'The Midnight Gospel' Trailer: Netflix's Insane Acid Trip Of An Animated Series From The Creator Of 'Adventure Time'

Netflix has shown that it has set no limits for how imaginative and mature its animated series can go, giving its creators free reign to go as buckwild as possible. And Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward is definitely going buckwild with his new Netflix animated series The Midnight Gospel. The first official trailer for the animated series from Ward and his frequent collaborator Duncan Trussell is a cosmic acid trip released, fittingly, in April 2020 (get it, 4/20). Watch The Midnight Gospel trailer below.

Adventure Time was already a children's animated series unlike most others we'd seen before — so full of rich characters and (literal) candy-colored fantasy lands. But The Midnight Gospel makes Adventure Time look, fittingly, like child's play. Pendleton Ward's crazed, surreal potential has been unleashed with The Midnight Gospel, which looks like a delirious cross between Terry Gilliam and the Beatles' trippy Yellow Submarine, with a healthy heaping of acid thrown in.

While Cartoon Network allowed Ward to work his particular brand of offbeat magic with Adventure Time for nine seasons, it's clear that Ward was just itching to unleash his wildest project with Netflix, which has shown an affinity for envelope-pushing adult-oriented animated projects like BoJack Horseman, Tuca & Bertie, and Big Mouth.

The Midnight Gospel is so chock full of overwhelming eye-catching animation that you'd be forgiven for forgetting that this series probably has a plot. According to Netflix, that plot follows Clancy, "a space-caster who uses a multiverse simulator to interview beings living in other worlds – what he learns is the basis for The Midnight Gospel." The logline brings to mind the episodes of Adventure Time featuring the dream-hopping Cosmic Owl — some of the most surreal and dryly funny stories of the series — which feel like Ward was building up to The Midnight Gospel. It'll be exciting to see what Ward will do with this animated series without any restrictions holding him back.

Here is the synopsis for The Midnight Gospel:

Traversing trippy worlds inside his multiverse simulator, a space-caster explores existential questions about life, death and everything in between.

The Midnight Gospel debuts on Netflix April 20, 2020.