When I first sat down to see what Hulu and Disney+ were doing with The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball, I honestly didn’t expect to watch all 20 episodes of the first season. But I did. Every single one of them. I can’t say I remember every episode perfectly because I watched them over a stretch of time instead of binging the whole thing in one sitting, but next season I’ll probably do exactly that. At only about 11 minutes per episode, you’re really looking at around three and a half to four hours for the entire season, which makes for a pretty easy marathon.
I also came into this completely cold. I never watched the original The Amazing World of Gumball, which aired on Cartoon Network from 2011 through 2019 and ran for well over 200 episodes. I knew it had a passionate fanbase because otherwise it wouldn’t be getting revived, but it simply wasn’t something I followed. I caught bits and pieces of Cartoon Network shows over the years while channel surfing. I’d seen a little Adventure Time, a little Regular Show, but Gumball somehow escaped me.
If you’re wondering whether this is something your kids would enjoy, or whether it’s worth watching as an adult, the answer to both is yes. The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball is basically an animated acid trip where the rules of reality never apply. Anything can happen at any moment, and the show fully embraces that chaos. Gumball is a blue cat living with his cat mother Nicole, his rabbit father Richard, his rabbit sister Anais, and Darwin, who started life as the family’s pet goldfish before growing legs and eventually becoming Gumball’s adopted brother. That’s just the starting point, and somehow it only gets stranger from there.
Every episode seems determined to outdo the last in terms of sheer absurdity. One story revolves around a crush involving a demon that escalates into increasingly bizarre territory before ending with Gumball and Darwin kissing while one of them is possessed. Another has Gumball and Darwin practically fumigating the neighborhood with body spray while remaining completely oblivious as everything around them falls apart. Then there’s an episode near the end of the season where Gumball has problems during gym class that somehow conclude with him running around completely naked while conquering obstacle courses and climbing walls. Moments like these are so unexpected that I spent half the series wondering what I was going to see next.
Seriously, I have a feeling this show would be incredible to watch while high. Even in a television landscape full of surreal adult animation, Gumball often feels less grounded than shows specifically made for grown-ups. I could absolutely picture this airing during Adult Swim and nobody questioning it. Despite technically being a children’s cartoon, there’s very little about its style of humor that feels aimed exclusively at kids. It’s broad, random, relentlessly creative, and completely unconcerned with making conventional sense.
If you’re hearing words like acid trip and fever dream and thinking, “But is this even right for my kids?” of course it is. Are you kidding? The stuff I watched growing up was bizarre. Maybe not quite at the frenetic pace of The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball, but Rocko’s Modern Life certainly had its moments. Ren & Stimpy was complete nonsense. We even had Tales from the Cryptkeeper on Saturday mornings in the ‘90s, which sounds ridiculous today, and kids in the ‘80s got an animated Rambo series. In the grand scheme of what gets branded as children’s programming, Gumball isn’t nearly as shocking as it might seem at first glance.
It’s really only been in more recent years, especially after the success of Adult Swim, that we’ve started drawing harder lines between animation for kids and animation for adults. Ironically, a lot of those early Adult Swim shows are fairly tame compared to what exists today. Gumball works because it isn’t overly crude or sexual. Nobody’s dropping F-bombs every other sentence, the kids aren’t stepping outside to smoke pot, and it’s never trying to be edgy simply for the sake of it. Kids can absolutely enjoy the nonstop chaos, while adults can appreciate just how wildly creative the writing gets.
Another standout is the audio description, produced by Deluxe, and narrated by Darren Rivets. This is one of those shows where a human narrator makes all the difference. The narrator has exactly the kind of warm, inviting voice that fits children’s and family programming, and because the show is so wonderfully weird, there’s constantly something bizarre happening on screen that needs to be described. The writers pack as much information into the descriptions as they reasonably can, making it easy to follow all the visual insanity. There is a bit of an expectation that you already know these characters, so there aren’t lengthy physical descriptions at the beginning, but I don’t really fault the production for that. These are established characters. If someone is just now discovering SpongeBob after 20-plus years, it’s not really the narrator’s job to explain what SpongeBob looks like. It’s up to me to do a little homework, and I did.
The biggest surprise for me is that I actually want to keep watching this. I started it almost as a lark, never believing it would become something I’d genuinely look forward to. But with every episode it became clearer that this absolutely works for a grown-ass man who enjoys adult animated comedies. Then again, I also watch everything from children’s cartoons to horror movies, indie dramas, reality television, and just about everything in between, so maybe it isn’t all that surprising that this found a place in my rotation.
What is surprising is how enthusiastically I can recommend it. Don’t write it off because you assume it’s only for kids. If you’ve ever wanted to watch a show that feels like a fever dream, an acid trip, a sandbox where reality has simply given up, or maybe all three at once, The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball is absolutely worth your time. I honestly don’t know how the writers come up with some of these ideas while completely sober. If they do, then they’re mad geniuses. Either way, The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball lives up to its name. It’s broad in who it reaches, fearless in how strange it’s willing to become, and wonderfully, utterly weird in all the best ways.
Fresh: 8.3/10
