Earthworm Jim Is Coming Back To TV
You read the title correctly — the universe’s coolest earthworm is coming back to our galaxy — and we don’t mean another video game. We mean a new TV series!
The backstory: After blowing everyone away with groundbreaking animation graphics in the Sega Genesis version of Aladdin, Interplay wanted to take the same technology to do something radically different — and about as un-Disney as possible. One year later they debuted Earthworm Jim on Genesis — a completely insane comedy game about a worm who happens upon a giant muscular suit and has to immediately use it to save a bug princess (literally named “What’s Her Name”) from an evil space queen. Jim journeyed through several planets on the way there and battled bosses with names like Evil The Cat, Professor Monkey For A Head and Bob The Killer Goldfish.
The Earthworm Jim game was so cartoonlike as it was, it made perfect sense to turn it into a real cartoon — so the EWJ TV series premiered on the launch day of Kids WB. It lasted two seasons and 23 episodes, and was just as funny as the game. I wouldn’t know where to find it these days, but it had a DVD release in Canada ten years ago.
We’re all for another Jim cartoon, but what’ll it be about? This one seems to use a different canon from the games or the first show. According to the concept art, Jim is still journeying through space, but he’s doing it with two other worms and a giant bull, and Peter Puppy is nowhere to be seen. And while the original Jim’s goal was to save the universe (repeatedly), this Jim is just trying to find Earth.
So, elephant in the room: Jim’s creator, Doug TenNapel, has proven himself in recent years to be, to put it lightly, a friggin’ bigot. Because of this, Interplay has to make it a point to mention that “Doug has no involvement in this new series.” Instead, relative unknown K. Michel Parandi has been hired to showrun the new Earthworm Jim cartoon, and a company called Passion Pictures will be producing.
The new Earthworm Jim cartoon currently has no release date or destination for that matter (we presume some streaming service will get it). Groovy!