The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball Season 2: Creators Discuss the New Season, Meta References, and the Void

Much like other recently released animated reboots, The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball Season 1 struck an accord with both new fans and its dedicated community. With its first batch of episodes, this revival delivered on the humor and the cartoony hijinks that The Amazing World of Gumball is known for.

Now, months after The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball released its first few episodes, the series is returning with Season 2. While fans can expect more misadventures, like Gumball and Darwin trying to save Christmas once again, fans can also expect Rob and the Void to make a comeback.

I recently spoke with executive producers Ben Bocquelet and Erik Fountain about the revival’s success, which characters they want to explore, and the Awesome Store’s role as a narrative catalyst.

Speaking on the positive reception of the series’ first batch of episodes, Bocquelet and Fountain were very grateful to the community engagement that’s been spreading online.

“It’s nice that we are welcome back in people’s living room that way,” Bocquelet began. “We’re just glad that they didn’t hate it!”

“I was nervous for years as we made this batch because animation is a very tedious process,” Fountain added. “So I had a lot of time to cry myself to sleep and just be nervous about the reception. It was great that it was so warmly received!”

The most notable fan reactions that stood out to Bocquelet and Fountain during the first batch’s release came from the initial teaser. Given how word on The Amazing World of Gumball projects was quiet at the time, the overall reception was explosive.

“The amount of views across social media [from that teaser] was daunting,” Fountain recounted. “I don’t even know how many people are on Earth, and it seemed like more people had watched it than there are people on Earth.”

“It’s been touching,” Bocquelet noted. “I think we’ve been missing it, and people have been missing watching it. I think everyone was just like, ‘It’s back on!'”

With The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball also bringing back the referential humor it’s known for, fans can expect a lot of meta jokes. One of those episodes, “The Unfollow,” will heavily deal with appealing to the dedicated fandom and the measures some take.

Looking back on our previous conversation through this episode, Bocquelet and Fountain discussed balancing fan service and their own storytelling.

“It’s almost like a personal feeling, you know?” Bocquelet said. “Sometimes you’re on social media, and someone will take a shine on you and ask you a billion questions. Sometimes, you get bored of answering those questions, and then at some point, they move on to like another fandom or something.

“Then, you feel like, ‘Oh, I kind of almost miss it now.’ I don’t know if it was like Stockholm syndrome, but it’s sort of based on a personal experience with that, and it’s funny that we got to make an echo into the show that way.”

“You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, even if what you had was a bit scary, especially in Darwin and Gumball’s case,” Fountain added. “That is, I think, my favorite episode of this new batch of episodes. I think it’s really fun!”

Fountain also shared a favorite reference, which shows Gumball and Darwin in a bouncy visual style and was in the teaser. It left fans speculating on who was behind this animation, which the two creators finally confirmed.

“Taking a joke to the most furthest extreme feels like a very Gumball thing to do,” Fountain said. “Employing super talented, world’s greatest animators just for the sake of a single joke. That’s probably my favorite thing in ‘The Unfollow.'”

“It’s in the trailer. [It’s] James Baxter, the greatest living hand-drawn animator. The assignment for him was like, ‘Animate like you’re over-animating on purpose.’ For him, it’s like going for it, but I think it was even really fun for him.”

Speaking more on the show’s meta humor, Bocquelet talked about how they handle jokes they want to include, but couldn’t find the right place to. “Sometimes, we really want to do this thing, this joke, but it just doesn’t fit anywhere you’re trying to place it,” Bocquelet said.

“I’ve got a document with these kinds of jokes, and they stay in there. It’s like the ‘spare joke’ tank, and it just stays there for like eons up until one day the moment comes to actually play that joke.”

There are also many more episodes apart from “The Unfollow” to look forward to that are more avant-garde in terms of concepts. One of the episodes that stands out to Bocquelet and Fountain is “The Score,” which deals with a heavy-handed topic.

