Hacker Cinema
Adventure Time
2010 · TV series · 11 min episodes · 10 seasons
Created by Pendleton Ward
AnimationComedyScience FictionFantasy
Young Finn and his shape-shifting dog buddy, Jake, go on a series of surreal adventures as they journey through the postapocalyptic Land of Ooo.
24 positive1 negative1 mixed20 neutralfrom 46 commenters
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49 comments on Hacker News
Well, I'm interested, will be neat to see what the actual result is. For context, they are an established artist with a very interesting style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_OReilly_(artist) maybe most well known by people here for the video game Everything (and the Adventure Time episode _A Glitch Is a Glitch_)
Roblox is leading the charge, makes me think of the Adventure Time episode where Beemo goes into the VR pod
> We don’t need a “safer” alternative for damaging their cognitive development.
By Safer, I meant like some educational content or shows which are genuinely good fwiw. So I grew up watching Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. So curating shows like those and channels say veritasium or some Vsauce videos.
My question was that, can there not be a human volunteer curated group effort to find some decent channels from Youtube which are nice/safe for kids.
Calling the whole of youtube channels as bad might be unwise as well and mix some of it with cartoons and just having an archive/tag designed for it so that either an app or even you yourself could look at the archive tags and see which channels the videos are from and cartoons and just a more collective human effort into making a small library of things that are safe for kids?
Because kids will watch Youtube someday and they will hear about it from their friends and feel left out. You then trust that something like YT kids might work only to realize that it doesn't. Even something like rss list of those channels with something like freetube could be good as well fwiw.
What do you even recommend that people watch? I used to watch cartoon network for many hours growing up watching shows like beyblade and pokemon and Adventure Time etc. but it seems that cartoon network itself is nowadays struggling compared to Youtube kids :/
there definitely should be more to why/how Youtube kids is so prevalent. one can say bad parenting but I have seen good parents slip up in this case. They think its harmless. There's defintiely more to it (imho)
Plenty of incredible works of art and story telling use glitch art to evoke feelings and notions of "brokenness" or surreality. Some pieces that come to mind are Adventure Time S5E15: A Glitch is a Glitch, created by artist David OReilly[0] and the music video for A$AP Mob - Yamborghini High made by editor Uncle Luc[1].
This of course doesnt even begin to touch on the influences glitch art has had on music and audio - it's arguable that glitch art has its origins in printing, photography/film, and in electronic music, but most deliberate uses of "glitches" as artistic vehicles tended to arise during the early eras of electronic music production. Rosa Menkman speaks in depth about the origins of glitch art in the music scene in her paper The Glitch Moment(um)[2].
0. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/25/datamoshing-land-ooo-conversation-david-oreilly/
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt7gP_IW-1w
2. https://mediarep.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/b16c898a-c6b8-465a-bb15-de239f73b348/content
Some are for sure, but a lot of those shows hold up well for all ages. I don't put much faith in marketers to decide which shows are for what demographics. Better to see what lands for yourself. It helps when you're watching and discussing the shows with your kids too.
Some of them, Adventure time being a great example, can appeal to very young kids but they'll find new meaning in those episodes as they get older.
I think shows like Infinity Train, Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Steven Universe, and Samurai Jack will be better after a kid is old enough that Cocomelon wouldn't hold any appeal, but even at that age Sarah & Duck, Hilda, MLP, Craig of the Creek, etc could still be good. Just about anything that holds their attention and isn't Cocomelon is a huge win. If you'll enjoy it, all the better.
I'm not sure there's ever been more options for good shows that a parent can watch and genuinely enjoy with their kids. Try Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Hilda, Sarah & Duck, Adventure Time, Miraculous, The Dragon Prince, MLP Friendship is Magic, She-Ra and the Princess of Power, Samurai Jack, Gravity Falls, Ducktales (the new one, but the old one isn't bad either), Cleopatra in Space, Amphibia, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Owl House, Craig of the Creek, Steven Universe, LEGO Elves, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Over the Garden Wall, Infinity Train, and the Disney Fairies movies.
