[tps_title]#20-11[/tps_title]
20. “Food Chain”
Season 6, Episode 7
Adventure Time has had three guest-animated episodes so far, and the other two, “A Glitch Is a Glitch” and “Water Park Prank,” are among the series’ most disposable episodes, but Maasaki Yuasa, a well-respected anime artist and director, somehow tapped into the show’s soul the way the other guests just couldn’t while making an episode entirely unlike any before or since.
Magic Man showing up as a catalyst and not coming back is always a great device, but along with the loose animation, what makes “Food Chain” is the music, from its use of Mozart to the frankly unsettling plant song, right down to the grand finale. Finn and Jake learn about the food chain firsthand. “Food Chain” skirts the line of edutainment while retaining the twisted dialogue and effortless goofiness of Adventure Time.
Funniest line: “Hey, have you noticed we are birds now?”
19. “Holly Jolly Secrets”
Season 3, Episodes 19 & 20
Advertisement
Ice King has always been a tragic character. After being conked out in “Prisoners of Love,” his dream self wondered why nobody liked him. “You’re a sociopath,” cooed the Cosmic Owl. He just might be, but his loneliness, sadness, and even occasional helplessness added something to his character beyond his villainy. But it wasn’t until the sorta-Christmas special “Holly Jolly Secrets” that Adventure Time‘s mythology was opened up forever with the revelation of Ice King’s former life as scholar Simon Petrikov.
About as sad as the tale of Simon Petrikov is Ice King’s daily life, though. His video diary is a dull, vapid, and ponderous vat of despair, including a segment BMO speeds up about how he bathes in spoiled milk. BMO also finds a preposterous code involving Ice King’s tears revealing a picture of Gunter.
One of the only things holding “Holly Jolly Secrets” back from being of stratospheric greatness is that it doesn’t quite justify its double-length runtime, but it still provides enough wackiness to keep its heavier contents well afloat.
Advertisement
Funniest line: “Y’know, diary, I’ve been meaning to tell you something insanely private. I’m serious. I…I…love…to…GRRRR…fill my bathtub full of milk and sit in it like I’m a magic angel! There, I said it. My, the milk is dense, but when I poke my little toes up from the milk, it startles me. But I giggle! I giggle, diary. I get cold toes, but I giggle! And then I fall asleep, and the milk curdles and I get all stinky and sticky. Disgusting, diary. I’m disgusting! I’m disgusting…I’m disgusting and I smell like curdled milk!”
18. “Sons of Mars”
Season 4, Episode 15
High stakes episodes have become pretty routine in Adventure Time, but in the fourth season, “Sons of Mars” is built on three revelations: A. Glob is an actual character and not just an interjection, part of a four-headed deity residing on Mars known as Grob Gob Glob Grod, B. Magic Man is his brother, banished to Earth, and C. Abraham Lincoln on Mars, a throwaway joke in the pilot, is actually canon, and Honest Abe is the freaking King of Mars.
Advertisement
We go through a stupefying amount in the ensuing eleven minutes. Jake and Magic Man switch bodies, Jake dies by Abraham Lincoln’s decree, and Abraham Lincoln sacrifices himself to bring back Jake.
The epic scale is brought deep into the realm of fun by the great dialogue and voice acting for Magic Man, and the ending monologue by a tiny manticore is an added slice of strange.
Funniest line: “And what about that one time when he turned all the water into hair, and we all got so thirsty we drank it?”
17. “Breezy”
Season 6, Episode 5
After “Frost & Fire,” this is the second look into Finn’s unfocused horniness, and it gets weird. Finn has doctor’s orders to go out and have a good time for the sake of his torn-off arm, and a bumblebee named Breezy, obsessed with the flower on his stub, wingmans him into quick kisses with lots of princesses (“Maybe if I made out with lots of girls, I will feel something?”), but things go wrong when Finn is attacked by bees, Breezy fulfills her duty of drinking the royal jelly and becoming a queen, and Finn declines her offer to partake of her pollen and become her drone. It’s sad: “But I royal jellied for you.”
In perhaps the show’s most disturbing sequence, Finn does something like losing his virginity to Lumpy Space Princess. Wondering if having fun and collecting kisses from princesses is the answer to his problems, his flower responds by losing a petal. This episode shows Finn at his very lowest, but it also introduces a one-off character powerful enough to inspire Finn’s arm back, although with a tantalizing thorn on his palm.
Funniest line: “I’ve been pounding pickle juice like I was preggos. For the electrolytes.”
16. “Memory of a Memory”
Season 3, Episode 3
This is the one in which Marceline’s ex pretends to be her spirit animal to trick Finn and Jake into an Eternal Sunshine-type situation. She storms out on him after he sells Hambo (“I sold that teddy bear you love so much!”) and he gets Finn and Jake to collect that memory, but along the way they see a young Marcline with Hambo, her dad eating her fries, and Marceline moving into their treehouse before arriving in the memory core, which feels like it could be based on an indie video game. It’s a pretty slick way to further explore what was already one of Adventure Time‘s deepest characters.
