It’s Adventure Time!
Screen shot of opening sequence – Pendleton Ward
Have you ever gotten high? No? Don’t live in Washington or Colorado and want to try it out? Now you can! For just $19.99 on Amazon.com, you too can purchase the first season of Adventure Time and experience what it’s like to have the fundamental principles of reality break down around you!
Seriously, this show is WEIRD. It revolves around a pair of friends – Finn, a young boy who seemingly stretches his underwear up and over his head, and his older brother Jake, a shape-changing dog. They are probably the most normal characters you see on the show at all. The rest of the land, called Ooo, is made up of personified animated candy, animals, and other ordinary objects that have become sentient.
Much like the name implies, the show mostly involves Finn and Jake going on various quests and adventures to help the people they know, or just because they’re bored. Along the way various insane things happen, such as crystal apples, zombie candy, or an animated independant heart. The entire show plays out like a stream of consciousness dream, where sudden unrelated ideas link in front of you to take on a new and strange form. The effect is unsettling at times, but also enjoyable.
It’s sometimes distracting that Jake the dog is voiced by the wonderful John DiMaggio, or as you may know him better, Bender from Futurama. The voice of the character is nearly identical to the Bender voice, simply a bit more relaxed and natural. It often makes me wonder when Fry is going to show up.
Though the show starts off as a simple mind-bending exercise in silliness, over time it begins to build out a startlingly sad mythology. In the same way that the creators of the Venture Bros. seem unable to resist adding depth to their ridiculous show, Adventure Time builds out its world slowly but steadily in the background. The setting takes place 1,000 years in our future, after World War 3, referred to in the show as the Mushroom War. References to our world lie scattered around nearly every episode, and lately have begun to figure prominently in the main plots of episodes. The main villain of the series, for instance, the Ice King, is revealed to have been a regular guy before the war who was driven insane and granted magical powers by what happened.
This creates a parallax between the surface ridiculousness and the serious underpinnings that have created this fantasy. That’s not something a lot of other shows can do well (Avatar: The Last Airbender springs to mind). On its outer layers, the show simply exists to make you laugh in the same way that Family Guy does – by showing you unexpected and bizarre things. However, when you dig deeper, you find a serious current of thought that makes you really think about what’s happening in the show, and what it means when set against the backdrop of nuclear war. I don’t know if the creators intended this deeper level, or if it’s something I’m adding wholesale with my complete and utter inability to just take things as they are and not read into them. Either way, it adds a lot to the show for me.
The best part about the show, however, is that it’s accessible to many people of all ages for completely different reasons. There is an excellent balance of adult and juvenile humor that makes it an excellent show for nerds with kids. The kids love the bright cartoony nature of the show, and who doesn’t love a shape changing dog. The adults will love the writing and references to our own world thrown into the post apocalyptic Candyland. So check out Adventure Time, Timothy Leary’s favorite show from beyond the grave!