I'd also recommend getting your hands on the cartoons you enjoyed as a kid. Odds are good your kids will like them for the same reasons you did, although you may find that they don't all hold up for you.
I really liked the ending of the series a lot; I thought the final two episodes tied together the loose ends I cared about and finished on a theme that really highlighted the core messages of the show. To me, it was exactly the ending I wanted for the show. When they announced Distant Lands, I immediately felt annoyed, because I thought "they're going to take a nearly perfect ending and risk ruining it by adding more crap to it??"
Initially I wasn't going to watch Distant Lands because I was afraid it might tarnish the series for me, but eventually I caved and was surprised to find that it a) didn't do anything to ruin the original ending, and b) actually had interesting ideas to share that the show is better for having. I thought Obsidian and Together Again really did a great job continuing the series in such a way that it didn't negate anything I loved about the original show, and posed some more interesting thematic elements about the characters. I don't know if it's Pendleton or someone else in the Cartoon Network staff, but whomever is in charge of Adventure Time really seems to know what they're doing. I get the impression that they will only allow a new thing to be added to the franchise if it has a good reason to exist.
Fionna and Cake did a great job maturing the series a bit, without it being gratuitous. It ended so well that I'm a bit concerned that they renewed it for a second season, but I've been wrong twice before and I'm cautiously optimistic that they'll keep up the quality.
I’ve noticed something strange on my iTunes account recently - missing tv shows I absolutely remember buying at one point, but nowhere to be seen now.
One I remember is “Adventure Time”. Just now searched my email and found receipts from iTunes Store for “Adventure Time Vol 1” dated 22 Nov 2013. I see receipts for the other seasons of the show too, they were not rentals as far as I’m aware. Then sometime in last few years the content disappeared from my account and devices. In fact I just opened up iTunes Store now, found the Adventure Time series still available on iTunes, but it’s asking to pay and saying I don’t have. This is exactly same AppleID I used 10 years ago to buy this content ugh.
I have over 400 movies, and about 30 complete TV series. Ripping movies isn't so bad, takes about 40 minutes on my laptop, but ripping TV series is a huge pain in the ass.
Episodes appear to be stored in no particular order on Blu-ray, so I end up having to open the video file, pray for a title card, and match that against an episode order list on Wikipedia.
For some shows (like most British shows) this isn't too bad, since there's a very small number of episodes so re-ripping doesn't take too long. For other shows (e.g. Adventure Time), there's a million episodes, and correctly labeling them takes a lot of effort that I do not want to duplicate.
The thing is...I have re-ripped all my blu-rays. Twice. Because I didn't know what I was doing with ZFS and kept breakingu cluster. I don't really want to do it again.
oh this is good, very good.
are you able to tell me anything even more basic of how play works? The inspiration for this is a combination of the Adventure Time episode Card Wars, and seeing, but never playing pokemon cards.
What are super-organisms thoughts on:
turns vs simultaneous play, external tracking of health points v everything is encoded in the cards and their placement? A sequence of small battles v building a position that creates a victory condition?
Reminds me of Adventure Time Season 4, episode 10: Goliad
https://adventuretime.fandom.com/wiki/Goliad_(episode)
(Spoilers follow)
> Princess Bubblegum is concerned over her mortality, and reveals her designated successor to Finn and Jake. However, things get out of control when the heir turns against Princess Bubblegum.
> […] The heir is Goliad, a pink Sphinx with a mound on her forehead […]
> […] Goliad reveals that her mound concealed a third eye, and proceeds to psychically control Finn and the obstacles in the course for a perfect completion. She explains that with her in control, everything would be perfect. […]
> […]
> […] Finn and Jake confront Goliad but are beaten by her psychic powers. Goliad tries to read Finn's mind, and Finn narrowly avoids revealing the plan by interrupting his memories with nonsense. The new creature; another sphinx with an eagle's head, white feathers, and golden hair; rescues Finn and battles Goliad. Goliad tries to convince her brother, named Stormo, that they should work together, but Stormo refuses by screeching. They engage in a psychic showdown, but with their powers matched the two creatures are eternally locked in a mental stalemate.
