Even before the plot of Fionna and Cake season 2 begins to take shape, the tone is immediately set by a completely new opening sequence that goes insanely hard. Filled with fast-paced guitars and trippy visuals of Fionna and Huntress Wizard, it tells fans exactly what they’re going to get from the second installment of this Adventure Time spinoff: an absolutely action-packed whirlwind.
“We had a propulsive theme for the first season,” showrunner Adam Muto tells Polygon, “but obviously we couldn’t reuse a lot of the same visuals. It was not trying to copy that, but also not downshift it dramatically. A lot of it was driven by the storyboards that [director] Ryann Shannon did, and then once we had edited it in, we had a temp track, and it felt better if it was cutting a lot faster. That dictated what kind of music we ended up going with.”
The theme was composed by Amanda Jones, who worked on the music for both Distant Lands and the first season of Fionna and Cake.
“Amanda Jones is a guitarist on her own, so I think that’s probably her,” Muto explains, then pauses. “I haven’t double checked to see if that is her,” he says with a laugh. “But yeah, once we experimented with what the arrangement would be — it was a little bit more synthy and keyboard driven before — but we were just like, ‘No, just guitars.’ Once we got that version and it was feeling good, that’s where it landed.”
Those guitar chords can only mean one thing: The second season of Fionna and Cake has arrived, picking up where season 1 left off with the gender-bent, multiversal variants of Finn the human boy (now a young woman) and Jake the stretchy magical dog (now Cake, a stretchy magical feline). Ahead of the premiere, streaming now on HBO Max, Polygon spoke to showrunner Muto, who previously served as showrunner on Adventure Time for most of its run, to discuss the evolution of Fionna and Cake between seasons 1 and 2, why he chose to put a deeper emphasis on the inscrutable character Huntress Wizard, and future Adventure Time-related projects.
[Ed. note: This interview contains light spoilers for the first episode of Fionna and Cake season 2.]
Getting to know Huntress Wizard
One of the biggest driving forces of the plot in Fionna and Cake season 2 revolves around Huntress Wizard, who is trying to save Finn from a poisonous injury. In the original series, the character was always quite an enigma, and Muto was excited to finally explore her more thoroughly.
“It was a cool opportunity,” he says. “It was also sort of risky to take a character who’s mostly known for like, ‘Oh, that’s a very cool character design.’ She’s in a couple episodes — just enough to have a fan base of her own, but not necessarily enough that they know the ins and outs of her character. Certainly her backstory was left very mysterious.”
Fionna and Cake is all about new takes on long-running characters. The new season expands this concept even further, with more screen time for gender-bent versions of characters like Hunson Abadeer, Marceline’s demon father in Adventure Time. But in the case of Huntress Wizard, who finds herself traveling between realities on her quest to save Finn, Muto took a more subtle approach.
“It gave us a chance to do a version of the character that could be distinct from the original series, but also sort of a natural evolution,” he says. “She is pretty much a loner in the original series, so she’s a bit more of a grouchy loner in this one just as a starting point.”
Finding the right balance
The first season of Fionna and Cake often felt downright apocalyptic, with the protagonists’ alternate reality facing annihilation from a multiversal “god auditor” called Scarab. By the end of that season, however, their world was no longer in peril, which provided Muto and the rest of the team with an interesting opportunity. They could tell a “cozy” story set within this new dimension, or find a way to raise the stakes once again. Ultimately, they split the difference.
“I was not bold enough to just say, ‘We’re going to do a very cozy season. Every episode’s going to be kind of boring, but it’ll be fun,’” he says. “There’s definitely the temptation to just do a slice of life thing and just keep it completely low stakes, just about Fionna and her friends, and that could be satisfying in some way, but I feel like they would not have greenlit that show. Finding a middle ground was sort of the challenge.”
Focusing entirely on Fionna and Cake’s dimension could have solved another issue Muto dealt with, a concern over retelling the same Adventure Time stories, which he expressed to Deadline in a 2024 interview. “It definitely gives you a very clear sandbox about, ‘Okay, this is how this is different than Ooo,’” he says when I bring up the question. However, it was impossible to resist the pull back to the dimension where the series began.
Fionna and Cake season 2 also occasionally cuts back to the action in the land of Ooo where the original Adventure Time takes place. Muto admits that it’s tempting to focus on the franchise’s most recognizable characters, but it was important to find a careful balance between important plot progression and fan service.
“Whenever it felt like we were going to Ooo too often, that was usually a sign we had to bolster something in the Fionna-world side,” he says “I think the risk is just to show old favorites and just say, ‘Oh, you missed these characters, let’s see more of them!’ In the end, it was easier to cut the Ooo stuff if it felt like it was encroaching upon what Fionna was doing.”
The future of Adventure Time
Adventure Time was always a show technically meant for children, but enjoyed by an older audience as well. Beginning with the Distant Lands specials, which aired on HBO Max and didn’t have the same age restrictions, the team has been able to explore more adult themes at length, like death and adult romantic relationships. Fionna and Cake goes even deeper. The characters swear, but that’s just one example of the many restrictions that have been lifted on the franchise thanks to its move from Cartoon Network to streaming.
“A lot of it is less about how crass you can go, but more the stuff that you kind of intuitively do that usually got put in check by Standards and Practices notes, which were copious when you’re doing a six to 11 show, you wouldn’t even think about it,” Muto says. “Like if you wanted a character to draw blood, or go without a seatbelt, or stuff that seems sort of petty, but you spend so much time just in these long email chains discussing all this horse trading about what exactly you can do and what you can’t do. Removing that as a constraint was a lot more freeing.”
The lack of those restrictions doesn’t mean Fionna and Cake is completely going off the rails, however. As the steward of Adventure Time, Muto is still extremely conscious of striking the right tone, even as new spinoffs focus on a more mature audience.
“The limitation is self-imposed,” he says “It’s like: ‘We can swear. Are we swearing too much? Does this feel off-show now?’ They could be completely foul-mouthed now, and that would technically fall under the rating, but that would feel like a different show.”
When it comes to other projects like a promised Adventure Time movie and the kids-focused cartoon Heyo BMO, Muto can’t say much, but he offers an intriguing look at how the franchise has changed as it shifted from Cartoon Network to Warner Bros. Animation.
“Development takes forever — it takes even longer now,” he says. “Becoming part of WBA more officially has made it possible for the show to exist in different platforms and in different formats, because when we were the original series, there was no movie, there were no spinoffs. It was just linear, just make more episodes, and then eventually they decided they had enough episodes, and why make more?”
“So it’s strange now to be in a situation where we can sell it to different platforms and it can exist in different forms, but we still have to get permission and actually actively sell it as opposed to having Cartoon Network there as the sort of home. But yeah, at this point it’s just — things move a lot slower than maybe we’d like, and also things get announced way earlier than they probably should be, so I think it’s a combination of those two things.”
Fionna and Cake season 1 episode 1 is streaming now on HBO Max. New episodes air weekly each Thursday.
- Security Camera Installation – indoor/outdoor IP CCTV systems & video analytics
- Access Control Installation – key card, fob, biometric & cloud‑based door entry
- Business Security Systems – integrated alarms, surveillance & access control
- Structured Cabling Services – voice, data & fiber infrastructure for new or existing builds
- Video Monitoring Services – 24/7 remote surveillance and analytics monitoring
Author: 360 Technology Group
