Cartoons Revolutionary Socialists should watch with their kids: The Return

When the mainline of a particular modern cartoon series was due to finish because of an early cancellation back in 2018, 7 years ago now (notwithstanding the four subsequent feature length episodes that delivered the real denouement to the series or the explicitly for adults sequel/successor that is currently in its second season) I made a bold claim on my socials. That was that the show in its entirety constituted one of the great works of narrative art of the modern age and ought to be studied in future years, centuries, millennia even the way we now study Shakespeare’s Theatre, The Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, The Táin etc. It was a bit of an extreme take but I stand by it now as firmly as I did then, even more so considering the excellence of the subsequent material from the team attached to the IP. 

So, before we get into the “whys” of all of that, lets have a quick word about why I’m writing about this now.

Fans of the blog may recall that in the distant past we had an occasional series wherein I would do a quick breakdown of children’s animated series and films from or adjacent to my own youth that contained progressive, even revolutionary, leftist themes and ideas. Little did I know in 2012 not having children of my own that the world of children’s entertainment was going through a minor revolutionary upheaval of its own.

What I had intended to do was after the most recent of these (name link) was to do a couple more and then finish on a particular series that wasn’t remotely political but had an incredible surrealist chaotic tip to it that I very much enjoyed and vibed to when I was a child. Unfortunately the creator and show runner of the series was subsequently outed as a creep of the highest order and I can no longer in good conscience support or platform any of their work. I wouldn’t even say the name of the person or the work that they are synonymous with. 

It was a blow and something that took a while getting over. Knowing that was on the horizon didn’t make me feel much like coming back to the series, even though it was one that I liked doing and a small part of the reason why this thing is so sparse. 

That said, we have up until a few years ago been living through what will probably come to be seen as a golden age in children and young adults animated media, especially long form episodic series for the small screen. From about the start of the 2010s to a few years ago when the Cartoon Network that was arguably the driving force for this shuttered, there was a marked spike in the quality and variety of these shows. The whole story of what this was and what happened to essentially kill it are a whole story and too long a one for me to want to go into right now, a post for another time probably. Suffice to say that I have got enough things to talk about to potentially keep me going for some time.

To begin with I’d like to start with what is in my opinion the best of these series, and also the foundational one of the era. It has proven to be both a masterpiece in itself and also a training ground for many other creators who would go on to do their own works which I will also be covering in future instalments.

So what time is it? 

Adventure Time!

(So at this point in these articles I usually split things into three sections, What’s It About, Why Its Good and What the kids will hopefully take from it. I have found that with Adventure time giving a reasonably explanation for what its about inevitably leads into explaining the others so I’ll just get stuck in)

Initially at least Adventure Time is about the adventures of Finn the Human and his stretchy dog Jake. They live in a tree house in the grasslands of the land of Ooo. The nearest civilisation is the Candy Kingdom where the candy people live ruled by the Princess Bubblegum with whom Finn has a romantic interest. There’s a Vampire Queen called Marceline who the MCs become friends with, along with other characters like Tree Trunks the elderly cute little elephant and the seemingly superficial valleygirl-accented Lumpy Space Princess. Their main antagonist is the Ice King, an Ice Wizard who likes to steal princesses who Finn and Jake inevitably rescue. Most of the stories in the first season are very simple stand alone fables, very straight forwards and just looking to entertain. The show is for young children but pitched in a way that any adults watching will get a good laugh out of the humour. 

That’s how it all starts, at some point though things start getting more complex. During the production of season one the tale grows in the making, an episode suggests that the world is not just a whacky fantasy that happens to have one human in it, but that it’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland on earth some centuries past a catastrophic “Mushroom War”. Between seasons 1 and 2 it’s decided that the silliness in the first season is actually building a world with a consistent cannon. Locations are returned to, throwaway gags become or are retconned into setup for stuff that happens seasons later. There is a subtle shift in the writing in that the characters start getting fleshed out and dimensions to otherwise pretty simple archetypes get added. The Ice King gets a backstory and becomes one of the richest and most interesting characters in the show. 