This seems like a plot of an Adventure Time episode.
Perhaps this is really stupid and juvenile, but the show Adventure Time had an episode where one of the characters said “sucking at something is the first step to being kind of god at something.” I think that’s an important lesson a lot of people should learn. Going out and sucking it up is awesome if it means you’re getting better at something.
Depends on the content. For popular crap that I'm probably going to delete later I generally go for the 10-15GB option as finding a decent rip at a lower file size can be annoying (Latest marvel movies, etc). If something is sufficiently obscure or visually stunning I'll normally keep it at 10-15GB rips depending on the source material (Obscure horror movies, Dune). For regular stuff that I still want to have a copy of but that is popular enough I'm not worried it's going to disappear I go for the smaller versions (The expanse, adventure time).
Right now one of the biggest things on disk are a bunch of Boston Legal episodes. I have family that enjoy it, and I'm too lazy to find a good small release so it's taking up more space than it needs to.
I try to get HEVC encoded video where possible, and when I know there's a particular release group that produces high-quality I'll set up tags to prefer them.
You see this in lots of long-play shows/properties. Adventure Time comes to mind. A number of seemingly irrelevant details become central to the main plot in much later episodes (years/seasons later).
I am wondering, however, whether there is some sort of plot bible that lives with the “keepers” of the storyline, or whether some details are just randomly sprinkled here and there as hooks with the hope that writers will weave them into the future plot.
Either way, this type of writing is extremely rewarding to long-time fans of a show.
why are bicycles nonexistant on post-apocalyptic stories?
Bikes are present (and maybe even integral to) some post-apocalyptic films like, Testament, Turbo Kid, The Stand. There are some media with no gas powered cars, like Adventure Time, and probably more.
However, for better or worse, Mad Max set the trope that the fight for fuel is often an interesting conflict. It's easy for a gas hungry viewing public to understand, at least!
I think on demand TV has a bit of a Skinner effect. You discover something awesome every once in a while, but most of the time it's trash, and you get frustrated looking for something really good. It doesn't help that a lot of Netflix productions have 20 episodes or so, of which only about 3 are really good.
Back in the day, you'd have your Simpsons and Power Rangers and just learn to enjoy it and talk about it with all your friends.
I think algorithms are built wrong too. We'd probably click on some show with a sexy model, or a rom-com twist on a zombie flick, or some reality cooking show with celebrities, or a gritty remake of a children's show. We don't really intend to watch it. But they pique curiousity and a little disgust. The algorithms register these clicks and long views as an "interest", and gives us more of these clickbait-ish shows.
I think what would work is simply narrowed down genres, say, Animation > Children > Horror (e.g. Adventure Time) or Animation > Adult > Tragicomedy (e.g. BoJack Horseman). Past that, just arrange at random, alphabetically, and not even by popularity.
I'd argue that the time period plays a more important role there than the gender, considering the kind of mobs I've seen on Tumblr and communities for TV shows (Steven Universe/Adventure Time/Gravity Falls comes to mind).
1) My first thought on reading this: 'LaTeX never seemed all that melancholic to me..." took a second to get reoriented
2) A lot of his films were favorites of mine in childhood, and I didn't know until much later that they shared a creator. Having said that, two of the disney movies mentioned here as not being so great, "The Fox and the Hound" and "The Great Mouse Detective," were also childhood favorites.
3) For anyone thinking "they don't make them like that anymore," I'd highly recommend you watch and then make it all the way through "Adventure Time." The Ice King's arc is as sad and haunting as anything in Bluth's works. Season 9 begins with the effects of PTSD, complete with auditory hallucinations.
I actually have a "whitelist" in advance of things that I'm allowed to procrastinate on. HN is on the whitelist, as well as Indie Hackers and Twitter (my Twitter is more a chore than entertainment).
