Adventure Time Revolutionized Fantasy Cartoons With Heart & Humor

Adventure Time, one of the last decade's biggest hits in kids' media, is finally coming to an end after its tenth season. Eight years ago, Pendleton Ward introduced us to hyperactive hero, Finn the human, his stretchy BFF, Jake the Dog, and the strange, candy-filled Land of Ooo that they protect from wrongdoers. What began as a series of episodic adventures peppered with quirky creatures and made-up slang words built steadily into an animated fantasy epic, rich in lore and mystery.

Today, Adventure Time's enduring popularity can be easily measured by the volume and diversity of its merchandise, or its cosplay representation at conventions. Not only has the show proven a huge success with it target demographic, but thanks to its eccentricity, it also quickly earned a reputation as the chosen "cool" cartoon of sofa-slouching teens and young adults -- a proto, PG-rated Rick and Morty. Most point to Adventure Time's eccentricity when considering the show's impact on current trends in kids cartoons: noodle-limbed characters; flat, un-fussy backgrounds; surprise musical interludes; loosely scripted dialogue; abrupt endings and a surreal, Monty Python-inflected sense of controlled chaos. When people refer to shows like Adventure Time as "random" or "trippy," they're complimenting how organic and unscripted everything feels. In reality, a process as methodical as animation is usually anything but, which just makes the end product seem even more like an act of wizardry.

Elements of Adventure Time's particular style can be found in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, which Ward worked on as a storyboard artist after unsuccessfully pitching Adventure Time to Nickelodeon in 2006. He was struck by the freedom afforded to Flapjack's staff to both write and draw episodes from an outline, elevating the impact of individual talents on a show. Around this time, Ward also met many of the people he would bring to work on Adventure Time when it was eventually picked up in 2010. Some of his friends and fellow graduates from the California Institute of the Arts would go on to create shows that shared Adventure Time's zany feel, like Uncle Grandpa and Regular Show. Present-day complaints about a "Cal Arts" aesthetic that has made modern cartoons too artistically homogenized usually cite Adventure Time as Patient Zero.

Among Ward's hires for his show was storyboard artist, writer and composer, Rebecca Sugar, who would go on to make Cartoon Network's first female-created show, Steven Universe. Unsurprisingly, Steven Universe shares some DNA with Adventure Time: a series focusing on a young, heroic boy raised by charmingly strange, non-human companions, with many of the show's fantasy elements swapped for sci-fi. Both shows also excel at emotion-led storytelling. However, while Steven Universe attracts a lot of praise for this type of storytelling, discussions about Adventure Time's emotional storytelling often get upstaged in favor of those about Ward's signature wackiness.

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The oddball humor that Ward and his contemporaries have used to breathe new life into kids cartoons obscures another, quieter revolution he brought to the straight-faced, high fantasy media of his '80s childhood. Those underlying influences hide in plain sight. (Only someone raised on Dungeons & Dragons would make a Lich a primary villain in an '00s cartoon series.) What Ward did was take the stern faces of Lion-O, He-Man and Conan the Barbarian and turn them into a goofy kid with a sword that other goofy kids could relate to. Rather than have a beefy warrior resembling a father-figure or overbearing older brother delivering shoe-horned morality lessons in a leather harness, Ward -- to stick with the D&D analogy -- made the t-shirt-wearing kid playing the game the hero of the story.

Avoiding these dour genre trappings was a conscious effort, according to Ward. "I just cringe when there's a serious moral to be learned at the end of a story," he told Wizards of the Coast. "I'll always turn the moral on its head if the episode needs something like that at the end of it. In the episode, 'My Two Favorite People,' Jake was acting pretty selfish and stupid throughout the episode. In the end, Jake says something like, 'Let's never be stupid again,' and Finn says, 'No man, let's always be stupid... forever!'"

Stupidity is at the heart of Adventure Time. High fantasy conventions just don't cut it like they used to in a post-irony age. The series -- with its hot dog-themed princesses, a city where everyone is a thief, a screaming Earl with a lemon for a head and a valley girl shaped like a purple cloud -- leans into the unwitting silliness we now laugh at in old Masters of the Universe episodes. The Ice King and his obsession with kidnapping princesses spoofs the Evil Wizard archetype. Later seasons then pick away at his bumbling facade to reveal the debilitating loneliness underneath. The episode, "I Remember You," (storyboarded by Rebecca Sugar) picks even further to uncover a past kinship between Ice King and teen vampire Marceline, memories of which were erased by his creeping insanity. The emotional gut-punch might have been even more severe if the episode stuck with its original title: "Help."

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Isolation, dependency and loss of identity aren't themes you'd expect from a cartoon that once devoted an entire episode to the ups and downs of a beach ball-balancing horse, but during its 10-year run, Adventure Time has been able to construct big story arcs rooted in the emotional development of its characters. Finn began as a caring boy with a rigid sense of right and wrong, often failing -- in a typically childish way -- to understand moral greyness. (He even went so far as killing an ant once because it was described as being "unaligned" by Mark Hamill's Trial-Master. Ward's D&D influences show again here.) Later, frustration with his absent father, the unnerving discovery of his robotized mother and the trauma of losing his "favorite" arm pushed Finn towards an emotional breakthrough. Like a figurine being moved across a map, Finn adventures for the sake of adventuring, but like any real growing kid, joy, sadness, anger and fear are always uncomfortably close to the surface.

The insecurities and awkwardness of first love have also been well-explored in the show. Finn's initial crush on Princess Bubblegum was once filtered through the eyes of a boy who still found the idea of kissing to be icky. Over time, his attitude towards physical romance matured, and relationships between other characters -- like Bubblegum and Marceline -- evolved with the complexity you'd expect from two people with a long and storied history.

The release of the 5th Edition of D&D, reorienting the role-playing game to focus more on characterization and narrative, has generated a boom of renewed interest in the game like never before -- an interesting parallel when considering Adventure Time's legacy. As the show comes to an end, it's hard to imagine that the upcoming revivals of She-Ra and ThunderCats could have happened without its success. The reimagined animated icons of the '80s bear an unmistakable resemblance to Ward's softer-bodied and softer-hearted take on the genre that Adventure Time not only borrowed from, but reinvented for a whole new generation.

Adventure Time: The Final Seasons four-DVD collection, which includes the series finale, is on sale now from Cartoon Network. The Adventure Time "Come Along With Me" original soundtrack is available for digital download and streaming on all major platforms.