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.