Other things were calming games like Transport Giant, Stardew Valley, Recettear. Some TV series too, mostly cartoons like Futurama and Adventure Time. Don't do Rick & Morty, too addictive.
That way, even when I'm wasting time, I feel somewhat satisfied with the entertainment I get. A lot of entertainment doesn't actually raise your "fun" bar, YouTube being one of them.
I feel seriously remiss for forgetting Adventure Time now. Gravity Falls has been recommended to me before, though it escaped my memory since I've actually never seen it.
Even though it's a miniseries, I do feel like I should perhaps mention Over The Garden Wall for a few reasons: 1. More than once I've been told that if I liked Over the Garden Wall, I'd like Gravity Falls, 2. Over the Garden Wall was produced by Patrick McHale, creative director and frequent writer for Adventure Time, and 3. It's that damn good -- the basic story is presented simply enough that a kid mature enough to not get freaked out by spooky things would enjoy it, and there addition themes woven in that story that adults would enjoy it too (I know I did).
When I binge watch shows, specifically cartoons, I find that I can watch comfortably at 1.5x-2x speed.
I can't quite do this for movies, and I definitely do miss some jokes (e.g. in Bob's Burgers I miss the intro and food of the day gags) but for shows like Adventure Time, I feel like I absorb 99% of what is happening.
I would recommend giving it a shot. Start slow at 10% and work your way up. Stick to cartoons first. It is definitely a different experience, but personally, it's not a worse experience.
I'm sorry but I can't let this one slide. Yes, children have been subjected to a slew of execrable sitcoms but at least in the realm of cartoons children's there is much that is of high quality. Adventure Time, Gravity Falls and Steven Universe roundly refute "universally terrible". Even the 2000s had Avatar, Samurai Jack, early Spongebob and Fairly Odd Parents. Other than nostalgia and smugness, I can't find any justification for claiming that none of it was as "mentally stimulating" as the 90s given how equally rife with garbage the 90s were.
There's also a huge difference between telling a formulaic story with traditional style and some sort of sermon like moral statement, vs photographic memory of a "where's waldo" book.
For example, look at formulaic rebooted sequel Hollywood movies. Given less than a paragraph outline, you can recite the details of most movies pretty well. Consider the first Star Trek Reboot movie, doesn't that compress down to only a couple lines, even if you talk for hours about lens flare and pew-pew sound effects? The second reboot movie compresses down to perhaps one or two complete paragraphs worth of raw data, its at least twice as complicated as the first movie.
Something like the iconic original Star Wars was tight because it provided a new formula, a pretty cool formula, but within that formula which admittedly is difficult to learn, the story is also not terribly long.
I guess I'm getting at teach a Bard about Hollywood Star Wars films for awhile, then learning specific movies only takes one viewing and is easy to memorize.
If you know the Adventure Time world and in-jokes, each episode is like two lines of text to memorize, maybe.
They would have been more tolerable if there were more variety to the ads. For the last few days every YouTube video I've watched has been prefixed with the same unskippable ad, a 30-second spot for Lucky Charms cereal that wants so badly for you to think it's an episode of Adventure Time that you can smell the flop sweat from across the room.
If you're going to force me to watch the same ad over and over, at least make it an ad that doesn't make me want to claw my eyeballs out with a rusty razor blade.
Hi, I am the creator of RioFolio. You might have heard of the 'Done list' (Marc Andreessen comes to mind). I have unknowingly used a variation of it for several years, using pen-notepad-coins. For each good/productive action, I give myself points. Redeem rewards (eg 1 Adventure Time episode) with the accumulated points. Flip a coin, heads double the reward. I only recently found out that this is called 'gamification'.
Anyway, the simple system has helped me with overcoming social anxiety (greatest personal achievement), cold calling, my consulting business, motivation for exercising/studying/chores/brainstorming, creative projects, etc. I hope it benefits you too.
I've got a laptop that I hate using precisely because of it's awful trackpad. Anymore I use it only for watching old episodes of adventure time and playing sega genesis games.
