Defying the fact that there’s nothing more brutal than a long-running show getting canceled just before its planned finale, Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small is crusading to win his series the ending it deserves. Working with music video game Rocksmith—in what may be the first instance of a “Save Our Show!” campaign with sponsored support—Small has spent the last month running “Metalocalypse Now,” an attempt to rally the show’s fans to convince Adult Swim and Hulu to co-finance Metalocalypse: The Army Of The Doomstar: The Final Chapter.
Now in its final week, the core of the push is a Change.org petition, begging Hulu to air the planned mini-series. (That’s the subtext, anyway, as the actual petition, addressed to both companies, just says “Metalocalypse Now.”) Small originally brought the proposal for the grand finale to Adult Swim on its own, but says the network rejected it for being too expensive.
The cynical might point out that the Metalocalypse team already had a perfectly good opportunity to give their show a proper send-off—2013’s musical special The Doomstar Requiem—and instead spent their run-time screwing around with a bunch of meandering half-plots and overindulging in the show’s musical side. Then the cynical hopefully remembered that the grand finale might bring back Werner Herzog—whose character is dead, but it’s not like that matters—to spout more black-metal-inspired eschatological exposition, and maybe decided they could cut Small a little slack.
Anyway, if you’re interested in helping to bring the show to its glorious, crashing crescendo, you can head over to the site. Read the manifesto—a term that always denotes a movement with good things in its future—engage on social media, and, if you want, send some guitar picks to the people over at Hulu. (As Small tongue-in-cheekily notes, in a nice reminder that Metalocalypse is also a comedy, under all the Sturm Und Drang, “They can’t ignore thousands of guitar picks!”)