The rest delivers just as well. Finn showing Marceline his memory of her memory in his memory is a complex resolution for a children’s show, Finn’s “Puncha Yo Buns” scene was an instant classic, and the episode ends with Terry Gilliam’s Flying Circus foot.
Funniest line: “Don’t you guys get it? I out-brained you.”
15. “Thank You”
Season 3, Episode 17
Setting aside the surefire Fionna & Cake episode, this was the first true experiment Adventure Time ever tried. In a mostly wordless episode, a snow golem takes care of a lost pup from an enemy species, the fire wolves. It’s the most adorable episode of the series alongside “Simon & Marcy,” a Romeo & Juliet tale with paternal themes in place of romantic. The golem almost sacrifices himself for the young wolf and explodes with glee as a pack showers him with thanks. There’s not much to say about it. It’s a little weird, completely adorable, but mostly just quietly, gorgeously hopeful.
But then there’s also the image of the pup suckling from the udder of a cow, burning it as the cow screams in agony. That’s great.
Funniest line: “You know, maybe we could all learn a thing or two from those sandwiches.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Hz9B1Ldu0
14. “Puhoy”
Season 5, Episode 16
Adventure Time had gone pretty far off the rails at this point, but this is the one where, as he and Jake are building a pillow fort while stranded inside during a knife storm, Finn lives in an entire lifetime lost in a fantastical pillow world. And it all starts with Finn being bummed because his GF Flame Princess didn’t laugh at a joke of his. “Man, having a girlfriend is hard.” “No, being crazy is hard,” Jake corrects him.
Finn spends his entire life festering on an escape into something else rather than focusing on the wonderful family around him. It’s a great display of how Finn’s sense of adventure can interfere with his joy. Meanwhile, after Jake tosses literally his favorite cup to show Finn about imaginary problems, he reels it in from the knife storm. “I thought you said you didn’t care,” says BMO. Jake sips from his empty mug and doesn’t acknowledge it.
Funniest line: “Are you telling me that birds in your world don’t poo little pillowcases?”
13. “Adventure Time”
Pilot
The first thing that happens in the very first episode of Adventure Time, which became a viral video all the way back in 2007, is Jake downloading a little dance from the internet with his mind. It doesn’t not stop being this wacky, and it does not stop being this awesome. Sweet Jesus, it was awesome. Everything about it reeked of greatness, from its open-ended world to its bizarro-cutesy chiptune scoring to its algebraic use of slanguage.
What’s most remarkable is that just about everything from the short has been kept intact, right down to Abraham Lincoln, who takes Pen’s–Finn’s name at the time–mind back in time…and to Mars. Ice King (who actually has a great voice here), Lady Rainicorn (who didn’t speak Korean then), and Princess Bubblegum were entirely recast, while Finn’s voice actor, Jeremy Shada, had not yet replaced his older brother, Zack.
There’s really only one thing that hasn’t been followed up in the series, and I’m a little sad that we never saw what happened to those ninjas stealing that old man’s diamonds. Give him back his diamonds!
Funniest line: “That guy is a total patoot.” “He’s like fifty patoots!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpG1nR0p0OE
12. “The Comet”
Season 6, Episode 43
There is a lot to take in with the season six finale, “The Comet.” There’s Finn fighting breaker of worlds Orgalorg, Finn’s ultimate confrontation with his father, Finn being given the choice to become one with the universe as a greater sense of being, and Jake’s prophesied death.
Ultimately, it’s about Finn A. realizing that not everything gets to be satisfying and B. coming to the same crossroads we saw in the question Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephant hears in “Something Big” and the decision Grob Gob Glob Grod makes in “Astral Plane.” Finn gives up transcendence because tending to the world he’s invested in is something greater.
At the beginning of season six, Finn moped around singing “Lost in the Darkness.” As he drifts into the void–actual, literal darkness–he finally makes peace with his situation.
Funniest line: “It was like forty years ago.” “I’m sixteen!” “Well, I don’t have a star to revolve around to track time.”
11. “All the Little People”
Season 5, Episode 5
Watching Finn mess around with living, miniature versions of the show’s cast, including C-listers, is really strange, especially as he begins interfering with their romantic lives like he’s writing some sort of voodoo fanfiction.
His obsession brings him off the rails, with intense spanking, a weird, funky threesome (!) involving Choose Goose and Abracadaniel, and little Marceline licking little Peppermint Butler into nothing
Funniest line: “You’ve crossed the line from weird curiosity into some dark, messed up stuff.”
Advertisement