Or the Adventure Time episode "Scamps" [0].
[0] http://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/Scamps
Reminds me of Adventure Time s04e10 "Goliad", though said episode is about a creature, not a robot.
an aside.. your link reminded of one of my favourite adventure time episodes: food chain(o); directed by masaaki yuasa
"to a plant, a day is short"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6DlinOXfZg
(o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Chain_(Adventure_Time)
I've got a large amount of extended family and married friends, so good shows like these are super helpful in positively connecting with their kids. And shared media interests is actually part of a large social aspect of public school.
> Steven Universe
This show works incredibly well. Especially since the episodes are short - a feature for parents as well as kids. Gravity Falls, as well, does a great job of being fun without trying to do much preaching. Of course, some of the adult fandom for these can be a bit ... enthusiastic, so I worry about whether the kids will be able to enjoy themselves at conventions and on the internet without getting caught up in the drama.
Both of these shows have also garnered approval from some parents with some pretty insane control issues, too. In situations like that, it's nice to be able to provide gateway entertainment to kids languishing under extreme supervision. I doubt I'm the only one who's had to deal with that. It's surprising how many parents unwittingly rob their kids of a childhood. Being a non-parent in some ways gives a more even perspective about loosening the grip on the kids and not taking everything so seriously.
Shows like Regular Show and Adventure Time are pretty good, but some parents reject them for being "too stupid". Yeah, there's juvenile behavior, but it's not all over. When introducing parents to these, I sometimes have to be particular about which episodes I start with, or they'll immediately reject it.
I've introduced teens to shows like Rick and Morty and Star vs. the Forces of Evil. Parents are generally more accepting of more edgy material at that age. And they're gonna push boundaries, so at least point them to the better quality shows. Anime has also gotten hugely popular in this recent generation, to the point that some of my nieces and nephews seem to literally breathe it. Streaming subscriptions help with that, though available shows vary by licensing deals and region. Hulu is one of the best for cartoons.
It's also amusing that the creators of these shows are the recent adults who grew up on the last generation of entertainment cartoons.
To be honest, while We Don't Have Cable(tm), some of the stuff I have seen on Cartoon Network was surprisingly good. Shows like Adventure Time are weird and funny, there was also a mini-series called Over The Garden Wall that was straight up fantastic.
Even stuff towards the more rubbish end of the spectrum, like Teen Titans Go, obviously has really good writers and is a lot of fun, at least for somewhat older kids and their parents.
Pretty much the last good episode of Adventure Time, as well. The shark jump happened shortly thereafter (begining of the next season).
SEEKING WORK (sort of!) - Based in Princeton, New Jersey, Mostly Remote Only
Hi, I'm Julius and I'm a freelance software developer. Currently, I'm booked through the rest of the year myself but I like to post here every month anyway just to connect with people.
Last month I also started a small agency here in NJ that is available for taking projects, should you be interested in that. We do more than just iOS, but we primarily focus on iOS apps and APIs for startups. We <3 (seed-funded/pre-series A) startups!
--
As for me, I spent a few years at Fitocracy in NYC and built both of their apps. Both of them were featured by Apple on multiple occasions.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fitocracy-workout-exercise/id509253726?mt=8
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fitocracy-macros-how-much/id786388273?mt=8
--
I launched RunSwift last year for running Swift code in your browser. That was really fun to build. http://runswiftlang.com
This year I built Chicago startup Charlie's new iOS app. You may have seen the launch hit #1 on Product Hunt last month, that was pretty cool!
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/charlie-impress-anyone-you/id986891498?mt=8
http://www.producthunt.com/tech/charlie-for-ios
--
Currently, I'm working with a local NJ startup for a Fall 2015 launch and on getting my agency up and running. It has been a great year so far!
My website: http://www.juliusparishy.com/app-development
Feel free to reach out to chat about your project or just say hi.
--
I also welcome emails discussing the latest episodes of Adventure Time.