“That one tackles like really heavy subject matter, like Gumball and Darwin’s eyes being open to the existence of economic inequality, but it’s handled in a fun way,” Fountain recalled. “It’s got tons of retro gaming easter eggs. It’s doing heavy lifting social commentary-wise, but it’s also heavy lifting with a lot of visuals.”

“It’s quite a nice episode,” Bocquelet added. “It’s one we wanted to feel emotional. We hope that people will relate to this because it’s something that we feel strongly about, like the fact that some kids are not as lucky as others and they have difficult backgrounds.”

“It sort of develops a character that needed a bit of development as well, so it’s kind of a nice episode in that respect.”

As The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball dives deeper into the world’s side characters, there are some characters that Bocquelet and Fountain still want to explore in the future. Particularly, there was one that came first to mind: the Clown.

“I want to do something with the clown and what’s up with that guy,” Bocquelet said. “What is his life like? Everyone cares about him just because of the way he looks. I think that’s something we’ll explore one day.”

“At the wrap party, our editor, [Andy Goodman], had a pretty amazing costume of that clown character,” Fountain recalled.

“The mask is made by his son. Our art director, Joe Sparrow, and I — we’re looking at it, and we’re like, ‘We have to use this.’ If there’s a spot for it in a future season, we have to mask it. It’s so scary!”

One other character that came to mind was Sussie, a recurring character from The Amazing World of Gumball who has her own peculiarities. Though there have been multiple episodes about her, Bocquelet says there’s still some room to explore her.

“We could do her again, though, because she’s this beautifully philosophical character, you know?”

“[But], it’s a form of medieval torture to film that character,” Bocquelet joked. “It’s medieval torture, but wearing green spandex for hours on end. We’d have to be careful that we don’t break the Geneva Convention again!”

One recurring element that remains important in The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball is a van known as the Awesome Store. Throughout The Amazing World of Gumball, it has been integral in establishing an overarching meta-narrative about the state of the show.

Reflecting on the original show and the revival, Bocquelet went into detail with how the Awesome Store’s role transformed from a one-off device to a catalyst for a larger story.

“I think it became more important, if anything. Right?” Bocquelet explained. “It used to be this fun solution to explain whatever thing we didn’t know how to explain.”

“If we needed a character or an object to come out of nowhere, it was the perfect solution. But then, it became more and more important in the show, and this meta overarching plot that we’re developing. It’s a key part of The Amazing World of Gumball, like its gatekeeper.”

The Awesome Store and its mysterious owner heavily play an important role, specifically on “The Cheapmas” as well as “The Rewrite.” However, fans still don’t know much about where it came from or how it really works.

Boquelet actually had another approach to the Awesome Store before he settled on making it a van in The Amazing World of Gumball.

“This came from developing the Awesome Store for the movie idea I had,” Bocquelet recalled. “We’re like, ‘Oh, what is it like? He’s got so much stuff inside. Everything he sells is either magical or cursed, so the inside must itself be a fun, magical place.'” 

“Then we started developing this idea of it being like a souk in Morocco, like a huge Moroccan market. It went on from this to what it is now.”

Although the origins of the Awesome Store aren’t explored in this batch of episodes, Bocquelet and the team did have conversations to explore how it works in the show’s Void storyline.

“We talked about it extensively, but not so much the origins, but how this thing functions and what can it do and where it gets its objects from,” Bocquelet noted. “That is something that I want to see explored as well.”

Furthermore, one of the most important characters that also makes a return in “The Rewrite” is Rob, a former nemesis-turned-antihero. Much like other side characters, Rob’s family history before Gumball and Darwin has also remained unexplored.

However, Bocquelet has confirmed that, going into The Amazing World of Gumball movie, Rob’s family history will likely be explored in addition to his main motivations.

“Yeah, very much so,” Bocquelet added. “He’s a key character, I would say, to the show. Maybe he should have been called The Wonderfully Weird World of Rob, in all fairness, because he seems to be the only one who cares about taking care of it.”

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The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball Season 2 premieres Monday, December 22nd on Hulu.

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