Last Week in Animation: May 8th

Welcome to Overly Animated’s Last Week in Animation! This is a new recurring series where we aggregate the news items most relevant to fans of the shows we cover regularly, as well as interesting tidbits on other animated television and film projects.

Steven Universe Bombs Your Phone, Will Soon Get To Your Television

Last week we told you about Cartoon Network planning an early release of their flagship show, Steven Universe, via their network app. Indeed, at midnight on Friday, May 5, all five episodes of the bomb were released onto the app for fans of the show to consume immediately. Soon afterward, reactions to the bomb’s finale in “I Am My Mom” soon spread all across the Internet, so it’s unlikely that you’ve stayed unspoiled for long. But on the off chance you’ve been saving yourself for television airings, the bomb will begin with the broadcast of “Lion 4: Alternate Ending” on Monday, May 8 at 7 PM. It will be a nightly event up to Thursday, May 11, when “I Am My Dad” and “Are You My Mom?” will air in the same night.

It was previously reported that after this bomb, Steven Universe would return by Memorial Day (May 29). After a recent leak, we have confirmation on at least one of the new episodes, “Stuck Together.” This episode is expected to be the premiere of Season 5 of the show, and will be notable for being Lauren Zuke’s first solo writing/storyboarding credit on the show. Zuke announced their departure from the show a couple of months ago, so it should be interesting to see what kind of showcase they put on for potential employers, if they haven’t been snagged up yet by another project.

RWBY Returns! (Kinda)

Since RWBY’s Volume 4 came to its finale in February 2017, fans of the web series have been biding their time until the next volume premieres some time this fall. But to tide people over, Rooster Teeth has announced that the second season of the show’s comedy-focused spinoff, RWBY Chibi, will premiere on May 13. The spinoff’s first season was premiered in May of last year as a lead up to the main show’s Volume 4 premiere in October, so it seems that Rooster Teeth will be following this formula going forward of using the spinoff as an appetizer.

On The Rick Again

We still have no concrete news on the airdate of Rick and Morty‘s second Season 3 episode, “Rickmancing the Stone”, but Adult Swim is trying to keep the hype alive with a U.S. nationwide tour via a truck modeled after a drooling Rick on all fours (Adult Swim mentalities can take bets on why he’d be positioned like that). The truck will act as a traveling merchandise shop for Rick and Morty fans and will begin in Atlanta on May 11 before going up the East Coast, across the Midwest, down the West Coast, and make its way back to Atlanta by October. [Adult Swim]

In other Rick and Morty news, here’s Justin Roiland recording dialogue for the fourth episode of Season 3 after at least four shots of tequila.

https://www.facebook.com/adultswim/videos/10155114281641745/

Other News and Notes

• Variety teamed up with Nickelodeon to hold their third annual “10 Animators to Watch” event in Hollywood on Thursday. You can find the full list and short stories on their careers thus far on Variety‘s site. As for animators associated with Overly Animated properties, we have Kirsten Lepore, who was the director for Adventure Time‘s Annie-winning stop motion episode “Bad Jubies”, and Julia Pott, who was a writer for Adventure Time and is currently working on the recently greenlit series Summer Camp Island for Cartoon Network.
• In a Thursday conference call, Nickelodeon president Cyma Zarghami said that “there will definitely be another SpongeBob movie.” This project, which hadn’t been officially talked about until that call, would be the third film installment in the SpongeBob Squarepants franchise. Zarghami also said there is a film project in the works for The Loud House, although it was not explained whether this would be theatrical or made-for-TV. [Hollywood Reporter]
• NBCUniversal has announced that Sprout, its children’s programming network primarily aimed at preeschoolers, will be rebranded as Universal Kids by September 9 of this year. Under the rebranding, programming aimed at slightly older children will be aired after 6 PM. The network’s expected lineup includes the first television pickup for DreamWorks Dragons: Riders of Berk, the How To Train Your Dragon series that has previously been handled exclusively by Netflix. [Animation World Network]
• In a bizarre legal case, Jamye Gordon was sentenced to two years in prison for fraud and perjury. Gordon tried to convince the legal system that DreamWorks stole his character designs for the making of Kung Fu Panda in 2011 and forced the studio to deal with multi-year litigation. It was eventually found that Gordon was erasing evidence during the case, and it was discovered that the characters he claimed were his… were actually traced off of a Lion King coloring book from the 1990s. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. [Variety]
• And in this edition of Weird Animation of the Week, here’s Today‘s Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie reimagined as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic characters.