This MF'r

Around season 3 you start getting episodes that aren’t focused on Finn and Jake. Thank You is the first one of these and is told almost completely visually. We start getting episodes that are explorations of different ideas and concepts that the writers find interesting. As the series progresses the complexity in all senses levels up each year. It basically grows up with its audience. You get episodes in the late run that go from one week being an exploration of big brands and consumer capitalism to Crowleian Hermeneutics the next. Finn grows onscreen physically from the start, getting drawn a little bit physically larger as the early seasons progress. The voice actor was a literal child himself at the start, you can literally hear his voice breaking. The character also develops emotionally as we go on too. Some of the plots of the early episodes play his naivety and youthful enthusiasm and immaturity as a positive, in season three towards the end we get My Way which is a corrective to this and he learns that his particular approach isn’t always the best and that’s okay. This stays as part of Finn for the duration. Finn’s ongoing quest for romantic partnership is an ongoing feature of the show as well as his quest for identity as the apparently last human in a world thriving with other forms of life become drivers of the overarching season-long stories that we get later on. Marceline’s centuries long backstory which ties in to a lot of the backstory of the world itself is filled out in a 7-parter that is partially based on some of the major arcana of the Tarot and is some of the finest storytelling in the animated format ever. The real main antagonist of the series gets unleashed and our heroes end up travelling across space and time and into other dimensions to fight it. Jake becomes a Dad and the trials and travails of fatherhood become a feature of his story line. BMO, the cute little robot character that lives with Finn and Jake has a psychotic break. There’s a handful of episodes that are legit short horror and genuinely unsettling. 

We get episodes that are shorts compilations where you have to guess the theme that connects each of them. There’s the Fionna and Cake episodes where the characters are gender swapped. There’s even one of the shorts episodes set in the gender swapped universe where there’s a gag involving layers upon layers of layers of abstraction that is as mind blowing as it is hilarious.

The ruling classes, as per Adventure Time

The general sensibility behind Adventure Time is not quite overtly socialist but it is definitely anti-capitalist. Jake, when explaining how society works to Finn opines in a typically abstracted way what is a not unreasonable rendering primitive accumulation and the rise of the ruling class and the law in a way that is readily understandable to the target audience:

"The laws ain’t made to help earthy cats like us… Here on our planet, back in the old days—back in the real old days—it was just every man for hisself, scrooblin' and scrat-scrobblin' for the good stuff, the greenest valleys, and scrat-scrobblin'. And the strongest, meanest men got the best stuff. They got the green valleys and were like, "The rest of you, y'all scrats get sand. And that’s when they made the laws you see."

Jake The Dog, Season 6 Episode 12 ‘Ocarina’

The whole thing is definitely very much animated by a left liberal-hippy ethos. It is feminist, it’s very much pitched against the toxic masculinity you get in standard hero narratives. It’s very queer friendly, there’s a canonically homosexual relationship which builds from the midpoint of the series onwards. There's a lot of environmentalist messaging in certain parts too.

If you’re starting to watch it as a young-ish kid around the time of season 1 or 2 you were essentially growing up with the show. This is why I would personally recommend for any adults I know with young children that if you are going to follow my advice here and watch it with your kids that you stagger the seasons. I feel like if you’re starting off with it with children who are age appropriate for the first couple of seasons the later seasons are going to be a bit too weird and abstract, unless they’re precociously smart and this is the thing that’s going to unlock their media literacy for the rest of their lives, which it well could. If you’re starting with kids who are the right age for the later seasons they might bounce off the earlier more kiddie stuff in the first couple. This is why I would also personally advise you to get it on physical. The one legal streaming service that its on in the UK at least butchers or outright bans some of the episodes that have some of the darker or more implicitly adult humour. This shouldn’t be an issue for the home releases, though do check since some of the UK release randomly miss important episodes. 

There are 10 seasons of varying length and 4 40+ minute short films that fill out the run. These last were originally broadcast out of order, though they stand alone pretty well and it doesn’t quite matter what order they’re done in as long as you finish on Together Again as that was clearly intended as the capstone and canonical end of the series as it ties up Finn and Jake’s story and the themes of the whole show. 

