‘Adventure Time: The Complete Season One’ Review
Unless you’ve seen Adventure Time it’s hard to explain exactly what it is, because it’s not just a cartoon, it’s an experience. It’s like your brain has taken a sugar overdose and gone on the craziest hyperactive journey it could think up. When watching Adventure Time: The Complete Season One for review, I found after I’d made it through the discs I was ready to go straight back to the beginning and watch them all again… and that is the magic of Adventure Time.
The basic idea for Adventure Time is that it takes Finn the human boy and Jake the wise dog who are the best of friends and in each episode they go on an adventure. This could be meeting characters such as Princess Bubblegum or Marceline but also battling others like Ice King whose obsession with kidnapping princesses. Each episode has a typical moralistic message to teach, but it’s done in a more surreal and twisted way, pointing out that sometimes you can’t always be nice to people or it’ll end up with you getting hurt, and just because somebody is picking on walking talking houses doesn’t mean that they should be stopped.
Adventure Time is a little dose of happiness in a cartoon episode, for kids it’s pure adventure and for adults it’s a trip back to being a child, it wakes up that inner child who screams to get out. Exploring the Land of Ooo is one of the best representations of a child’s imagination. We’ve got the cute side with Princess Bubblegum, the evil side with the Ice King and even the darker side with Marceline. All of these characters and others are all pretty much childlike themselves, you won’t find any adult who acts like an adult, and they all have their eccentricities. It’s pretty much a cartoon that says hey… let’s just have fun.
Of course all cartoons made for kids must teach morals right? Adventure Time does this in a twisted way. Instead of taking the easy route like “this is why you don’t throw stoness at the old woman’s window” Adventure Time would take the route of why didn’t you break the magical windows of the evil witch? It’s all about not taking things at face value. This is something that we do learn in the real world, but not many cartoons are smart enough to bring up. Finn often finds himself in situations where he has to be the hero, because that is his duty. This duty then of course gets him into trouble, and that’s because being the constant hero is his weakness. You can’t save everybody, because sometimes it’s not about being saved.
The nice thing about watching Adventure Time: The Complete Season One is that you are getting to see the first introduction of the characters and sometimes their first encounter with Finn and Jake. Marceline’s episodes for example are an introduction of her character and then another episode to introduce the fact that yes, she may seem evil but that’s just the way she likes to appear. It’s nice to see the friendship form for the first time.
For fans of Adventure Time I don’t even need to recommend that they buy Adventure Time: The Complete Season One because they’ll have made that choice already. For people who have not discovered the beauty of the Land of Ooo though I would say that this is the perfect way to get an introduction. Once you’ve started watching you’ll never want to stop.
