In 2020 at the height of the pandemic, my daughter Dev and I had a nightly ritual. Dev was just 13 at the time. After my wife Tracy went to bed we would watch an hour or so of Adventure Time. Adventure Time is an animated series created by Pendleton Ward. It aired originally on the Cartoon Network from 2010 to 2018. Recently Max has produced new series that act as codas and spinoffs from the original. I was aware of Adventure Time as it was happening but I never watched it. I still remember the glowing review in The New York Times by James Poniewozick. He described it as a masterpiece of television. Dev had watched it already with friends.She wanted to introduce me. So, in the hot, fevered height of the pandemic we would nightly consume big gulps of Adventure Time. The main title theme and especially the closing song “Islands (Come Along With Me)” still hits a very tender spot. It was a sweet space that we occupied together. It just takes that theme and we’re back.
At first, Adventure Time seems like a saccharine and noisy entry into the crowded field of kids’ cartoons. But where most animated series feature voice actors who seem to have drunk too much Red Bull and record their lines while yelling into a wind machine, Adventure Time plays it downbeat and wry. Jeremy Shada who voices Finn the Human speaks like a normal kid. He even gets to let his voice change in real time as Finn grows up. The music (there are many songs) is funny, heartfelt, ironic and wide ranging. Each episode clocks in at about ten minutes. You might think you were watching something like My Little Pony (also much smarter than you would think) or any throw away series on Nickelodeon. You get lulled into a story that deepens organically, that maintains its narrative thread all while taking creative risks and seemingly fruitless narrative side paths. Adventure Time manages to be much more emotionally resonant than any gritty, dark so called realistic series.
The thing that struck me most about Adventure Time is that structurally it felt like oral storytelling. Before stories were run through the diagnostic ringer of social scientists and literary criticism they were agile and wild. Take Coyote stories from Indigenous cultures of the United States. They often begin “Coyote was walking along…” There is no pretext or backstory. They aren’t just-so stories or allegories , though they might contain elements of those. We meet Coyote walking along. What follows is usually some fool’s adventure as he tries to satiate some hunger or lust. Absurdity unfurls from there. Sometimes the story ends with the creation of the stars or just a story about not being foolish like Coyote. Oral cultures told stories episodically. The teller had the bones of the story: the images that are told in the right order. The flesh and muscle of that story was up to the teller. There was room for riffs and switchbacks to occur. It is not a lack of narrative sophistication. Quite the opposite. There is an implicit trust in the story. Adventure Time has that in spades.
So what is Adventure Time about? In essence, it is the adventures of Finn the Human; the last human boy in the land of Oo and his adopted brother Jake the Dog; a stretchy, magic, gravelly voiced yellow dog. At first the setup is your basic fairy tale structure. Finn who is twelve years old is the hero to The Candy Kingdom overseen by the benevolent scientific genius Princess Bubblegum. Finn has a massive crush on the Princess. The Candy Kingdom is comprised of sentient candy people. The biggest threat is the lasciviously creepy Ice King. Ice King, voiced by Tom Kenny, has a habit of capturing princesses, caging them and trying to coerce them into marrying him. He is awful and pathetic. There are several other princesses including the vain and self-deluding Lumpy Space Princess and the soft voiced slug like Slime Princess. What at first seems to be a candy-colored fantasy land emerges as the future of our own apocalyptic destruction. It’s all standard stuff but gets wobbly pretty quickly. Unlike the Disney template or other depressingly bland takes on folk materials it doesn’t rely on cheap irony or over seriousness.
As the show progresses we meet other characters such as Jake and Finn’s roommate BiMo, a small sweet sentient gaming device, Billy the hero voiced by Lou Ferrigno and Marceline the Vampire Queen. Marceline first appears as a standard antagonist but soon becomes a friend. Marceline, like Princess Bubblegum is thousands of years old. Slowly it is revealed that Marceline was a little girl just after the first wave of destruction. Her father is the leader of the Nightosphere a hell-like dimension. Her mother dies trying to protect her. She falls under the care of Simon, a kind academic who is in the process of falling under the spell of the Ice King’s crown. Part of this reveal comes during a particularly poignant (I dare you to keep your eyes dry) episode. Marceline is trying to remind the Ice King of his past and who he truly is. They are jamming (Marceline has a bass that is a literal ax). Her frustration mounts as she tries to jar Simon’s memory but the Ice King is oblivious. Adventure Time uses its post-apocalyptic setting to explore trauma, healing and emotional growth.
None of this sacrifices the humor; some of which is literal fart jokes to more sophisticated word play or the adventure fun from the title. It does quickly retool the hero/princess premise through narrative alchemy. It is an astute deconstruction of the hero myth while offering a real alternative. Kindness, queerness, humility are the real power source of Adventure Time. Finn begins to realize that just smashing monsters isn’t the best way to go about things. He becomes more likely to try to reason with or understand those he meets. Princess Bubblegum is revealed to be morally complex. Her insistence on control and refusal to admit being wrong forces her to make some dubious decisions. There are profound meditations on growing up. In one episode, Finn, Jake and BiMO create a massive pillow fort; a fairly typical goofing around premise. Finn goes so deep into the pillow fort he ends up in a pillow universe. He meets a young pillow woman, falls in love, marries and has children. Finn raises the children, grows old and dies. At the moment of his death in the other universe he reappears in his own moment. Jake and BiMO haven’t felt any passage of time. Finn however is haunted by the memory of a fully lived life. And then forgets it. We the viewers don’t get to forget.
Adventure Time is full of references and homages. It takes a lot of structural storytelling from video games. Mythic references abound. There is a full on Gawain and the Green Knight episode. The biggest homage is one that hit me full on while watching it. Finn is Kamandi: the Last Boy on Earth. Kamandi was created in the early seventies for DC Comics by Jack Kirby after he saw The Planet of the Apes. In typical Jack Kirby fashion, he took the bones of the idea and ran with it. Kirby told stories with serial bravado. Like Finn, Kamandi has flowing blond hair and sky blue shorts. He is the last of the human race (or so he thinks). He occupies a future Earth on whose bones sits a patchwork of empires controlled by humanoid animals. He even has a companion named Dr. Canus who is a dog physician. Kirby created comics for monthly consumption. As when you tell a story to your child with an idea of getting them to sleep, as it grows night after night it moves forward with its own volition. After each nightly installment, the story’s own logic becomes apparent.
In this short essay, I did not do justice to the beauty and complexity of Adventure Time. It’s not often that something this magical comes into being. Like an epic told over the winter months around the fire or Ice King’s fan fiction “Fiona and Cake” that gender bends the Adventure Time universe, something more than professionalism exists. Pendelton Ward and the team he worked with (a team that includes Rebecca Sugar who created Steven Universe and Patrick McHale creator of Over the Garden Wall) seemed to receive a transmission from some other dimension. They understood the medium and the context of Cartoon Network, but they fashioned something much bigger. Like all great stories it now lives it’s own full life.