It took more than a year, but Glitch Productions’ Knights of Guinevere has released its second episode, “Wolves Around the Corner”, which went up on YouTube on 9 October. The long wait doesn’t seem to have cost it anything. Cartoon Brew reports around six million views on day one and nearly nine million by the end of day two, edging past the pilot’s eight million over the same stretch.
The setting is Park Planet, a planet-spanning amusement park floating in the clouds, whose mascot is an android princess called Guinevere. Andi and Frankie, two labourers, find her damaged and are promptly dragged into whatever is festering beneath the turnstiles. The show comes from Dana Terrace, creator of Disney’s The Owl House, with John Bailey Owen and Zach Marcus. So a former Disney showrunner has made a psychological thriller about a corporate theme park, a princess mascot and something rotten in the basement. Nobody need read anything into that, though naturally we all will.
Glitch is the Australian independent studio behind Murder Drones and The Amazing Digital Circus. It self-funds its shows and puts them out free on YouTube, treating the platform the way the BBC once treated Saturday teatime. Knights is its first 2D production. Terrace has said the aim is animation that looks beautiful while staying sustainable. In practice, that means a schedule closer to a quarterly journal than a series: episode three arrives on 22 January 2027 and episode four on 16 April, with eight in the season. Anyone who survived the gaps between series of Blake’s 7 will cope. At this rate the finale lands sometime in 2028, provided nobody at Park Planet pulls the plug first.
There’s also a short-term treat for anyone in Los Angeles. The Animation Is Film festival screens the first two episodes theatrically on 16 October. For perspective, Knights isn’t the biggest act in Glitch’s travelling show, since the second Digital Circus episode managed 30 million views in a single day. Even so, nine million in two days for a 2D indie with no broadcaster and no toy line is the kind of number that makes streaming executives close their office doors. The princess is awake. Since Michael Crichton’s Westworld in 1973, the only open question about any fictional theme park has been how long before something important breaks.
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