December 30, 2000 by creators Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro, it went on to become a huge hit for the networks and existed for 11 seasons until it unceremoniously ceased in 2015.
“We were disappointed it went away too,” Maiellaro tells Paste. “We weren’t sure why so we were always hoping it would come back.” And then Adult Swim ordered 10 shorts from the team and a direct-to-video movie, Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm, that all aired in 2022. From that success, Season 12 of Aqua Teen Hunger Force got a five-episode order, which just aired at the end of November.
Why the short order? Willis says they don’t know. “We’d love to make more. We’ve said that it’s gonna take seven more seasons to really completely tell the saga. But yeah, so we’re calling this a micro mini nano season.”
While the show has had concept seasons with their own subtitles, ATHF has always really just been about anthropomorphic food friends: Master Shake (Dana Snyder), Frylock (Carey Means), and Meatwad (Willis).
Asked if this mini-resurrection changed how they wrote the five episodes, Willis says only by accident. “I don’t know if we try to be necessarily satiric or topical, like a South Park,” he muses. “Like, we have a whole episode that’s about AI yet we’re kind of oblique with our commentary on things. But we finished that episode and then the strikes happened. AI was in the news, like every day, and it felt prescient, but not so prescient. Like it might feel old by the time it airs but at the time, we were like, ‘Oh, wow, there is some commentary going on here.’ But we don’t get together on what the ‘message’ is going to be or anything. We just get together and try to crack each other up and then that somehow evolves into an episode.”
But that’s not to say the show hasn’t been ambitious with their animation stylings, especially this year with the season premiere, “Shaketopia.” Animation studio Floyd County are responsible for the opener having an entirely different look for Master Shake’s idyllic VR universe. “That was a standalone one because we needed that world to look different,” Maiellaro explains. “But those guys are so talented and they threw a bunch of ideas at us and we honed in on that one. But as far as the new look of the new episodes, it started with the comeback of the big movie. We’d been away for so long so we really wanted to enhance and saturate and put on an extra polish.”
Now, the pair wait to see if the audiences that returned for the show will let them finish their grand plan of seven more seasons. “The company loves the show and they love us as we’re easy to get along with most of the time,” Maiellaro says of their current status. “If we don’t get to do the seventh and finish it out, it’s just gonna be a hole in the history of storytelling. So not only seven years to finish out the saga, but then we go back to before the pilot so it reverse circles itself. We’re orbiting that line of just grandiose pretentiousness,” he jokes. “We’re pretty sure we’re going to be able to make more. And we also have a couple other things coming out in the near future.”
Frog and Toad: Christmas Eve (December 1)
It’s crazy to think that author and illustrator Arnold Lobel’s first Frog and Toad book was published 53-years ago. The genteel stories of the two opposite-in-disposition amphibian friends have been fixture titles in school libraries forever, helping generations of kids fall in love with reading. In the decades since, the characters have been adapted into a Tony-nominated Broadway musical, and this spring, into an Apple TV+ series, Frog and Toad, with actors Nat Faxon voicing Frog and Kevin Michael Richardson as Toad.
For the holidays, the streamer is releasing Frog and Toad: Christmas Eve done in the same beautiful, illustrative style of Lobel’s artwork, in glorious 2D animation. The bundled up buddies will embark on a Christmas adventure with their little community to find their spirit of the season. The sweet world of the series is like watching a gorgeous picture book already, so adding some holiday cheer on top of it all is a welcome addition to everyone’s Christmas animation rotation.
A Merry Little Batman (December 8)
Imagine the Batman character and Gotham rendered like an illustration straight out of the late, great cartoonist Ron Searle’s pen? That was the hook that sold veteran animation writer and producer Mike Roth to develop and direct Warner Bros. Animation’s A Merry Little Batman holiday special, streaming on Prime Video. A fresh take on the typical approach to the Batman mythology, the special focuses on Bruce Wayne’s (Luke Wilson) rambunctious son, Damian Wayne (Yonas Kibreab), who is desperate to be a crime-fighter like his hero, Batman.
“You want to tell a Christmas story and there’s certain tropes for Christmas stories, especially emotional ones,” Roth explains to Paste of the care they put into grafting the Dark Knight mythology and the holidays together in a reasonable way. “We were conscious of that, but at the same time, there’s 90 years of Batman history too, and we had to stay conscious of that as well. ‘Well, how do we do that?’”
“The world is very much through Damian’s perspective,” Roth continues. “We landed on this idea that instead of Damien being this petulant 13-year-old, he’s going to be more of a Calvin and Hobbes type [character]. He still gets himself into trouble, but he’s a little kid. He doesn’t know any better.”
The core conflict of the story erupts when Damian gets gifted a utility belt for the holiday, gets a little over excited, and ends up going out into Gotham exactly when The Joker (David Hornsby) and his rogue’s gallery returns.
Speaking of the quintessential villain, Roth says David Hornsby just “crushed” the audition, giving them a Joker that brought to mind Bob Fosse’s jazzy, snake performance in The Little Prince. “It was beautiful what he did, and just so funny,” the director says. “He just really brought the character to life.”
Roth and his team are now busy working on a Prime Video series continuation of Damien’s adventures. “There was just a lot of electricity and excitement around this project,” Roth says. “When Amazon bought it, my understanding is that somewhere around that time the idea came about of still living in this world. What else can we do with this? We just got started here on the series, adding new characters. And so far, it’s a very fun series to be working on.”
Diary of a Wimpy Kid Christmas: Cabin Fever (December 8)
Author and cartoonist Jeff Kinney’s long in-the-works Diary of a Wimpy Kid Cabin Fever special has been bouncing around in developmental hell going back to 2014. But with the 2019 announcement that the whole franchise would be moving over to Disney+, the concept has now resurfaced as a Christmas special featuring middle-school protagonist Greg Heffley (Brady Noon) and his circle of family and friends getting snowed in for the holidays.
The special follows in the CGI animation aesthetics established in director Swinton Scott’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid and continued in Luke Cormican’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (who also directs here). The everyday hijinks of Greg’s suburban life is still at play here, with his accidental mistakes snowballing (literally) into bigger problems he needs to solve before Santa arrives.
Archer: Into the Cold (December 17)
After 14 seasons of spy hijinks and R-rated humor, FX’s adult animation innovator, Archer, comes to a close with this three-episode finale event titled, Archer: Into the Cold. In this final season, Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) and his team have gone back to basics much like they started in Season 1. Aside from Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) taking over the job of leading the agency, the final season found the characters trying to change up their poor habits, but ended up snapping right into dynamics that proved hard to break. It’s going to be interesting to see how the gang closes out their epic run: still trying to spy hard or closing up shop and walking into retirement leaving the world still a very messed up place.
What If…? Season 2 (December 22)
After a two-year hiatus, Marvel Studios’ very first animation project, What If…?, returns for a second season of stories that are meant to explore alternate universes featuring the ensemble characters of the MCU. Head writer A. C. Bradley and writer Matthew Chauncey are back for Season 2, with episodes directed by Bryan Young. Series narrator, The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright), returns a la Rod Serling to present stories set beyond the boundaries of Phases 1-3, featuring the vocal work of many MCU actors including Michael Douglas, Jeff Goldblum, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kat Dennings, Jon Favreau, and more. Disney+ will release a new episode every day for nine days, giving MCU fans a new story to unwrap through December 30.
Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, Total Film, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and the upcoming Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen
For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.