Cartoon Network Teases 10th Anniversary Celebration Of 'Over The Garden Wall'
Fall is here, so break out your potatoes and molasses, we’re getting ready to party
Well this is an interesting turn. Earlier this week, there was a departure scare regarding the beloved Cartoon Network miniseries Over the Garden Wall created by Patrick McHale. It, Unikitty and OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes were listed to be leaving Hulu at the end of the month. Over the Garden Wall had been removed from Max at the end of August 2023. The latter two still are leaving (creating worries about what OK KO!’s status in general is as it was removed from Max in the infamous August 2022 purge), the Over the Garden Wall issue was resolved pretty definitively. Despite some hiccups, it’s not leaving, and most certainly not written off either. It’s got a full series marathon coming October 11, and an even bigger surprise teased on Sunday morning.
To mark the first day of Fall, the network posted “Dancing in a swirl of golden memories...🍂🐸 A little gift from The Unknown to celebrate the 10th anniversary of #OvertheGardenWall. Stay tuned, wayward souls.” The attached video has a setup featuring Greg and Wirt’s hats next to a tree branch. The anniversary celebration will happen on November 3, the exact date of the series premiere in 2014. Notably, the posts tag Aardman Animation, the famed claymation studio but there was no elaboration, but that’s to come. As they say, stay tuned, it’s still 6 weeks away.
Over the Garden Wall’s ten 11-minute segments are a unique blend of dark fantasy, comedy, and adventure, as well as its gorgeous animation and haunting and whimsical music. It sees Wirt (voiced by Elijah Wood) and Greg (voiced by Collin Dean) find themselves lost in a mysterious forest called the Unknown. As they try to find their way home, they encounter a variety of strange and fantastical characters. The cast also includes the likes of Melanie Lynskey, Christopher Lloyd, and Tim Curry, in one of his last roles before the stroke that sidelined him to this day.
In the wake of Over the Garden Wall’s success, Cartoon Network followed it up with another otherwise unrelated miniseries, called Long Live the Royals, created by Sean Szeles. It premiered its four episodes over late November and early December 2015, but it isn’t as fondly remembered. However, they would order Infinity Train as a miniseries nearly a year later, and the rest is history, for all the good and bad times. The last modern miniseries to end on Cartoon Network was the HBO Max original Aquaman: King of Atlantis, which got its linear airing in May 2022, before also being lost in that infamous purge just three months later.
Whatever’s being done with Aardman, this project is probably going to be considered the first event that feels like Cartoon Network is able to go the extra mile again since the Discovery ownership era began.
10 years? Lawd, lawd....