Let's go on an Adventure

We all had that cartoon or show that we watched every time it was on. For some it was SpongeBob, others it was Pokémon and some it was Looney Toons. Well for me it was one of the best animated shows of all time. The greatest thing that Disney has ever produced, Phineas and Ferb. The show had it all for a young kid. It had songs and dances, stuff to learn and interest you. It was a goldmine for a young impressionable kid like I was. I would come home and watch it as long as my mother would let me, sometimes for hours on end. I remember crying watching the last episode knowing that it was the end of an amazing 8 years.

As an adult, however, I couldn’t care less about watching an episode of Phineas and Ferb. It just doesn’t interest me anymore and offers no rewatch value to a 20 something like me. So one day while my wife and I scrolled through Hulu looking for something to watch I came across a show I had not thought about for years. A show that I had never finished previously because I got bored of it as a child. A show that was so extraordinarily complicated that it became stupid. This show featured literally everything and then some. You wouldn’t be surprised to be whisked away by humans with gills one episode and then be assisting a bunch of dentist ants kill a worm in the next. This show, as you might have already guessed, was Adventure Time.

First airing in April of 2010, Adventure Time offered no plot line. It offered no rhyme or reason to its candy fueled madness, but it did offer entertainment for young kids. As a child most of us don’t care how the story ends, but how it gets there. We care about what happens in each episode individually, not what happened in each season. Adventure time perfectly embodied the stereotypical cartoon as it checked all the boxes. Talking animals, check, mystical beings, check, overly strong 13 year old boy that various 18+ princesses have the hots for, check. Anything a kid could want could be found in an episode of adventure time. The show was an instant success when it first aired and I remember Finn and Jake becoming the go to costumes for that year's Halloween.

The first 26 episodes went off with little to no mention of how it got there, it didn’t really set up character arcs and left little to be desired in the next episode. But it somehow always brought you, a child, back for the next episode. Adventure Time was, during the first season, a TV show to fill your time with meaningless content. This changed during the second season. They slowly hashed out a vague story of how the Land of Ooo became to be. The hesitantly created a world that started to, not necessarily make sense, but started to go together like pieces of a loosely fitting puzzle.

Then during the third season the creators either got more bold or more bored and started investing their time and effort into creating a serious story that would go on for 7 more seasons. I remember losing interest in the show around that time due to the story becoming more and more complicated by the episode. While the characters were still fun, and certain episodes were still just controlled chaos. My adolescent self was losing interest as now I had to think about what was happening instead of just ingesting the content before my eyes.

I stopped watching Adventure Time around the time the 5th season aired. The show had gotten too complex for me to care and was no longer just a bunch of laughing. I moved on with most of the kids my age and slowly forgot the show. Until the day I found it with my wife. We both had watched it when we were younger, and I found myself now fascinated with the complex branching stories the creators had set out to make. I was hooked again before I started watching the show.

We binge watched the first several seasons over the course of a few nights. I found myself now excited to dive into the story laid out in front of me. As the seasons went on the show continued to get better and better until. New exotic places were shown, crazy situations and jokes that now made sense since I was an adult. We got to the 8th season in about a month of watching, and I found myself less motivated to watch the show. My wife thought I was no longer interested in the show when in fact it was the opposite. I was so interested and invested in Finn and Jake and the princesses and Simon that I didn’t want to keep watching because I knew the seasons were getting shorter and there were only two seasons left. I didn’t want the show to end as I felt connected to it now that I had almost watched it completion. At times this children's show had almost brought me to tears and other times it forced me to become overly excited and happy with life due to what I was shown.

That's when I realized what had happened all those years ago when I first stopped watching Adventure Time. This show that had started out as a kids show with little rhyme or reason was slowly and strategically crafted into a young adult and even an adult animation of sorts that catered to all ages. Now that I was older I was able to appreciate this aspect of the show that was so perfectly catered to me. I forced myself to sit down and finish the show to completion and I cried as I watched the last episode which I am not going to spoil for those of you who are going to go watch the show.

Ever since then when I am longing for something to watch I switch back to Adventure Time. And every time I do so I realize that I had missed something before, or I see a new joke or Easter egg that makes it interesting. The best part of all you ask? I have watched all 10 seasons time and time again and I generally still have absolutely no idea what is going on in the Land of Ooo, and that's ok.