Hey, Some of Those Cartoon Network Shows Are Pretty Damn Great
When I was in my first year of college, I started hearing about a show called Adventure Time. Unfortunately, I was hearing about it from the kinds of people whose opinions I didn’t trust. Stoners who liked lame meme-y internet humor and pretentious assholes and the like. Later, it would be recommended to me by people I did trust. But I wasn’t open to listening.
Jump forward to the beginning of 2019, when I was doing my bi-yearly rewatch of Futurama. “Hey,” I thought, “John DiMaggio’s pretty funny. Isn’t he on that show Adventure Time?” So on impulse, I gave Adventure Time a shot, and I fell completely in love with it within ten episodes. I liked it so much that I didn’t want to stop going down this Cartoon Network hole, so the night I finished Adventure Time, I immediately started Steven Universe and eventually fell in love with that as well.
As far as television viewing is concerned, these Cartoon Network shows have defined 2019 for me. I love both of these shows so much that I get actively angry at my college self for being such an asshole.
There’s a number of reasons these shows mean so much to me, and honestly, most of these reasons have been discussed to absolute death. The offbeat humor and endearing strangeness of Adventure Time. The big beating heart of Steven Universe, and the show’s effective stories of empathy and fighting big monsters.
Still, apart from the content of these shows, I’ve learned a lot from them in a much broader context. Simply put, there are ways of making television I wasn’t previously aware of. True, when your episodes run eleven minutes as opposed to twenty or forty and hour, things have to change. However, I’m not just talking about mechanics. I’m talking about mythology, genre, and what exactly these shows “are.”
So hey, it turns out there are different ways to make television, and that makes me profoundly happy, particularly in an age where we’re all forever drowning in new shows to watch. Innovation, from a structural and conceptual level, is still possible on a creative level! Yaaaaaaay!
Both introduce their mythologies in new and interesting ways.
The danger of setting a show in a purely fictional world is that you have to spend a lot of time explaining the mythology to the audience. Where are we? When are we? Who are these characters, and how does the world around them inform who they are and what they care about? As fascinating as the answers to these questions can be, unfortunately, they also bring up two huge problems: How are you specifically communicating this information, and how much time is it going to take?
The answers to these questions largely depend on the show. Many beginnings have a lot in common, and many don’t. But the more information to get through, the more, for better or for worse, it tends to stand out. For example, the beginning of Game of Thrones had to introduce, amongst other things, dozens of characters, dozens of locations, political systems, societal norms, and give a sense of where all these things are in relation to each other. It’s good stuff, but it also felt a little busy.
Though Game of Thrones has a lot to get through, it at least gives itself and the audience a break by not incorporating non-linear storytelling techniques, nor does it have to train the audience how to watch it as it doesn’t employ multiple technical filmmaking techniques or set itself in non-physical realms. The same cannot be said for Legion, a show that puts on so much so quickly that I had to watch the pilot multiple teams just to keep track.
Some shows are their own unique cases. Battlestar Galactica has so much the audience needs to know that it needed an entire miniseries before the first episode of the proper show even aired.
Now, don’t get me wrong: None of these introductions are “bad.” I didn’t love the beginning of Legion, or Legion as a whole for that matter. But nobody could ever accuse it of being boring. Similarly, the beginning of Game of Thrones was one of the most exciting times to be a fan of the show, and I personally love that Battlestar miniseries on its own merits and as a de facto pilot of the show.
However, at some point, one has to wonder whether or not there’s a different way of doing things other than front-loading all mythology. For decades, the structure has been to use the pilot as, essentially, act one of a movie. We meet the characters, we’re launched into new circumstances, then the show is everything that comes after. It works, but there’s a reason why more and more shows are beginning to feel the same, even when they’re good, and part of that is because the framework is all the same, even if the content is completely different. There has to be a new way? Right?
Let’s look at the first two aired episodes of Adventure Time, “Slumber Party Panic” and “Trouble in Lumpy Space.” (Individual episodes of most Cartoon Network shows are eleven minutes, thus a lot of them air two at a time. Also I have to say “aired” because Adventure Time had an unaired pilot you can find online.)
In “Slumber Party Panic,” Princess Bubblegum accidentally creates a formula that raises zombies, so to help prevent a mass freakout in the Candy Kingdom, where this first episode takes place, she throws a huge slumber party in the castle with the help of lead character Finn in order to distract everyone. This includes Jake, a talking dog and Finn’s best friend and (as we’ll later learn) adoptive brother. In “Trouble in Lumpy Space,” Jake is accidentally bitten by Lumpy Space Princess and slowly starts to turn lumpy himself. (Meaning he starts growing lumps all over his body and starts talking like a valley girl. Adventure Time is a weird show.) He has until sundown to get the antidote, so Jake, Finn, and LSP (as we’ll later call her) travel to the Lumpy Space realm and hijinks ensue.
