General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Crossing Swords

Crossing Swords is an American adult stop-motion animated comedy series created by John Harvatine IV and Tom Root for the streaming service Hulu, in which a goodhearted peasant named Patrick becomes a royal squire and discovers that his kingdom is run by corrupt monarchs, crooks, and charlatans.¹^•² The characters are wooden peg people, round-headed figures with no arms or legs, animated in stop motion and voiced by a cast including Nicholas Hoult, Luke Evans, Alanna Ubach, Adam Pally, Tara Strong, Tony Hale, Seth Green, and Breckin Meyer.¹ The series ran for two seasons of ten episodes each on Hulu, from June 12, 2020 to December 10, 2021, and was then canceled.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Format	Adult stop-motion animated comedy using peg people characters; TV-MA rated, about 23 minutes per episode¹^•⁵
Creators	John Harvatine IV and Tom Root, executive producers of Robot Chicken¹
Production	Stoopid Buddy Stoodios and Sony Pictures Television⁴
Run	Season 1 premiered June 12, 2020; season 2 premiered December 10, 2021; 20 episodes total³^•⁶
Cancellation	Announced by Harvatine IV on Instagram in June 2022, after two seasons⁴
Main cast	Nicholas Hoult (Patrick), Luke Evans (King Merriman), Alanna Ubach (Queen Tulip), Adam Pally (Broth), Seth Green (Blinkerquartz)⁷^•⁶
Reception	IMDb 6.8/10 from about 2,000 votes; Rotten Tomatoes 27%⁵

Spoilers

Premise and characters

Patrick, voiced by Nicholas Hoult, is a goodhearted peasant who lands his dream job as a squire at the royal castle, only to find the court is a nest of lusty monarchs, crooks, and charlatans; war, murder, and full-frontal nudity follow.² His valor made him the black sheep of his family, and his criminal siblings, the pirate Coral (Tara Strong) and the bandit Ruben (Adam Ray), return to make his life difficult.⁷^•⁸ Other characters include the volatile King Merriman (Luke Evans), the promiscuous Queen Tulip (Alanna Ubach), Patrick's best friend and fellow knight Broth (Adam Pally), the trainer of the knights Sgt. Meghan (Yvette Nicole Brown), the castle wizard Blinkerquartz (Seth Green), and Princess Blossom (Maya Erskine).⁶^•⁵

Season 1 follows Patrick learning that his aspirations are nowhere close to reality; season 2, according to Tom Root, is about him learning to exist in the world he has found himself in and being more realistic about it.⁹ In the second season the now-broke kingdom tries to return to financial glory while Patrick faces bloodthirsty leprechauns, an island of killer monkeys, and a shadowy villain, and a former king moves to hijack the throne from Merriman.⁶^•¹⁰

Origin and style

The show's look came before its story. Root and Harvatine knew they wanted a series that looked like the wooden peg people toys of their childhood, figures differentiated only by their paint job, and found it funny to take such a limited puppet and shoot it in a cinematic way while telling adult stories.¹ Root described the pitch as imagining Game of Thrones made with very cute preschool toys, with the nudity, language, and violence that required a streaming platform rather than broadcast television.¹

The genesis was a desk toy. When Stoopid Buddy Stoodios was founded about ten years before the show, Harvatine painted peg people as the Ghostbusters along with an Ecto-1, kept making peg-person race cars for a Pinewood Derby-type event, and Root decided the studio, already producing Robot Chicken, SuperMansion, and Marvel's M.O.D.O.K., should build a peg-person series.⁶ The creators and the Robot Chicken team drew a map of fantastic lands on a whiteboard before the story existed, and Seth Green compared the map's role in planning the show to the way Game of Thrones unfolded its territories.⁹^•⁶

Production

Each episode takes about a year from start to finish, with the first part of the year devoted to writing and design.¹ The studio runs about 30 stages with about 20 animators, each producing about 10 seconds of finished animation per day, so five or six days of animation yields one episode under optimal conditions, though stage changes and lighting slow the process.¹ Root noted that ten episodes can be made in about a year, and that a larger episode order would strain that capacity.¹

The animators function as half the acting. Root said the voice actors are one half and the animators, who physically perform the characters on the stages, are the other, and the studio hires animators who make material funnier.⁹ Because stop motion at 30 frames per second must be timed precisely to the audio track before visuals begin, much of the comedy is baked in before the animators receive it, with limited latitude to improvise.⁹ For season 2 the team pushed toward practical, in-camera effects using materials such as fiber-fill and hot glue, and used motion-control rigs for more dynamic cinematography.¹¹ During the COVID-19 pandemic the writing, designs, storyboards, and animatics were done remotely, with plans to spread the on-stage crew out so animators worked alone in curtained 10-by-10-foot stages.¹

Reception and cancellation

The series holds a 6.8/10 rating on IMDb from about 2,000 users and a 27% score on Rotten Tomatoes, against a JustWatch rating of 43%.⁵ Root said early viewer reaction was enthusiastic, judging in part by the volume of fan art the show generated, which Robot Chicken, with fewer recurring characters, had not produced.¹ Cast member Yvette Nicole Brown attributed the show's appeal to taking a familiar childhood animation style and making it completely adult.⁶

In June 2022 Harvatine IV announced on Instagram that Hulu had officially canceled the series after two seasons, thanking Hulu, Sony, and the crew for the show about characters "with wooden veins and everything."⁴ The series remains available on Hulu, with digital purchase options on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Animated television series (individual series) › Adult animated comedy series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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