Yes, I'm serious.
Email: hello@juliusparishy.com
This is a ideological/philosophical opinion piece scantily clad as an article about something. I know that the author doubtlessly regards his premises as well-founded, but he does not seek to validate these foundations for the reader; he is writing solely for an audience that already shares his opinions.
Initially he brushes against the notion that hacking may have grown, as an activity, due to the geometric (?) progression of connectivity, and that the phenomena he is describing is the demise of the 'collective', as a species, rather than the demise of hacking itself. This is sort of a bizarre moment in the essay, because he immediately forgets the notion and plunges into an ideopathological rumination of the decline of creativity and the destruction of collective will by a search for unique individual identity under the oppressive circumstance of the capitalist/existential philosophical apparatus.
I describe it thusly to give the click-to-comments-first reader a flavour of the essay, and also because I am making fun of him. I am making fun of him with serious purpose, as he has made the fatal, arrogant error of conflating ideas with facts; an error that has literally killed millions of people.
It is interesting that the hacker collectives have declined, and this could have been an interesting essay. It does not seem to me that the raw incidence of hacking has declined. I have no idea why this person believes such a thing. Hacking of all kinds and intentions are reported in a flurry these days. What has declined (I accept his assertion) is the phenomena of the group social identity of hackers. My first hypothesis about this is that anyone who studies graphs and networks could explain it to me without a second's hesitation, and perhaps someone will.
My (largely uninformed: I welcome correction) expectation is that the explanation will be directly related to the progression of connectivity: information is no longer rare or exclusive, and so social representation and status-seeking are no longer necessary parts of the driving activity, which is the hacking. This precludes the fetishization (in a pseudo-Marxist sense) of small networks such as the hacking groups. Small networks doubtlessly continue to exist and function quite well with only a fraction of the awareness of their collective identity.
I would recommend the Adventure Time episode "Thanks for the Crabapples, Giuseppe" as good contextual background material.
I think my favorite part about the Simpsons is how you can date people by which key episodes them remember. For me, it's the X-Files episode, or the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper. But for people a lot younger than me, they remember totally different episodes. I think there's just an age range where the jokes are targeted.
I do think the modern version is just sort of more modern. With so many competing cartoons like Adventure Time, Family Guy, and other (better) ones, the overall humor has just evolved. Simpsons I think has tried to evolve too, but can't evolve enough to really be a solid show because doing so would destroy the fan base it does have.
Perhaps best to think of it as the "Oracle" of television cartoon comedy =)
You could also say that TV is increasingly for the young. Vice, House of Cards, etc. are great but they're targeting the 20+ crowd. There's an explosion of new shows and programs for kids on cable. Some of them, like Adventure Time, are so well done that I enjoy watching them. In fact, you could call this a bit of a "golden age" for this sort of thing.
Watching shows on the internet is great. The acting talent and quality there has really improved. But, I see this less as taking away from cable, and more as taking away from the box office. Kevin Spacey was doing great movies 10+ years ago, and now he's headlining Netflix's service. Honestly, I think these long running tv shows are a better format for a lot of actors. Breaking Bad just can not be done in a 2-3 hour movie, or in a syndicated format where each episode needs to be treated more or less independently (e.g. Law and Order). However, Netflix didn't really start that trend, cable did.
Also, cable/tv "owns" the coax cable running through the house: the fastest and most reliable way of moving information around the average US home. There's new technologies like Moca that are going to make a lot of things possible that currently are very flakey with current wireless/alt-ethernet solutions.
TV has always been (mostly) about mindless entertainment. I think the shows that are successful outside of a traditional cable package succeed because they were probably inappropriate for the cable programming format anyways. Services like Netflix are filling a new niche, but I don't think they can significantly take away the core value of cable for most people.
>you can't get focus to deal with it... working out a series of things to do to contain the task... brainstorm simple things I could do around my outcome... writing a paragraph about why it feels hard... string together four or five tasks... Come back after rest for another go.