We learn a lot in these first two episodes. We meet most of the important characters and get to know their personalities, as well as the playful tone of the show and the style of storytelling we’ll come to expect from here on out.
But there’s also plenty we’re not told either. Apart from new lands and characters we’ve yet to meet, we’re not told where we are. (“Land of Ooo” isn’t mentioned once in either of these episodes.) We’re not told when this show takes place either, or for that matter, whether we’re still even on planet Earth. We’re not told that all of this takes place in what is essentially a post-post-apocalypse, the state of the world being what is after having been rebuilt from the ruins of an event called The Mushroom War. (“Mushroom” being what you think it is.) We’re not told that Finn appears to be the only human left, and the list goes on.
Some of these things we’ll be introduced to right away. The Ice King makes his first appearance in the very next episode, and BMO and Marceline follow soon after. Some of these concepts, however, will take the show multiple seasons to introduce and properly explore while merely being hinted at in the early seasons. Moreover, one of my favorite aspects of the show is how it will occasionally introduce huge elements of the lore in a casual off the cuff manner. The first time we’re ever shown a full view of Earth, for example, we see a continent sized crater where a chunk of the planet used to be. It’s not commented on or explained. It’s just shown to you, and we won’t find out why it’s there until much later.
Steven Universe shares a lot of DNA with Adventure Time. Though Steven Universe is a much more forthright show that operates more like what’s come before it, it also spends a significant amount of time withholding its lore and it uses its first two aired episodes, “Gem Glow” and “Laser Light Cannon,” to similar effect.
In “Gem Glow,” Steven bemoans the discontinuation of Cookie Cat, his favorite ice cream sandwich brand, while wondering why he can’t summon powers and a magical weapon from the gemstone on his stomach like Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, the three superpowered women he lives with who also have gems on their bodies. All of this happens, by the way, while they’re being attacked by a swarm of acid spewing beetle monsters. In “Laser Light Canon,” as a giant crystal eyeball approaches the Earth, Steven has to dig through his father’s storage unit to find the titular canon. As he digs, he’s reminded of his past, particularly his mother Rose Quartz.
Much like the first two Adventure Time episodes, these episodes are used more for character than world building. The first episode makes sure we understand who Steven and the others are and what they do. (As the opening song explains, they “save the day.”) The second episode explains Steven’s relationship with his parents and that his mother is no longer around because she gave up her physical form so Steven could exist. Our first hint that these people who occupy this world with Steven aren’t human.
We’re told in the opening song that the people Steven lives with are called “The Crystal Gems” and we learn their personalities, but not their purpose. We’re told by the song that they “always save the day,” but we’re not told why. To be more precise, we’re not told that these women fled a totalitarian caste based space empire, and they’re on the losing side of a civil war. (Though the lyrics Steven raps from the Cookie Cat jingle are a not-so-subtle hint of this.) We’re not told that the Gems are there to protect the planet from their home world, nor do we learn that, to pick a random example, there’s a horrifying monstrosity forming in the center of the Earth that could lead to its annihilation. You know, the small things.
Also like Adventure Time, the show introduces its mythology in an unusual manner. Unlike Adventure Time, Steven Universe takes place in a world where traditional society is still intact. Steven is a really young kid, thus there’s an understanding that he needs to be protected from certain truths until he’s capable of properly understanding them. As such, we learn about this world as he does.
At first, all this stuff is “cool.” Fighting big monsters and traveling across the world and so on and forth. But once he’s old enough to understand what’s going on and he learns more about the women who raised him, the more his relationship with the world around him begins to change. Which leads into the next point…
Both shows morph and transform as they go along.
Like many little kids, I was a huge fan of cartoons as a child. Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo, the various Hana-Barbera shows, and the rest of the usual suspects of the late nineties. Essentially, whatever was on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon.
Some of those Looney Tunes classics earned their status for a reason, and I still have an affection for Ren and Stimpy and Courage the Cowardly Dog and a few others. But a lot of these shows, in hind sight, were crap. Regardless of relative quality, there’s an unavoidable truth about the vast majority of these shows: For various reasons, be they production related or due to general creative bankruptcy, a lot of these shows were soul-crushingly repetitive. Dexter would always run into a problem, he would always build an elaborate machine to solve that problem, something would go wrong, and Dexter would fix it, preferably while shouting at his sister to get out of his laboratory. Scooby and the gang would always pull the mask off the villain and explain how they did it. There was always a formula, and that formula always led to a return of the status quo.