We also got a spin off series called Fionna and Cake about the gender swapped universe that is explicitly for adults. It’s great, again it levels up in real time with the original audience of Adventure Time. It starts off in something approaching the real world with a 20-somethig Fionna living in a crappy apartment in an unnamed city with a seemingly perfectly normal cat going from one bullshit job to another. By the time we get to Ooo we see things we didn’t get to see in the show, like the characters bleeding after a fight and using money. The second episode is a self-conscious criticism and deconstruction of one episode from the old series about dealing with trauma. It is clever and playful as the show was at its best and is thankfully currently ongoing. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone over 15 though.

That’s about as much as I think I can or want to say without going into too much granular detail. If I feel like it I might come back to the well and do some deep dive on particular episodes, like the aforementioned one about brands that is essentially No Logo condensed into a ten minute mostly silent childrens cartoon, or the Scrat Scroblin’. I really hope I haven’t over egged the more complex or adult elements of the show to the point where people have the impression that it goes too far or is ever not child friendly. For all of that it never stops being bright and funny. Even the horror episodes tend to end on a joke. It helps that each episode only runs for ten minutes. I think anyone whatever age will get a lot out of it.

My #31daysofhalloween challenge 2025

 31 days of Halloween, 2024

Keeping up my yearly tradition of sharing the various films and spooky / horror media I’ve been enjoying over October, usually averaging about 1 per day. This year I have been in a bit of a slump but I did hit my target and did some other stuff that’s seasonably relevant, which I’ll get into. 

But first the movies:

1. Brimstone and Treacle (1982) – this was the movie version of the incredible Play for Today from the 70s by Denis Potter that was subsequently banned for being genuinely unsettling and narking off the TV Censors of the day with its themes of religious obsession and sexual exploitation. It was an undisputed classic but wouldn’t see the light of day to a mass audience until the 1990s. This film was an attempt to cash in on the controversy and get something out so people could at least see a version of it. Of the two despite better production standards this is the inferior version. The whole thing is dumbed down, the whole thing is dumbed down for a mass audience and the sexual element is amped up to being genuinely icky and exploitative. Also, whoever decided to recast the main character as Sting should have been shot.

2. Netherworld (1992) – Unmemorable cheap ropey American horror. 

3. Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025) – This was a lot of fun. Part of a Netflix series based on the RL Stein YA horror books, it’s a stand alone and just goes ham on the 80s setting and slasher tropes. Its 1988 and someone is killing the prom queens in a small town high school, does what it says on the tin. Good crack.

4. Time Of The Wolf (2003) – Definitely one of the classier things I saw over the season. Michael Hanneke doing a post apocalypse. The nature of the crisis is not apparent, there’s no world building just a clear societal collapse and focus on character. We follow one family unit as they try to make their way through the world and survive as best they can. Bleak.

5. Extraordinary Tales (2013) – This is a delightful animated feature taking audio of 5 Edgar Allen Poe stories and setting them to creepy gothic animation. Solid.

6. Mermaid Forest (1991) – classic OVA period anime based on Japanese mythology around their mermaid lore. Nice and suitably creepy but if you like this sort of thjing try and find a torrent or stream for the full uncut version which is not the one that’s on Youtube.

7. Ginger Snaps (2000) – first rewatch of the season, still as great as it ever was. This is just a very cool idea executed really well, the style is iconic and the young cast rinse all the pathos out of the scenario that you could ever want.

8. Fréwaka (2024) – I managed to miss this in the pictures the one showing that it had. Really good to catch up, we need more bleak elevated horror As Gaeilgé and this did us proud. Nice creepy one.

9. Invoking Yell (2023) – Yous know I like to hit each continent at least once when I’m doing these. This was our South American film of the year and tho looking okay on paper it wasn’t much to write home about. A Blair Witch-esque FF horror about a bunch of metallers trying to get some spooky field recordings for their mix tape ought to have been great but this was poorly executed and just boring.

