Heh, Woah! ‘Fionna and Cake’ Show Boss Adam Muto Offers Some Insight into the Second Season

Today is a big day for fans of HBO Max’s acclaimed series, Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, which kicks off its second season with an inventive and entertaining new episode. The gender-swapped, alternate world take on Pendleton Ward’s beloved Cartoon Network series (2010-2018) finds its main characters Fionna (voiced by Madeleine Martin) and Cake the Cat (Roz Ryan) on a new quest alongside the enigmatic Huntress Wizard (Ashly Burch, taking over from the first season’s Jenny Slate). The new batch also finds Harvey Guillén replacing Andrew Rannells as the voice of Gary Prince (the gender-swapped version of Princess Bubblegum), Kris Kollins taking over as Marshall Lee (replacing Danny Glover) and Kumail Nanjiani as Prismo (replacing Sean Rohani).

We had the chance to chat with two-time Emmy-winning showrunner and exec producer Adam Muto (who was also a showrunner, exec producer and writer on Adventure Time) to learn more about the sophomore season. Here is what Adam told us:

Animation Magazine: Congrats on the fantastic new season of your show, Adam. What do you find especially appealing about the second season?

Adam Muto: I always try to find like one thing in each episode that I’m really excited to see. It might be something visual or something stupid — like, I want to see tiny chairs. I mean there’s arguably no reason to see tiny chairs, but I want to include these weird things, because maybe it wouldn’t exist on any other show. So, I think finding one of those things in every episode is what keeps me going!

Last season we followed Fionna and Cake’s adventures in the multiverse, but this season there’s more of a focus on new characters and storylines back at home. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yes, we didn’t want to repeat that same structure. There was a temptation to do that, but it felt like that would be just rethreading. We tried to find a way to keep the location centered in Fionna’s world as opposed to going to other worlds this time, and find ways for her and Cake to experience different dimensions without leaving her world. They would stay tethered to it.

What’s up with all the voice cast changes this season?

Yes, we had several cast changes. The truth is that two years go by, and then you come back to the same people and ask them if they could come back. You ask them, “Do you want to do 10 episodes?” A lot of times, they are people who are very busy, so when they say no, the only option is to write that character out or recast. Because a lot of them were established characters, we had to find a way to find somebody who can embody them in a different way without trying to sound exactly like the previous actor.

A lot of time we had our casting director go wide. We didn’t want to pigeonhole or narrow down the focus. A lot of them were from open calls. The new actor who plays Marshall Lee, Chris Collins, that was from an open audition that was one of the selects. They prescreened hundreds. He was a singer and could hit the same notes as the character, even though he hadn’t done a lot of voice acting, we felt that it would work. We also tried to target specific actors, but they were also busy. It’s a very complicated process. I feel it was simpler, but maybe it’s because it’s a world of streaming and everything is different now, and residuals also work differently, it felt like it’s a lot more involved a process to secure an actor for a voice role these days.

Do you have any favorite storylines in Season 2?

You know, it’s mostly episodes and locations. I love the places they go and the dynamics between some of the characters in Episode 6 and 7 most of all this season. But it’s hard for me to play favorites, because if there was an episode that I didn’t like, it probably means that I shouldn’t have done that one. We really tried hard to avoid things that felt too much like table setting, just trying to find the most interesting things to show, without overloading it and having too frantic a pace. It was all about finding the balance between real world stuff in Fionna’s world, and how weird we could go in the world of Ooo and different realms that they visit.

Can you share with us how you map out the whole season, and do you have plans in place for the third season of the show? Has that been greenlit?

You definitely have to have possibilities in mind, because you don’t want to end with a cliffhanger, because the show ends on an unsatisfying note if the show doesn’t get picked up. It’s this middle ground where you are hopeful, and then you try to find threads to lay down that won’t be too intrusive if they don’t get picked up.

It’s a lot different now than before when we were on linear, were we got picked up right when we finished writing, because you knew you had one more season to write toward. The way it works now is so different now, because you can’t put in so much work until you know that it’s going to happen. You just don’t have the time because the schedule doesn’t allow that. Also, the certainty that you might have had before doesn’t exist anymore. So, it’s a lot different now.

Our third season hasn’t been greenlit yet. That’s not how it works anymore. There are outliers where things can get picked up for more seasons before they premiere, but I feel that’s more of an exception than the rule these days!

Which overseas studios produced the animation this season?

Saerom and eMation Animation Studio (both in S. Korea) worked on the show this season.

I know you probably hear from the die-hard fans of the show all the time. Why do you think these characters and this show have such a strong appeal for audiences around the world?

I think it’s really different from viewer to viewer. Ever since the original show, I think people gravitated towards different things; maybe there were characters that they identified with or types of episodes they liked. Some of our fans only experienced the show as Fionna and Cake episodes, which I never could understand originally. But it was something that was happening enough. People definitely come to the show to get what they want out of it, so some of them only wanted a certain type of episode. I feel that now we have this added element of people who are nostalgic for the show; they basically grew up with Adventure Time, so the math works.

Our fans are not a monolith thing, but there are definitely characters that obviously pop more with the fans. When we pitch a show focused on a specific character, we can be more confident that if it’s centered around Simon or Huntress Wizard or Marceline or Bubblegum, it would get more immediate attention than a more tertiary character.

How do you find that delicate balance of revisiting the lore of the past and exploring new worlds in each episode?

I think initially we treated lore as a way to inform the characters: They needed to have a memory of what they’ve done in other episodes because it felt dishonest to have them learning the same lesson over and over again, or finding out something — like not reacting to the Ice King differently when they saw him again after having certain revelations. So, it was always about how would it impact a character reacting, as opposed to how it explains how the universe works. I think lore building is interesting, but it also it can get very sort of Byzantine about the mechanics of the deities and the realms of existence.

So, whatever rules that we have aid how a particular storyline works. We try to remember them, because the characters themselves would remember them, but not be so beholden to it that if you haven’t seen those past episodes you’d be scratching your head.

We never want a moment where a character walks in and you have to rely on people’s memories to actually have that moment be effective. I mean inevitably, that will happen because we’re in the second season of a spinoff show! You have to have watched the first season at least. We tried to make Season 1 sort of the entry point, where if you hadn’t seen any Adventure Time episodes, it would sort of act like this cool distant past to the characters. You wouldn’t necessarily need to know it exactly. That’s been our basic approach, but eventually, you run out of things to explain. So, it’s better to create questions that are satisfying than answers that are about power scaling or something like that.

How many people were in your writer’s room this season?

We usually had four, and then the board artists were still writing quite a bit as they were boarding but we tried to give them outlines that were pretty fleshed out, more so than we would have on the original series since there so many moving parts were involved.

What were some of the animated shows or movies that really influenced you when you were growing up?

I was omnivorous when I was younger. Anything that was on the pallets at Costco would get brought home and watched over and over again. I’d have to say Princess Mononoke. But, honestly if you go back enough, it was basically anything that I had access to. I didn’t have Cartoon Network, so I’d watch The Disney Afternoon shows and Saturday morning cartoons. When I first saw Akira, it was in a class in middle school. It blew my mind, because I hadn’t seen anything like that before. So, I started seeking out bootleg tapes in comic shops because I couldn’t get them anywhere else. It feels like the scarcity of influences back then made my touchstones very specific. It doesn’t mean they were necessarily the greatest things: It was simply what I had access to!

The second season of Fionna and Cake premieres on HBO Max today. New episodes will debut weekly thru December 25. The show is executive produced by Adam Muto, Sam Register and Fred Seibert.