Much like Steven Universe and Craig of the Creek before it, the earliest episodes of Cartoon Network’s Summer Camp Island were short, sweet escapes into a land of wonder and magic, where the stresses of day-to-day life faded into the background. But like those other shows, as the series went on, it began to get deeper and more lore-intensive in the best way.
As Hedgehog (Oona Laurence) has become more focused on learning witchcraft from the camp’s witches, Summer Camp Island’s subtly gestured towards a major event in Susie’s (Julia Pott) past that not only turned her into the bully she is in the present day, but also fundamentally changed something about world’s relationship with magic.
Reluctant to be open about about her feelings as Susie’s always been, there’s only so much about the truth of her past that Hedgehog and her best friend Oscar (Antonio Corbo) have been able to deduce. But the first trailer for Summer Camp Island’s 12-episode third season promises that when the series returns, its pair of heroes are about to learn the truth of what went down as part of an adventure that takes them out of the comfort of their cabins and tosses them into the great unknown.
Up until this point, Summer Camp Island’s played rather coy about the origins of its witches and their magic, but the new trailer establishes that, at one point in time, the existence of magic users and their powers was widely known and accepted as part of society. But that’s not all we can expect — in its third season, Summer Camp Island’s purposefully digging deeper into the lives of not only its witches, but also its aliens and yetis as well, in a series of three multi-episode arcs, “Witches,” “Aliens,” and “Yetis” that kick off next month.
Summer Camp Island’s third season hits HBO Max on December 10. Stay tuned for where it’ll end up in Australia.