TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Adventure Time

Years back, Craig linked me to a pilot for a cartoon about a boy and a shape-shifting dog voiced by Bender from Futurama. It was eight minutes long, and amazing. Here it is:

It seemed far too awesome to ever get picked up, and sure enough, no-one ever mentioned it again. Until about a month ago, when someone said something about an Adventure Time T-shirt on Twitter.

I was all, “Man, did that pilot go down so well people still buy stuff relating to it years later? That makes it even dumber that it definitely never got picked up, a fact I will continue to assume without ever checking.” Then I checked that assumption, and found they made FIFTY THREE EPISODES of this incredible thing and never told me.

I would have bought the hell out of a DVD box set or something, but the Cartoon Network cleverly saw me coming and decided not to release one so that I would have no way of giving them money. You win this round, Cartoon Network – I’ll watch these unauthorised rips of your content on YouTube. But mark my words: one day you’ll slip up, and there’ll be a way for me to pay for Adventure Time. And on that day, you will know the wrath of my twelve to eighteen pounds.

Here’s another great episode before I explain why all the episodes are great.

All the episodes are great because:

• Jake the dog and Finn the human are friends, and both are good guys. This almost never happens. The fact that they’re never jerks to each other in any serious way just makes the series a fun place to be, and the characters completely likeable.
• The dialogue is genius. It’s a mix of the straightforward earnestness of a kids’ cartoon, the fun plays on language you’d normally find in something more mature, and the conspicuously modern idioms that make the heroes feel likeably ordinary in their fantasy setting.
• It’s free and easy with its visual imagination. Technically it’s all set in one place, the Kingdom of Ooo, but whichever direction they head they seem to run into a race of creatures we’ve never seen before, an awesome place unlike any of the others, or a weird new magical artefact. It has the throwaway spontaneity of a child making up a story on the spot, but it follows each one through to an inventive or funny conclusion. It just feels like every time you start a new episode, you’re going to see something completely new.

I say every episode is great, but they’re not always funny: some of them are so weird or so dark – or so both – that there aren’t many jokes. But that visual imagination and the likeable heroes mean it always works as a straight story – even if it has a completely bizarre ending.

It’s weird to be watching this at a time when Futurama is back, and doing gender humour that wouldn’t even get a pity laugh on an open mic night. Every time that series has bombed in recent years, it’s when it betrays its characters to attempt some weak social commentary or manufacture drama. Adventure Time shows why characters and imagination are always more important than plot or gags, even in a comedy.

More Adventure Time, Futurama