10. Hell and Back (2015) – Stop motion horror, couple of stoner dudes doing Orpheus with Bob Odenkirk as the devil. Again sounds like a better time on paper than it actually was. A lot of shitty bro-y humour, probably of interest and worth only as a time capsule of dumb edgy-boy comedy just before #MeToo. 

11. Abigail (2025) – Dumb trashy blockbuster horror, best going in unspoiled as all the promotional material gives far too much away. Like the reveal as to whats happening is 45 minutes into this 1hour 40 minute film. Turn your brain off, enjoy, it’s a good ride.

12. V/H/S/Beyond (2024) – I got Shudder again this year so I got to catch up on this sci-fi volume of the ongoing anthology series. A bit hit and miss but the last few sections were pretty good.

13. Basket Case (1982) – A classic that I got to introduce my mum and sister to. We all had a great time. My Ma enjoyed it a lot and has recommended it to other people too. Will now see if can’t coax them to watch the sequels with me.

14. Frank and Zed (2020) – As far as low budget animated projects made by essentially one guy doing it all in his basement and garage nights and weekends around the day job go, its grand. Charming even. It feels churlish to say that the writing isn’t great and its not “good” per say in general considering but eh, ‘tis what it is.

15. To Your Last Death (2019) – A corporate exec sets his fuck-up children against each other in a death game in a high rise office to see which, if any are worthy of getting the keys to the big office and run things after he retires. This is why I need to be hard on Frank and Zed. This is an animated indie feature that seems to have been mostly funded online and it absolutely rocks, no excuses no qualifications. Good cast, well written, animation isn’t spectacular but it does the job. Some very inventive kills and very memorable twists and turns. 

16. Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004) – direct sequel to the previous one. My first time watching and it does not disappoint. Adds to and deepens the mythos around the series and the angsty queer stuff in the subtext. Great series in general nice to get fully onboard with it.

17. The Devil’s Work (2023) – This was the Australian movie from the month. A home invasion film mostly done as a 1er with the USP being that the monster is the sister of the girl from the couple getting stalked and potentially murdled. I just didn’t get on with it, too much faffing about in the dark.

18. Head Count (2018) – the Horrors of partying with people you don’t know that well! Nice idea, execution was lacking. Not scary or fun.

19. PG: Psycho Goreman (2020) – Loved it as much as the first time I saw it. Had fun introducing my sister to it which considering that it really is all about family seems appropriate. Basically ET or Mac and Me but the main kid is a sociopathic bullying weirdo and the alien is an all powerful evil warlord and it’s the best.

20. Dachra (2018) – This was our African film for the month. Never seen any sort of film from Tunisia before. This was interesting, based on North African superstitions around witchcraft but seems to run deeper as some sort of commentary on life in Tunis post Arab Spring. I wish I knew more about the culture and what’s been happening since the revolution because it comes off as quite generic and somewhat conservative and pro-fundamentaist Islam in the messaging.

21. Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) – 1800s set prequel with the same lead actresses. That kind of doesn’t make sense but its fine, very well done vintage frontier horror. This was a great series of films, would recommend, may rewatch.

22. MadS (2024) – recommended to me by my friend Jason Mills. Its quite good, another “horrors of partying” film that asks, what if you’re having a bad time on trippy gear but its all real (or is it tho?) again done mostly as a 1er but this all just clicked and worked rather well in ways the films I watched earlier this month that attempted those things didn’t quite. Yes, very good, worth catching.

23. The Stuff (1985) – another rewatch where I got to introduce it to the fam. Classic but jesus don’t watch the cut that’s on Shudder, must have been edited for TV showings in the day or something because it feels weird and like there’s a bunch of stuff missing.

24. V/H/S/Halloween (2025) – This years one! And its themed around Halloween so there’s a bit of trick-or-treating and some really grim stuff done to and by children! If that turns you off fair enough, some are sensitive to those things. I personally enjoyed it, a good combo of the edgy modern youtube horror culture with FF and has a fair few bits that will stay with me.

