Adventure Time

About Adventure Time

Adventure Time began as a seven-minute short that Nickelodeon passed on, and became the show that reset what a children's cartoon was allowed to be. Pendleton Ward's premise is deliberately thin — a boy and his talking dog wander a candy-coloured landscape — and the thinness is the point, because it leaves room for the series to drift wherever it wants. Over ten seasons it turned out that the pastel kingdom sits on the ruins of a nuclear war, that its most comic figure is a man destroyed by a cursed crown, and that the show was willing to spend entire episodes on grief with no jokes in them. Cartoon Network gave storyboard artists unusual authority over their own episodes, which is why the tone swings so hard from one week to the next and why so many of its artists went on to run shows of their own.

Storyboard artists were given unusual control over their own episodes, which is the direct cause of the show's week-to-week tonal swing.

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