When does Adventure Time: Side Quests take place? Finn's new voice actor is the biggest clue
Cartoon Network dropped 20 new episodes into a universe that already spans a thousand years and two separate spin-offs, and never once put a date on screen. The answer is sitting in the credits.
Jeremy Shada is not voicing Finn. Sasha Knight is — a kid, playing a kid, in a role Shada first took in 2010 when he was 12 himself and held through the original run, the movies, and Fionna and Cake, by which point he was voicing a 29-year-old man. Swapping in a child actor is the production telling you which Finn this is before a single episode plays.
The stretch of the timeline it occupies
Side Quests runs parallel to seasons 1 and 2 of the original series. Finn is 12. Jake is around 28 in magical dog years. Those are the exact ages they were when Adventure Time premiered on Cartoon Network in 2010, which makes this a companion piece rather than a prequel in the strict sense — the episodes slot into gaps between existing ones rather than leading up to them.
That places it well before every complication the original show spent ten seasons accumulating:
- No grass sword, no mechanical arm — Finn still has both original arms and a basic sword.
- No Flame Princess, no Huntress Wizard — the romantic subplots haven't started.
- Ice King is still just Ice King — the Simon Petrikov reveal is seasons away.
- No Lich, no Farmworld, no multiverse — the mythology hasn't been laid down yet.
- BMO, Princess Bubblegum, and Marceline — present, with Niki Yang, Hynden Walch, and Olivia Olson all returning.
John DiMaggio also returns as Jake, which is the other half of the casting clue. Jake doesn't age visibly across the franchise. Finn does. So the one role that had to change is the one that changed.
How many seasons will Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation have?
How far that is from Fionna and Cake
Fionna and Cake, which ran in 2023, is set after the original series ended and features Finn at 29. Working backward from that, Side Quests takes place roughly seventeen years earlier in story time. The two shows are in the same canon and share almost nothing in tone.
Twenty standalone episodes, no arc, no stakes carried over from last week. That was the pitch, and it's also the timeline placement.
Showrunner Nate Cash, who developed the series and executive produces alongside Fred Seibert and Sam Register, described the process in comparable terms.
"Making Side Quests felt like making the original Adventure Time, which felt like hanging out with art school buddies," Cash said in 2026.
Why the early seasons specifically
The original show got denser every year — serialized, emotionally heavier, increasingly interested in what the apocalypse did to everyone. Setting a new series in seasons 1 and 2 territory buys the writers a version of Ooo where a wizard can steal a hat and that's the whole episode. Victor Courtright and Niki Yang direct; Darrick Bachman is story editor; Matthew Janszen scores; The Moldy Peaches perform the theme, which is its own callback — Ashley Parker Angel sang the original.
For the record: the series premiered June 29, 2026 on Disney+ and Hulu in the US, then rolled out internationally on Cartoon Network and HBO Max on October 5, 2026. Same show, two very different release maps, which is its own kind of timeline problem.
Previously we wrote: Dark Matter: how many Jasons are there? The count, season by season