This is not what I consider procrastination, and I consider myself a major procrastinator, struggling constantly with time management issues because of it.
What you are describing is a context of ancillary effort surrounding the task. These are Things Being Done To Do The Thing.
Necessary but insufficient. Secondary, but nonetheless essential.
Procrastination, on the other hand, is the Absolute Evasion Of All Things Related To The Task At Hand.
Not lead up. Not preparation. Not sequencing. Not anything.
Anything But.
Do Something, but make damn well sure it's Not The Thing That Relates To What You Ought To Be Doing.
Email fidgeting. Netflix grazing. Guitar strumming. Water boiling watching. But not The Thing. And not Near The Thing.
Anything But The Thing.
This is doubly hard when creative (read: conceptual, thinking, fuzzy, ethereal, imaginative) work is The Thing To Be Done. Because sometimes Not Doing The Thing is what Needs To Be Done To Do It.
But just as often, oh man, do we like to fool ourselves into even avoiding Not Doing The Thing Needed To Do the Thing We Need To Do by simply Not Even Doing That.
If you pack batteries all day into tiny boxes in a warehouse filled with angry and watchful foremen (I've done this), there's no possibility for confusion between Getting It Done and Not Getting It Done.
But if you've got 600 words to write on how SEC New Rule 506(c) pertains to real estate crowdfunding, who's to say that sitting on your ass and watching 7 episodes of Adventure Time isn't integral to your effort. (It's not. But still, who's to say?)
Don't even get me started on billable hours. That's a whole nother can of worms.
Great site! Been looking for something like this for a while.
It would be great to be able to search by view all by Studio or Director / Writer. In fact you tag things like Studio (eg. Ghibli) but clicking the tags doesn't do anything :)
I'm trying to go on a bit of a Maasaki Yuasa tilt following his Adventure Time episode, so it would be nice to see all of the stuff he has done in one list.
Also it might be nice to see an overview of ratings when you mouse over recommendations.
Great site though and I will continue poking around on it!
As someone who grep up during the Cartoon Cartoon era, and am a big fan of many of those shows (Power Puff Girls and Dexter's Lab were quite good), I'd say yes.
At the very top level, Adventure Time actually has serial elements, as opposed to Cartoon Cartoons' strictly episodic nature. Character's actions in previous episodes have real and lasting consequences.
I love(d) Adventure Time but it's (IMO) suffering from the same problem as many good American shows, which is that as long as it's profitable the network keeps it going even after it's run out of creative steam. I'm sure there are still good episodes but I've mostly lost interest in the thing as a whole.
Also, the creators have been working on a short made-for-youtube cartoon show (~5 minute episodes) called "Bravest Warriors". If anyone here likes Adventure Time, check it out:
http://bravestwarriors.cartoonhangover.com/
(Also the character designer from Adventure Time is working on a new cartoon called Bee & PuppyCat, also in a similar awesome vein http://beeandpuppycat.cartoonhangover.com/)
One of the reasons Adventure Time is so interesting is that it manages a delicate balance - it is both your typical "kids cartoon" but also manages to appeal to an older audience. Most cartoons try to do this by slipping in pop culture references/jokes that will just go over children's heads - and AT does this too, there's a lot of literary and pop culture references; for example there's a great episode with Jonathan Frakes guest starring that heavily references the ST:TNG episode "inner light".
However, AT also goes beyond that.
It deals with themes like love, rejection, death, identity, and morality in very real and mature ways...but also in a way that children can relate to and laugh at it. There are quite a lot of episodes that deal with the main characters struggle with an unrequited love and heartache. An incarnate Death and "the cosmic owl" are reoccurring characters. One major arc is one of the characters struggle with (magic induced) mental illness. The show itself takes place after a nuclear holocaust has ripped apart the planet and mutated the inhabitants (referred to in the show as "the mushroom war").
