“Aqua Teen Hunger Force” was one of the first big hits in the early days of Adult Swim more than two decades ago, generated on a comically low budget by Atlantans Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro.
The show set the tone for the entire Atlanta-based network as a subversive visual diet for young men seeking a late-night diversion long before smartphones and streaming services became the norm.
Over 11 seasons, 140-plus TV episodes and a 2007 movie, “Aqua Teen” revolved around three living, breathing fast-food items writ large: the forever annoyed leader Frylock, narcissistic milkshake Master Shake and delightfully juvenile Meatwad. It was canceled in 2015.
But like many animated series, it was ripe for a comeback and last month, Adult Swim announced a 12th season of five episodes and HBO Max last week released a new film “Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm.” (It was first on demand for a few weeks and will air on March 19 on Adult Swim.)
In the movie, the trio of friends are estranged, only brought back together when Frylock befriends an evil tech billionaire who runs a company called Amazin. Then all hell breaks loose and the trio is tasked with saving the planet.
The two creators have a hard time not joking about the show’s resiliency. In fact, Willis hopes “Aqua Teen” lasts centuries. He said they have read the dictionary so artificial intelligence can use their voices for future “Aqua Teen” episodes well beyond the grave. “We want to create multi-generational wealth from ‘Aqua Teen,’” Willis cracked.
Maiellaro said as a franchise, “It’s beyond James Bond. We’re bigger than ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’”
Or put another way, as a Mooninite sardonically noted early in the movie: “This is nothing more than a pathetic cash grab.”
In Adult Swim’s early days, experimentation was rife and budgets were modest.
“It was such a small crew,” Maiellaro said. “We loved it. Nobody ever wanted us to do it and pushed us even further to keep making it.” Management, he said, “stayed far away from it. We just did what we thought was funny.”
Willis: “It was like a calling. We had blinders on. This is amazing. It never even crossed my mind that someone could cancel a TV show.”
Maiellaro said despite the absurdities of the show, it remains oddly relatable. “Everyone knows a Shake and Meatwad and Frylock in familiar fast-food shapes, and Carl as a human,” he said. “Once you get that hook, you can do anything around it.”
And in the end, “‘Aqua Teen’ put Adult Swim on the map,” he noted.
Doing a movie, of course, meant more depth and more character arc, Maiellaro said: “Once we cracked that, we went into episodic mode. It just took longer.”
“You have to be really smart to understand it,” Willis added.
And the magic of an animated series like “Aqua Teen” is there is no need for continuity. “We don’t even know what that is,” Maiellaro said. The characters could die or change jobs or get married in one episode and it won’t matter when a new season starts.
The pair has also produced other shows like “Squidbillies” and the live action “Your Pretty Face is Going To Hell,” but “Aqua Teen” will always be their calling card.
And “Aqua Teen” will forever be known for inadvertently causing a terrorism scare in Boston in 2007 when the marketing department placed electronically lit Mooninites in random spots around town to promote the show and folks thought they might be bombs. (The Wikipedia entry helpfully describes it as the “2007 Boston Mooninite Panic.”)
CNN covered it for hours.
“If only we had anything to do with that,” Willis said.
“We had no idea any of this was happening until it happened,” Maiellaro said.
They were recently invited to the Boston Comedy Festival. “We wrote a script about it but we never got to finish it. We might screen something and talk to them about it,” said Willis.
As a reminder, he keeps one of those original electronic Mooninite devices (named Err) as a souvenir on a shelf in his office.
WHERE TO WATCH
“Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm,” available on HBO Max, out on Adult Swim March 23
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