25. The Devil’s Path (2024) – German Language historical gothic, based on real accounts of actual events. Basically, if you were suicidal according to Christian theology you can’t just kill yourself since you’ll end up in hell as suicide is a sin itself and you can’t get absolution. So some people rather than be put off by all that used the loophole that if you kill someone else and confess to it the state will execute you and give you last rights before so you do definitely get to heaven. This was heavily gendered as these were mostly desperate women and their victims were generally children in their care. Grim eh? Well aye, that’s how it was and this film does a good job of depicting the personal / psychological, cultural and social context.

26. Spoonful of Sugar (2022) – Oh dear, we’re at the point with “Elevated Horror” where we’re getting By The Numbers iterations of the Horrors Of Fucked-up Families and thats what we’re getting here. 

27. The Being (1983) – nice old school creature feature with a good cast and some dope practical SFX. Basically jaws but in a small potato orientated town in the mid west.

28. Golem (1979) – Polish “horrors of living behind the Iron Curtain” sci-fi horror. Its similar to Possession in that our removal from the original context and what is being satirised makes it impenetrable and frustratingly inscrutable though certainly memorable.

29. Bloodsuckers (2021) – Not even sure if this counts as a horror film or even adjacent. It’s a mannered satire about communism that takes the lines from Capital about the Vampiric nature of capitalism as a basis with some light implications of real vampirism in the story. I enjoyed it because I’m a nerd for this sort of thing, Eisenstein shows up in it as a character ffs, not sure how many other people I know would like it.

30. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) – we lost an absolute legend this year. RIP David Lynch, one of the best to ever do it. The last time I saw this I was a teenager and hadn’t seen any of the series, watching it again now, I can absolutely see why people were generally baffled and frustrated but I enjoyed it a whole lot. Poor Laura! 

31. I wanted to cap the month off by rewatching Sinners and showing it to my Dad at least, who is a big Blues fan, but he’s been busy and I couldn’t get him to sit and watch a 2 hour film with me on the day or any other I tried him. So instead I dipped again into the extended To Watch list and watched a new Irish film All You Need is Death (2023). This is about Irish traditional music and musicologists getting in over their heads collecting unheard and nearly forgotten tunes back in troubles era rural Ireland. The soundtrack is done by Ian Lynch of Lynched / Lankum, Darragh is in the film, as are members of The Mary Wallopers. Naturally, all that is the best part of the film, which does the typical horror thing of starting well with a creepy set of ideas and visual conceits but not quite sticking the landing re. taking it all somewhere. So imperfectly executed as the last act might be I’d say its still worth seeing just on that basis.

Other visual media:

Netflix actually came up a blinder by showing a pretty decent wee horror comedy series Haunted Hotel. A woman co-runs a Shining style haunted hotel with her Brothers ghost, there are supernatural hijinks etc. Good fun. I also got recommended a Polish indie animated horror series Bad Exorcist which probably makes more sense and is funnier / more relatable if you are polish or familiar with the culture. Still pretty good without that. I also rewatched Over The Garden Wall and aye, still great. Cutesy YA Autumnal spookiness that just happens to match with The Divine Comedy’s circles of hell each episode. Great voice cast too.

Reads:

Wasn’t reading as much as usual this year. I read Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica that came out in its native Argentina in 2017 but since getting published in English at the start of this decade has developed a cult following online. It’s easy to see why, a meatless, animal-less dystopia where people that supposedly don’t have a consciousness are used as cattle and treated the way we treat animals in the meat industry IRL. Reads like vegan agitprop. Its well written and relentlessly grim. Decent enough, not quite my bag though. I also started reading but haven’t finished the latest Chuck Tingle non-tingler Lucky Day (2025) which is very good so far. It’s about probability and the central theme of the horrors of being hit by the random unfairness of existence is very resonant to me right now. I have also started and am still reading through Back For Good the collected EC Ray Bradbury collaborations, and most of the ones I’ve been through so far are his work on the Tales From The Crypt and adjacent lines. These are a whole lot of fun and its cool getting them all in one volume with supplementary materials (including a short bit by Greg Bear about Bradbury’s involvement in the fandom / convention culture in California during his lifetime). 

So that’s been basically it. If anyone else has been watching or reading anything fun please comment. Happy Halloween!