One episode for example, the main character finds a bag full of miniature figurines in the form of all his friends. When he takes them out of the bag, they come to life. He becomes fixated on them. Obsessively pairing them up and taking them apart to observe their reactions. He takes the miniature version of his best friends girlfriend and pairs her up with another man. He stops sleeping, he just sits surveilling this tiny world he has become god of. It's depicted very much as a descent into madness.
There are quite a lot of episodes like this, and while they often get heavy and dark they never lose their young audience or fail to maintain an overall uplifting and optimistic tone.
I wish I had a show like this when I was young.
Amused and happy to see this on the front page of HN. Adventure Time is one of my favorite shows of all time.
My husband and I had an Adventure Time themed wedding a month ago and we turned a whole slew of people into fans that way - our cake baker, some of the venue staff, a whole bunch of our friends and family. Unlike MLP and other shows where I feel like I have to explain things for people to get started, AT is generally great enough that I just tell people to watch any episode and then just blow their minds explaining some of what's going on in the show at large that they might not have picked up on. Love it.
Cake (and we even got CN's permission for it! suck it disney!): https://www.flickr.com/photos/argon/13347167874/
His and hers flowers with Finn and BMO: https://scontent-a-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/t1.0-9/p480x480/1962693_10152306904399648_141489450_n.jpg
And one of the centerpieces ;) https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/t1.0-9/p180x540/1964952_10152374309819388_545707268_n.jpg
In a similar vein, I've been loving the show Space Dandy, which is like Adventure Time's (slightly) older brother from across the Pacific; it's co-directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, of Cowboy Bebop fame.
Bringing it closer to Adventure Time than Cowboy Bebop however, it includes the work of a wide range of artists in different episodes, and isn't too minded by continuity. It also benefits from surprisingly bearable English voice acting and translation in Adult Swim's dubbed version.
Here's a review:
http://www.avclub.com/review/space-dandy-is-more-than-cowboy-bebops-demented-li-201062
Where can one watch adventure time episodes online?
Besides the fact that the creator(s) are clearly geniuses, I think a big part of the awesomeness of the show is that those creators are abstract people. One example was when Finn (the human) suggested that they should pretend to be defeated by a tiny little army of little mushroom people because he pitied them and wanted to give them confidence. To this, Jake (the dog) said something like "no way man, it'll ruin my stats".
Or NEPTR's "You cannot tell, but I am giving a thumbs up." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTTplK3kin8
In other words, the humor/atmosphere is much geekier than what you'd expect to find on a television show. The only other show I remember with this aspect is Futurama, except that Futurama is overt with its jokes, whereas Adventure Time has many shades of subtlety.
Adventure Time is one the greatest things coming from recent American pop culture. It's not only imaginative, creative, fun, loving & caring and emotionally daring, twisted and complex beyond the naive first layers meant for present day children, and those work for them too. It connects with this old Gen-Xer in deep ways. There you have the Cold War angst, the fear and uncertainty we all were brought up with, which now has vanished like a nightmare, but it's still lurking inside. The technology in the post-apocalyptic World of Oo (delicious names) shows tokens of that age, BMO is a Mac, there are VHS tapes and CRT TVs, everything is old but has that timeless charm of the things you learnt first. And there is so much Sesame Street vibe deep down there, we were really educated by it. It's a love song from grown up kids to grown up kids. An uncertain world, full of charm and hidden dangers with pure heroes that make mistakes and surprising foes that have their adult reasons.
Just a quote. Episode "Beyond this Earthly Realm", Ice King is watching static on TV (how cool this was?), he can alter it because of his ghostly condition in that scene, and then he comes up with this:
“What do you think, Finn? Can we pull back the veil of static and reach into the source of all being? Behind this curtain of patterns, this random pattern generator... so clever. Right here in every home, watching us from a one-sided mirror.”
This is unassumingly awesome.
I think a lot of people like cartoons like this because they're forced to be clever with the jokes, whereas something made for adults just throws the sexual innuendo and adult oriented content right at you, not to mention there is little to no philosophical discussion to be had on the average sitcom. You can re-watch adventure time and regular show over and over and each time catch something you missed before.