Hulu has released a trailer for their upcoming animatedCrossing Swordsseries. The new show hails fromRobot ChickenandSuperMansionproducers John Harvatine IV and Tom Root and it premieres this Friday, June 12th. It’s clear from the start that these specific Peg People toys, which are made for pre-school children, are strictly for adults only. Even the trailer is NSFW, so one has to wonder what is going to go on when the show debuts.
Crossing Swordsfocuses on Patrick, who is a good hearted peasant. He lands a coveted squire position at the royal castle, but his dream job quicklyturns into a nightmarewhen he learns his beloved kingdom is run by a hornet’s nest of horny monarchs, crooks and charlatans. Even worse, Patrick’s valor made him the black sheep in his family, and now his criminal siblings have returned to make his life hell.
TheCrossing Swordstrailer hints at all kinds ofNSFW content, including extreme bondage and a bunch of Peg People nudity. However, this new look at the series goes more into Patrick’s story and pulls back some of the fantasy tropes. The cast of the series includes Nicholas Hoult, Adam Ray, Tara Strong, Tony Hale, Luke Evans, Seth Green, Alanna Ubach, Adam Pally, Yvette Nicole Brown, Maya Erskine, Breckin Meyer, and Wendi McClendon-Covey.
In a new interview,Crossing Swordsco-creator Tom Root talked about the inspiration for theHulu show. Root and John Harvatine IV actually came up with the idea nearly a decade ago. “Harv was always captivated by the idea of Peg People as a puppet, just by how limited they were and how cute they were,” says Root. He went on and had this to say.
“Peg peopleas toys are really intended for preschoolers because they’re really simple. There’s nothing to break. And they make them so big now that you may’t swallow them. It’s the perfect toy! The look of them is really engaging. So we tried to think of what would be the perfect environment for peg people to run around in. And really we settled on a sword and sorcery fantasy environment. And from there, we tried to pick the kind of environment where you could envision a map full of playsets where our characters could go to a different playset every episode - and it would be really colorful and interesting to look at.”
Coming fromRobot Chicken, where everything was lampooned, one has to wonder if the fantasy elements and the simplicity of the characters was hard on the creation ofCrossing Swords. Tom Root says, “We’d never run out of places to go. A fantasy world seemed to be the best direction for that.” He adds, “I started drawing a map of the world on a dry erase board and adding to it, and that map stayed up for months and inspired us to keep working on this idea.”
From there, Tom Root and John Harvatine IV had a long wait before partnering with Hulu. While a lot of productions have been shut down since the beginning of the year,Crossing Swordswas lucky to have their stop-motion animation completed in the fall. Most of the work took place from last summer into the beginning of fall, so the whole season was able to be finish before the world turned upside down. You can watch the trailer forCrossing Swordsabove, thanks to theHulu YouTubechannel.
