Adventure Time TV Series Guide

By Danny Nolan

Welcome to the Land of Ooo, a world where rainbow-colored unicorns bark in Korean, vibrating worms elicit hallucinogenic nightmares, and where Abraham Lincoln is still alive and reigns as the "King of Mars". Ooo is also home to Finn, a courageous, stick-limbed boy, and his best friend Jake, an elasticated, shapeshifting dog. They're the stars of Cartoon Network's Adventure Time, a cartoon which may well be the most imaginative – and indeed entertaining – on TV. Like SpongeBob SquarePants and Yo Gabba Gabba! before it, Adventure Time has found that sweet spot between pre-teen adoration and countercultural cool; it's the latest "kids' show that it's OK for adults to like". Yet there are many things to reveal, just keep on reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Jun 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781304940483

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Why 'Adventure Time' Is the Best Science Fiction Show on TV Right Now

Sometimes you love a show so much it can do weird things to your head. I've gone out on a limb with Cartoon Network's Adventure Time by deeming it a groundbreaking form of cartoon storytelling that fuses several eras of animation into a delightfully surreal and yet oddly familiar experience. I also wondered if the entire show was one big metaphor for sex. I stand by the former and wince a little when contemplating the latter as anything other than one more manifestation of the fun possibilities involved in reading into a show that has a deceptively simple surface and tangibly dark interiors. But after last night's wonderful flashback special episode, Simon and Marcy, I'm convinced of one thing: Adventure Time is the best science fiction show on television right now.

Simon and Marcy picked up a thread initially introduced last season with the finest entry in the series' history, I Remember You, which was also the name of a show-stopping tune unveiled in the episode's climactic moments. In a touching moment of musical narrative, the song revealed that the moody goth Marceline the Vampire Queen had a history with the nutty Ice King, whose role on the show up until this point was merely as a comically inept foil to the usual protagonists, Jake the Dog and Finn the Human.

It turned out that the Ice King, originally an archeologist named Simon Petrikov, gradually lost his mind after discovering an ancient crown with magical powers in Scandinavia. When the apocalypse hit -- a period of time in the world of the show deemed The Great Mushroom War -- Simon discovered young Marceline on her own and took on a fatherly role as the two wandered through a desolate landscape.

Simon and Marcy detailed the evolution of that relationship while fleshing out a few other murky areas of the show's mythology. It starts innocuously enough, with modern day Marceline playing a game of basketball with the loony Ice King along with Finn and Jake, who ask Marceline why she has invited their enemy to join them. Because I love him very much, she replies, then launches into a survival story set precisely 996 years in the past.

Up until this point, we've only had select peeks at the volume of destruction that wrecked the planet before its came together as the Land of Ooo, where the show's current colorful inhabitants live. Last season's The Lich showed an alternative tale of destruction and hinted at a nuclear-fueled massacre, but Simon and Marcy revealed a wasteland of junk barely populated by anyone other than the two characters' of the episode's title. In fact, after Simon puts on his crown and freezes a deer the duo comes across in the woods, Marceline wonders if its appearance indicates that other things live around them in the wilderness. This brief aside indicates the sheer emptiness of