A FUN ‘TIME’ HAD BY ALL
The cartoon’s makers share the story behind its unlikely success
BY ROBERT LLOYD TELEVISION CRITIC >>> In 2010, a new cartoon debuted with these bold lines. ¶ “Princess Bubblegum,” asks Finn, a human boy, “when we bring the dead back to life, will they be filled with worms?” ¶ “No,” Princess Bubblegum replies. “If my Decorpsinator serum works, then all the dead candy people will look as young and healthy as you do.” ¶ It doesn’t quite work out for the dead— candy zombies wreck a slumber party in the first episode of “Adventure Time,” but for the living, Pendleton Ward’s animated epic becomes a cultural phenomenon. It’s 10-season run on Cartoon Network comes to a close Sept. 2 in an hourlong finale, having filled Comic-Con convention halls, inspired innumerable cosplayers and fan artists, and picked up rave reviews, multiple Emmys, a Peabody Award and a Macy’s f loat along the way. Its characters have been modeled for sale in plush and plastic and pixels, as Lego pieces and video game avatars. ¶ Finn (Jeremy Shada) and his shape-shifting dog (John DiMaggio) began the series as romping adventurers, fighting monsters on a generally charming if often dangerous mutant Earth, about a thousand years after the apocalyptic Great Mushroom War. The Land of Ooo is where they live, with its Candy Kingdom, Ice Kingdom, Flame Kingdom, Nightosphere and Lumpy Space, each with its issues, its creatures, its customs, its king or princess. ¶ The series developed over time, from a story of sword-swinging amateur heroics into one more concerned with family and friends and affections; it is spiritual in a
way that doesn’t deny the power of broken wind. The comical bumps up against the chaotic, the domestic beats back the dreadful. “Adventure Time” is cosmically cosmopolitan; many things are alive and all imaginable things are potentially welcome — notwithstanding that the tale has brought Ooo to the brink of civil war. It’ll make you laugh and break your heart.
Below, some of the many people who made it — several of whom have gone on to create beloved, award-winning cartoons of their own — remember some of what it was like. “Adventure Time” is born as “a doodle” in Valencia at the California Institute of the Arts, where Pen Ward is a student, alongside future key collaborators Adam Muto and Pat McHale.
Pen Ward (creator): CalArts had a lot of pretty typical drunkencollege-kid party stuff going on, but animators would always just hole up inside of their cubicles and work.
Pat McHale (creative director, later creator of “Over the Garden Wall”): The teachers were great, but being around other people that are super talented, that are also working towards the same kind of thing, gets you excited and, like, “I’m terrible, but I want to be better.”
Ward: It was just a sketch I kicked out into a minute-long short, where Finn and Jake save Princess Bubblegum from the Ice King using rocket boots. Nickelodeon was taking pitches from CalArts students. And they didn’t like it — my drawings were baaaaad in school. “Random! Cartoons” was a series of shorts produced for Nickelodeon by Frederator Studios, designed to field new talent and potential series. After leaving CalArts, Ward took his rejected minute, turned it into “a larger thing” and pitched it again.
Fred Seibert (founder, Frederator Studios): He’s standing there with a guitar; I have taken thousands of pitches, no one else has started a pitch singing. [Afterward] I said, “Well, we’re not doing that. He’s a month out of school, we don’t do student films.” And Eric [Homan, Frederator vice president of development] said, “You know, in most of these pitches you have a fake laugh and in this one you really laughed.” A short is made, in which Finn (then called Pen) and Jake rescue Princess Bubblegum from the Ice King and Finn/Pen travels in his mind to Mars where Abraham Lincoln advises him to believe in himself.
McHale: I remember when Pen did the boards. When they came back from the animator, he was like, “It’s magic! You just do some drawings and then it becomes a cartoon! It’s amazing!” Seibert has trouble finding “Adventure Time” a home but gets permission from Nickelodeon to put the pilot online, where it becomes a viral sensation.
Ward: It was really cool! It’s fun just as a social experiment to see how people react to this thing you’re making. It was actually way more fun to see people hate it — like, “Who are you?”
Ian Jones-Quartey (storyboard super visor, later creator of “OK K.O.: Let’s Be Heroes”: I was working on “Venture Bros.” when the “Adventure Time” short came out, and I remember telling everybody I worked with, “Guys, this is the future.” And a lot of them who were maybe a generation older than me were like, “What is this? I don’t understand this at all.”
Seibert: Over the next couple of years the short would get taken down and then somebody else would bootleg it back up again. Finally I went to Cartoon Network and said, “Look, just ask your teenage kids, one of them has seen this. If they haven’t, I’ll stop bothering you.” And sure enough one had.
Rob Sorcher (chief content officer, Cartoon Network): It was far from a sustainable television proposition, but I had not seen or felt anything like that in the genre before. It felt timeless, like a children’s classic book series. But at the same time there was this very contemporary overlay on it. The pilot becomes a series.
Adam Muto (writer, storyboard artist, creative director, eventually showrunner) :Alotof that early first season was, “We think the show is this. Maybe the network thinks it’s something else.” So even staffing up was difficult because we weren’t in agreement about what the show was going to be.
Sorcher: For every show, we do an art presentation once the team is up and going. And we went into a room and were surrounded on all sides by the Land of Ooo, the maps, the worlds, the characters. It had a dimensionality; it felt huge. A cast is assembled. Jeremy Shada as Finn, and John DiMaggio, Bender on “Futurama,” as Jake, with Hynden Walch (Princess Bubblegum), Olivia Olson (Marceline the Vampire Queen) and Tom Kenny (famously the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants, as the Ice King) rounding out the main roles.
Jeremy Shada (Finn the Human): My older brother, Zach, did the voice of Finn or Pen when it was a “Random!” short for Nickelodeon. And the first day of recording nobody knew I was Zach’s younger brother, they just thought they got lucky with someone that sounded like the original.
John DiMaggio (Jake the Dog): I was like: “I don’t get this show.” I felt I was in the dark about a lot of stuff and uncomfortable as an actor approaching the role. And then Tom Kenny said to me, “This is this generation’s ‘Yellow Submarine’ ” and I was, like, “All right, let me let it go and follow that advice.”
Olivia Olson (Marceline the Vampire Queen): Pen Ward knew my dad, Martin Olson, who was writing for “Phineas and Ferb,” and Pen randomly was like, “Martin, there’s this girl on ‘Phineas and Ferb’ who would be great for one of our voices. Do you know her?” And he was, like, “You’re kidding, right?”
Shada: Someone had asked a question about me on a panel at Comic-Con; they were like, “Once his voice changes, are you guys gonna replace him?” And Pen was like, “No, no, no, we’re not replacing Jeremy. He’s Finn, he’s our guy. If anything, I’ll just start maybe drawing him with a little gut hanging out or something.” The show is “storyboard-driven” — artists work from outlines that they flesh out with action and dialogue rather than from scripts.
Ward: I thought at first we were going to control it more with a script. The first thing I wrote was, “Finn and Jake make funny faces at each other.” And that was the most boring thing.
Muto: In “The Prisoners of Love,” there’s a scene with the Ice King carting Finn and Jake; he’s pushing them up a hill. And he takes a break and pulls out trail mix and eats it — you could put it in a script and it would just get cut. But in a board, you can feel why it’s right. It gives that he’s not just a pure villain, he’s a real guy and he’s just eating his trail mix.
Rebecca Sugar (writer, storyboard artist, songwriter, later creator of “Steven Universe”): Early on I think there was a lot of pressure from the network to have sillier jokes and a louder show that would be more accessible to younger kids. Everyone was trying to find what the show was. But it always knew what it was, which