Good news for fans of Justin Roiland and Mike McMahan’s surreal, hilarious, occasionally gruesome sci-fi comedy Solar Opposites: its animated aliens will be back for even more hijinks. At yesterday’s San Diego Comic-Con panel, it was announced that the series — which just dropped its third season, and was already greenlit for a fourth — will be getting its very own Halloween special, with even more holiday specials in the works.
It’s titled “A Sinister Halloween Scary Opposites Solar Special” and is arriving “this fall,” according to a Hulu press release. SDCC panel attendees saw a brief clip from the special; it featured Tales From the Crypt star John Kassir having a goofy good time riffing on his famous Crypt Keeper character. Fans of Solar Opposites will, of course, recall that Korvo — voiced by Roiland — is no fan of Halloween; in season one, a search to find the place that would stress him out the absolute most led him straight to a year-round Halloween store.
That’s a theme in the special, according to executive producer Josh Bycel, who also explained why the Solar Opposites aliens are so well-suited to holiday specials — including one themed around an as-yet-unnamed holiday that’ll be part of season four. “I think one of the things is that holiday specials are so ubiquitous in pop culture,” he told Gizmodo in a San Diego Comic-Con interview. “And I think our characters, especially Terry [voiced by Thomas Middleditch] and Jesse [Mary Mack], love pop culture and human culture so much. With the Christmas special and the Halloween special and then the one we’re doing next year, they’re not jaded by having seen so many specials. And I love that about our characters: it’s so much easier to put them in a special because they’re so new to all of it.”
McMahan added, “Also, nobody ever asks us to do these specials. We just like TV. So one day I called Hulu and I was like, ‘Can we just do a Christmas special?’ And they were like, ‘OK.’ And we’re like, [evil laugh] ‘Ha ha ha!’ I love [The Simpsons’] ‘Treehouse of Horror’ — I love that the first episode of The Simpsons was a Christmas special. I think that it gave us a new sandbox to get to play in that just felt so perfect because none of these aliens grew up doing it, you know? Every time we do a holiday special, it’s almost a little bit of being like, we’re going to do it, it’s going to be sincere, but it’s also going to be ludicrous. And since nobody was asking for it, whatever we are delighted in is what we’re going to get to do.”
Fans of the show know that season three ended on a very uneasy cliffhanger, something co-creator McMahan told Gizmodo during a separate Solar Opposites press day earlier this month was all part of the show’s grand design. But even with all that Solar real estate, including the just-announced Halloween special, the creative team is still bursting with ideas, and are hoping for many more installments to come.
“It’ll be a tragic day when we get cancelled, because whenever we get cancelled, five seasons worth of plot will be left on the table,” he said. “When we’re breaking these long dramatic stories [between seasons], we are just assuming we’re going to go forever and writing it up to that, because I think that it’s more valuable. If we get cancelled and we don’t get to finish these stories, that will be sad. But if we don’t get cancelled and we get to do a bunch, you’ll get to see a story play out in an animated show over five or six or seven seasons — nobody’s ever done that before in this type of show. [Gambling on the fact that] we’re going to keep getting picked up is worth the risk of doing that. And, and I guess if — hey, Hulu people, don’t cancel us! But also, if you do, pick us up for a series of movies like Farscape did where they wrapped everything up. I just want the show to be the best it can be and not feel like we’re hedging our bets, you know what I mean? Like, it should feel like, ‘holy crap, I can’t believe they did that. I hope there’s another season.’”
Solar Opposites features the voices of Justin Roiland, Thomas Middleditch, Sean Giambrone, and Mary Mack. Seasons 1-3 are now streaming on Hulu.
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