Adventure Time and Steven Universe get around these problems by continuing to evolve and change as they go on. New information is constantly introduced, and the status quo can change at the drop of a dime. This may not be new to some of you. But as far as non-adult animation is concerned, I’m running a decade or two behind.
Adventure Time, in the beginning, is a show about two goofballs goofing around. It’s an episodic show that, while tonally different than a lot of what we think of when we think “Cartoon Network show,” doesn’t stray too far from traditional television storytelling. A quick establishment of the status quo, a call to adventure, complications, an enemy is defeated, and so on and so forth. Despite the aesthetic and story choices, underneath it all, it doesn’t color too far outside of the lines. At least not in the beginning.
Part of the fun of Adventure Time is the built in playfulness. Because it starts as a show about two goofballs goofing around, there’s a sense that we shouldn’t take things too seriously. As a result, the show can essentially do whatever it wants and it doesn’t feel like a betrayal of the foundation laid down before it. It’s a show that can be whatever it wants to be, and it works.
At its simplest, this can mean an emphasis on other characters besides Finn and Jake. The show begins to take on more of an ensemble feel as it goes on and becomes more interested in the other people who occupy the world, as well as the world itself. Sometimes this means spending multiple episodes with other established characters, and sometimes with brand new characters invented for the sake of one or two episodes, like the famous Root Beer Guy.
This also means, particularly in the later seasons of the show, an interest in serialization. Sometimes, its light serialization where aspects of the mythology build on one another and you’ll have to remember certain events if you want to understand what’s going on. Sometimes, this means you’ll get something like season nine, half of which is a miniseries called Elements.
This experimentation, however, can also run a bit deeper. Adventure Time is a show defined by its goofy spirit. However, it can also be breathtakingly sad when it wants to be. It would take an entire article just to explain the context of some of this material, but say “Ice King and Marceline’s backstory” to an Adventure Time fan, and there’s a good chance they’ll well up right in front of you. The show can also get trippy. And I don’t mean “trippy” in the random internet sense of the word. I mean in the sense that aspects of the show appear to be inspired by psychedelic art or actual psychedelics. (Skip to 2:50 in this clip. The embed’s giving me the usual shit.)
On one or two occasions, the producers handed the show off to guest animators and let them do whatever they wanted. Episodes like “Bad Jubies,” made by stop motion animator Kirsten Lepore or “Food Chain,” an episode written, story-boarded, and directed by Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa. None of these episodes are considered canon (or if they are, then they shouldn’t), and none of them attempt to look or operate like a traditional episode of the Adventure Time. They’re just one-off oddities that simultaneously feel nothing and exactly like the show.
Steven Universe has one non-canon episode. Other than that, it never gets as experimental as Adventure Time. Though often surreal, it’s more upfront about what we’re seeing and offers more context if we’re seeing something particularly bizarre. Though often sad, it’s a more natural sadness that evolves from the story being told, as opposed to Adventure Time where one day we learned that two characters we’ve never seen interact before spent the entirety of the apocalypse together, and then one slowly and hopelessly had to watch the other descend into mental delirium. (As I said, Adventure Time gets sad.)
That said, Steven Universe still feels like it’s evolving as it goes along. It just doesn’t do so the in the same way. As we discussed, in the beginning of the show, Steven is a young boy. He tags along on adventures, but he’s present more as a means to mine comedy from otherwise life threatening situations. He’s there, as the show will outright state in a later season, to be a little annoying kid.
But also as we discussed, he’ll eventually learn more about his place. He’ll learn that this isn’t all fun and games, and to be the hero, he’ll need to put his life at risk. He’ll need to find a balance between knowing his adventures could kill him and having healthy relationships with the people in his life who would suffer from his loss. He’ll need to empathize with beings who have suffered traumas he’ll never fathom and how to communicate with those who mean him and his loved ones harm.
As he attains these skills, his role in the group and the show changes. Eventually, he stops tagging along on adventures and missions and starts leading them. Not only that, but he eventually becomes the de facto leader of the Crystal Gems in general.
On top of all this, Steven Universe also becomes more interested in serialization. Unlike Adventure Time, there was always a sense of forward story progression. The show’s quite upfront about the fact that it’s not telling you everything, and that we’re going to learn more as we go along. However, since the beginning, the more serialized aspects are essentially a switch the show turns on and off. Sometimes, there’s a massive threat the Gems will spent multiple episodes dealing with, and sometimes the show is content to hang out with the townsfolk for a chunk of episodes.
