No one, even Adventure Time’s creator Pendleton Ward, could have envisioned a segment on Nicktoon Network’s Random Cartoons would become an ever-growing franchise. During its humble beginnings as a short film, Adventure Time, a fun tale about Pen (Zack Shada) and his magical talking dog Jake (John Dimaggio) who fight the evil which comes in the form of the Ice King (John Kassir), mostly dealt with a simple damsel in distress tale. A story that’s been told a multitude of ways, but Adventure Time told with comedy and enough creative energy that it felt new. Moreover, the short solidified the premise of what the show would become.
The next home for adventurers Finn (Jeremy Shada) and Jake, newly named but the same characters nonetheless, turned out to be a long-lived one. Cartoon Network premiered Adventure Time on April 5, 2010, at a time when the network was changing up in its line-up of cartoons. Instead of another cartoon involving a superhero adolescent boy, Adventure Time parodied the genre by creating situations with a bend towards comedy. Unorthodox in practice, the series told episodic stories that were resolved with lighthearted endings. The bulk of the first episodes of the series involved stories saving any manner of strange princesses from the Ice King, correcting wrongdoing by newly invented monsters of the week, or just hanging out with characters from the massive cast that was present even at the beginning of the show. The series took on a very light tone with specks of darkness included in almost every episode: the title sequence foreshadowed a great deal of world-building not unnoticed by many fans at the time.
Season three of the series offered many more hints towards the history of the Land of Ooo; episodes like “What Was Missing” and “Holly Jolly Secrets” heavily augur the coming reveal of the Mushroom War (an armageddon war from the past that destroyed most of the world and killed almost all of the humans). Along with the darker inclusions to the narrative, the story structure began to shift towards a more serialized approach. The fourth season places past seasons in context while guiding newer seasons with stories that are reactions to established story beats. Persisting through the following season, Adventure Time unveils many of the secrets of the show through this new model of storytelling for the series. The penultimate episode to the fourth season, “I Remember You,” marks the show's adherence to connecting its mysteries to the tragedy of the Mushroom War.
Consecutive seasons follow the precedent of season four, but this shifts a bit in the seventh season where the first special deploys the world-building, serialization, and darker themes of the series. “Stakes,” by the nature of its story - Marceline (Olivia Olson) recounts how she becomes a vampire while getting rid of her vampirism with the help of Princess Bubblegum (Hynden Walch) - exhibits the masterful aspects of Adventure Time by anchoring the narrative into a specific story for several episodes and technically lengthening the runtime from fifteen-minute episodes to hour-long. This is a landmark moment within the series because of the pattern of producing serialized episodes surrounding centralized characters perseveres until the final season on Cartoon Network.
Presently, Adventure Time has shifted its storytelling once again with the newest anthology-like series of specials. Told from different periods and sometimes different dimensions within the Adventure Time universe, the show gives characters from all across the ensemble their specials. Adventure Time: Distant Lands introduces more adult themes to a series that was already sophisticated in a multitude of ways, but now there’s death. Other darker adult themes included in the newest iteration of the series are a critique of greed in the free market; a homosexual relationship that is centered in the narrative; and the deaths... they’ve become more gruesome than before. “Adventure Time: Distant Lands - BMO” finds the titular character exploring space and landing on a base that exploits workers and hoards resources. “Adventure Time: Distant Lands - Obsidian” investigates how far back Marceline and Princess Bubblegum’s love stretches. “Adventure Time: Distant Lands - Together Again” catches up with Finn and Jake in the future where they’re both dead and in the underworld. “Adventure Times: Distant Lands - Wizard City” illustrates the journey to becoming a wizard in the infamous Wizard City. All of these installments exude the best qualities of the show while expanding the lore and inviting adult themes; even the show's easter eggs reappear to hint towards different directions that the show takes on next. Finn appears in the second installment without Jake - why is he absent? It's small inclusions such as this one that pushes the series' storytelling in a more adult direction because it asks more of its viewers.
The first season of the new series has ended its run on HBOmax but there’s still room for speculation. Many characters recur throughout the installments; for example, Choose Goose (Jeff Glen Bennett) appears in the third and fourth episodes with a connected storyline that explains how he kicked the bucket. The series' new format offers for greater speculation and fulfillment to that pondering by answering questions with each coming installment.
Adventure Time is a franchise that has grown along with its audience, offering more compelling permanent aspects to its universe that also inform the show’s past. Adventure Time has effectively created a whole new era of cartoons that have shifted the expectations of the stories viewers can expect of the medium. More stories are on the horizon for the series. Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake have been ordered by HBOmax so the series will continue to expand.
Adventure Time: Distant Lands is streaming exclusively on HBOmax.