![]() Often, the word “surreal” is used interchangeably with “trippy” when discussing the show’s central qualities-its absurdity, its fantastical elements, its apparent randomness. The show even has enough formal flexibility to invite guest animators for occasional experiments in different styles. Its imagery isn’t particularly psychedelic in fact, its influences range from The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack (on which Pendleton Ward was a writer and storyboard artist) to the films of the legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki. If you believe that Adventure Time is anything like a trip on hallucinogens, it’s clear you have never actually used them. It’s a moment I had to go back and watch again, but must have been way over the heads of the prepubescent boys the show used to target. In the the first episode of Islands there’s a brilliantly bizarre bra-fitting joke: “I know they’re professionals, but it’s just too intimate” says BMO, a sentient but ambiguously gendered Gameboy-like robot. And while Islands is plot-focused, it certainly doesn’t sacrifice Adventure Time’s off-beat humor, even if this humor is becoming, gently, more adult. All of this involves quite a bit of world-building and some closure for Finn, while reaffirming his place back in Ooo, where he is at home and needed to help its citizens. ![]() It is here that we finally get to the bottom of Finn’s origins: the society from which he came, how he ended up a lost infant to be found and raised alongside Jake the dog, and what remains of his family. There is a city tightly guarded by an animatronic giant that keeps any wayward citizens from venturing out into a presumably decimated and dangerous world, and ominously “reeducates” them when they’re caught trying. There is an island of humans hooked up to pods, living through a “Better Reality” virtual reality game, as tiny sweet-faced drones tenderly care for their atrophying bodies. There is the gentle, lone survivor living in a hollow tree. Each island offers a different variation of a dystopian human future. ![]() Finn, Jake the dog, Susan, and stowaway BMO then leave Ooo, hoping to discover the aircraft’s place of origin and encountering a series of the eponymous islands. The action starts with a mysterious aircraft landing on the beach in search of Finn. Islands does a dizzying amount of plot development in 80-something minutes. It has been a beautifully managed balancing act, but, as the show begins its seventh year and penultimate season, the scales are beginning to tip. ![]() In Cartoon Network’s lineup, it sits precariously in the 7:45 pm slot-the lone, 15-minute buffer between We Bare Bears and Adult Swim reruns of King of the Hill. While it shares DNA with beloved adult cartoons like Futurama and BoJack Horseman, it is not fully inside that tradition. As creator Pendleton Ward has said of his fictive universe, “It’s candyland on the surface and dark underneath, and that’s why it’s compelling, I think.”Īdventure Time has always been a thing of many pleasurable contradictions: it is silly but profound it is free-associative in form but intricately plotted it’s mature, but kind of innocent. But the “trippy” label is one of the great short sells of the show, rendering it as flat as its pastel landscapes. Google the show, and you’ll find no shortage of professional TV criticism focusing on Adventure Time’s technicolor aesthetic, which, to be fair, does make liberal use of rainbows. It was that association with psychedelia that very likely got the show from children to stoners, and from stoners to the broader audience of teens and young adults it now enjoys. ![]() When Adventure Time premiered in 2010, I was sixteen, and the first episode was widely sent around my high school with some variation on the line: Can you believe this kid’s show? It’s so *trippy*. ![]()
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