More than six years ago, after six seasons and over two hundred episodes, The Amazing World of Gumball came to a sudden, tragic end, with a literal cliffhanger as recurring bad guy Rob trying to protect the town of Elmore from an oncoming, much foreshadowed great calamity that would bring about everyone’s doom. A movie was initially greenlit to resolve that cliffhanger, but…to this day has not yet materialized. Instead, a new season was greenlit instead as a spin-off, bringing back the characters many had missed all these years later in what is . The creator, Ben Bocquelet, still wants that movie to happen, and has written this new season as already having happened, so…I guess you just have to assume whatever bad thing happened at the end of the original show was resolved in a way that everything ended up exactly as the original show was, but apparently will be acknowledged in some way by the end of this season…which these first twenty episodes are only the first half of. And if you don’t really know what to make of all of that, the only detail you really have to remember is that we have more Gumball episodes! It’s pretty much exactly the same show you remember! But is that good news or bad?Well, if you’re like me, and I know I am, you probably enjoyed the original Gumball show and are plenty nostalgic for the pre-pandemic era, then you’re probably going to like this new season. Unlike other revivals, like the recent King of the Hill season, there’s no time skip or aging up of the characters (though there is a reference to the long time between seasons at the beginning, but time will tell if that is meant to be a lampshade, a foreshadowing to something that happens in the planned movie, or both). Everyone’s pretty much exactly where they left off at the end of the last show, which is easy to do since the last show didn’t end with anything that seemed to have any lasting effects on anyone. That’s not to say some things aren’t continuing to move forward, such as Gumball’s continuing and progressing relationship with his longtime girlfriend Penny (who is incidentally also voiced by the same actor that plays Gumball’s mom, but don’t think about that too hard). But for the most part, these are just more episodes of the show you watched six years ago, so whether you liked those or not will determine if you enjoy seeing more of the same being made in this decade.It’s also worth mentioning, as this review title states, that this is only the first half of the season, as it seems is Hulu’s policy in releasing specifically seasons of revived cartoons. Though again, releasing the rest is not likely to change minds either way on what they think about the show. As for me, I quite enjoyed seeing more of this cast, and the continued look back at Cartoon Network’s best shows of the 2010’s like how Adventure Time has the Fionna and Cake show, the upcoming Steven Universe spin-off Lars of the Stars, and the rumblings of more Regular Show (although I am still sore about how Close Enough got screwed over). And maybe if these new Gumball episodes are successful enough by whatever metrics Hulu uses, we’ll finally get that much anticipated movie that can resolve that still monumental cliffhanger we got stuck on all the way back in the year of our lord 2019. And if not, and the remaining twenty episodes are all we’re going to get, then it was worth it to even get that much again. For now, we’ll wait and see how these land with both new and old viewers alike and let the chips fall where they may.