Wander Over Yonder is a simple Disney animated TV show about a pair of alien friends – Wander and Sylvia – that travel the galaxy to see the sights and do good deeds. This happens to also really annoy Lord Hater, a skeleton with an eyeball army that wants to conquer said galaxy for clout.
The 2013 show shares its creator, Craig McCracken, with The Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Unfortunately, in spite of winning awards and praise, especially later in the show's lifetime, it was eventually kicked from Disney Channel onto the less popular Disney XD, then cancelled/not renewed in 2016 after its second season despite pitches being made for at least a final third. McCracken would go on to make another well-received show, Kid Cosmic, and fans were left to ineffectively petition the world's biggest entertainment conglomerate to renew a dinky little cartoon about friendship in space.
Objectively, this show isn't high art, especially with the amazing animated shows we have today, but it had a lot of heart, made me smile when I was a kid, and I remain really nostalgic for it. The message was sweet and I loved the villain characters a lot. If I hadn't gotten weirdly obsessed with it, there are probably a lot of things I'd be doing differently right now, both online and as an artist. It was very inspirational for me!
This section discusses real and fictional animal harm, including experimentation and death, and is probably of little interest unless you're as normal about this show as I am.
In "The Waste of Time", a slideshow of images from previous episodes includes a shot of what appears to be an Earth primate in American astronautical uniform. He doesn't look happy, and his helment seems to have been chipped. This character was completely new, and the scene didn't match anything seen in earlier episodes.
Additionally, in the end credits of the Season 2/series finale, "The End of the Galaxy". After Lord Dominator has her a tantrum over a fruit, the camera pans down to reveal the wreckage of an Earthly NASA-style space capsule. It sparks with green lightning, and audio plays of a monkey screeching, overlaid with Lord Hater's laughter.
Then the show ends. You get nothing else! Starve.
Now, (un)fortunately, I've got all the right chemical imbalances to think figuring out this issue is worth my time. I've compiled what information I can across various Tumblr blogs from official members of the show's crew, and I will be linking to these posts as I unravel the threads we've got.
Officially, this character's name is Monkeyboy, and he was going to play a "big part" in the show's third season. In addition, he was connected to more than one of the main characters in a big way.
Not much could be said on the third season at the time, apparently. What we do know is that the central arc would've been a threat that "challenged" Wander more than even Dominator, "something worse than a bully". However, the main threat was not a villain, but both a character and "some other form of threat".
It also seems there would also be three new main bad guys they wanted to explore, and there would be an arc in which Peepers was tempted by the "dark(er)" side, though these latter details will not be of major discussion on this page.
Additionally, according to a much more recent panel, the main pitch for the third season of the show was that, after the destruction of the second, the entire cast decides to patch up a ship and travel around the galaxy getting people home. This would've cut production costs while also forcing all the characters to interact. This is corroborated by how apparently it was more about dealing with a new status quo. In the panel, "Hater's origin" is also explicitly mentioned as something that would've also been explored, again something corroborated by a Tumblr post. Hater's origins seem to be something the writers really wanted to explore, because an ask requesting a movie pitch had a similar response.
There was a deleted scene in "The Waste of Time" in which Wander and Sylvia run into a teenage Hater and Peepers. It was "cut early on for time"... and, according to Craig, "because "Hater" and Peepers didn’t know each other as teenagers". The use of quotation marks implies that "Lord Hater" is a recent title, and that this character was known as someone else at one point. Other posts from Craig are a lot more blatant: "Remember, characters go by many names in this series." "Are you really sure Frank debunked [the theory]?"
Curiously, Dave Thomas answered "Who did you guys plan to voice Monkey-Boy?" with, "The laugh in the end credit sequence was Keith Ferguson," or Lord Hater's VA. In addition, Frank Angones could not discuss whether or not the third season would include Earth/humans and how old Hater is. Craig also shared in anecdote in which he remembers suggesting the Regular Show writers not go forward with a humans-as-zoo-animals gag in case they want to include humans later, which isn't the best receipt, I'll admit, but it suggests he had humans on the mind.
If you're on this page, I'll assume you're familiar with the most common theory in Wander Over Yonder fanon: Lord Hater and Monkeyboy were the same person.
It seems that Monkeyboy was an ape from Earth sent into space, seemingly by an American space agency, that later encountered an accident, perhaps even a fatal one. (It's worth noting that – while there were a lot of monkeys and primates sent into space prior to improved regulations on animal testing during the Space Race, often with disasterous consequences – there are no known cases of a monkey being lost in deep space; most incidents were due to mechanical failure, and they were always within Earth's orbit.) The majority of people believe he then became Lord Hater somehow, resurrected via space magic and/or advanced alien science. This seems to have some merit based on Hater's hunched stature and the way Monkeyboy's face has the same shape as his.
There are, however, some people who believe otherwise. I'll admit, it's a very ambitious and dark turn for a colorful Disney cartoon to make, but I am willing to entertain other theories. One I have seen suggests that Hater was also a monkey, but not necessarily Monkeyboy himself, or that they at least crossed paths in the past, and that Monkeyboy would return and be the "previous best friend" mentioned by Frank in his hypothetical Wander Over Yonder movie.
There is, however, a thread left hanging. Frank said Monkeyboy was connected to more than one of the main characters. If so, who could this possibly be? I can imagine a scenario for each of the remaining three. Hell, who's to say it isn't all of them?
Regardless, it's almost certain that Monkeyboy and Lord Hater have a major connection, and that this connection is integral enough to the character that the show's writers desperately want to explore it. For us, it's a matter of figuring out what the nature of it is. Personally, as a major fan of things coming back changed and wrong, I ascribe to the Monkeyboy = Hater crowd, but I invite you to draw your own conclusions. The implications are fascinating on their own.
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