Some find this aspect frustrating, but it’s one of my favorite parts of the show. It’s a reminder that real life is happening on top of all the monster fighting and galactic warfare, and these sections feature some of the best character work of the show. Though the serialized aspects will eventually overtake the smaller character episodes, it always feels like there’s more to learn, whether it be about a galactic threat from the Gem home world or the band the girl at the donut shop forms. Everyone’s moving forward, making decisions that will effect their futures, and nobody is immune from change.
Both have different takes on their respective genres.
I’ve had a bone to pick with the fantasy genre for quite some time.
Okay, to be fair, I have a rather narrow view of the genre. My interactions with fantasy these days are limited to just about every medium that isn’t literature, be it video games or TV or whatever. All “fantasy” means to me lately is orcs, dragons, mages, elves, and every other fantasy trope we apparently haven’t been able to escape from since the ‘70s.
One could certainly argue that at its core, Adventure Time is a fantasy show. Or at least, it uses a lot of the language and common ideas of the genre. The presence of magic. Kingdoms and realms. Ancient races. On the surface, it certainly looks and acts like fantasy.
But under what genre we file Adventure Time is a harder question than it seems. This show takes place in a world built on top of our own. In fact, it might even been built on top of our future. Remnants of the old world not only appear in this world, but there are certain people who are still alive from before the Mushroom War, and there’s still an active knowledge of what these remnants are and how they work.
There is, for example, BMO. (For those of you who haven’t seen the show, it’s pronounced “Beam-o,” not as initials.) BMO is a walking video game console. He is also, among many other things, an artificial intelligence that doesn’t exist in our modern society. He has feelings, and while his programming dictates his personality be a certain way, he’s capable of making his own decisions and doing whatever he wants.
So, is Adventure Time science fiction? Or maybe it’s apocalyptic fiction? Maybe it’s fantasy and a mixture of all things, and hey, why not throw in coming-of-age or psychedelic film into the mix while you’re at it.
What genre or genres the show falls under is up to you. The point isn’t to convince you of one thing or another. It’s to simply say that there’s a different way of doing fantasy and science fiction and all these genres than what we’ve seen before on TV. Though we’re reaching a point where there’s more experimentation in mainstream media with all these ideas, it often feels like we’re still stuck in a rut. We can make fantasy shows that don’t look like what we typically think of as “fantasy.”
As for Steven Universe, like most examples so far, it’s a bit more restrained.
I watched the first season of the show. Then the second. In all that time, the question of genre never popped into my head. Maybe it’s more a question of what I’ve been exposed to, but it didn’t really look like anything I’ve ever enjoyed up to this point. Then in the beginning of season three, it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve been watching a superhero show this whole time. Specifically, it was this scene from the third episode of the season, “Same Old World.”
Most superhero fiction takes place in cities. That way, the superheroes have more people to guard, as well as higher stakes if they don’t succeed at stopping their villains. (Cities also provide a number of practical and aesthetic solutions. You usually don’t see Spider-Man in Los Angeles because there are barely any skyscrapers to swing from.) Steven Universe takes place in Beach City, a small beach town based on the Delmarva area of Delaware. (An area my family still vacations every summer!) So when I saw the image of a being flying above a city, that’s when it clicked. “Right! Superheroes!”
I’m sure some of you already figured out that Steven Universe is a superhero show. After all, it’s fairly obvious once you think about it and as I said earlier, the Crystal Gems have superpowers. However, Steven Universe doesn’t operate like most superhero shows. It doesn’t look like what superhero shows or movies traditionally look like and it doesn’t have the usual kind of superhero characters.
Most superhero media stars manly men with ripped abs and hairlines that will clearly never recede. Steven Universe stars a young shy boy and three queer coded women. Most superhero franchises are all too eager to give you the hero’s origin story. Steven Universe deliberately withholds this information for multiple episodes and seasons. Most superhero stories deal with fighting a villain. The characters in Steven Universe frequently have something to fight, but just as much time is spent solving normal everyday problems and conflicts. It’s just as much a show about learning to communicate and be empathetic than it is about ending space dictatorships and interstellar war.
Both of these shows encourage us to rethink what we’ve seen before, and encourage us to look at things in a new way. You can probably see where this conclusion’s going. So for now, I intend to continue going down this cartoon hole. As I write this, I’m on season six of Regular Show. I don’t have as much fondness for it as I do with Adventure Time or Steven Universe. But I’m still learning a lot.
