Adventure Time

The Ruins of Candyland

I bounced off Adventure Time the first time I tried it. In 2010, animation was full of that hyperactive, internet-fried "randomness" that passed for wit, and a show about a boy and his stretchy dog fighting candy creatures looked like more of the same. It felt weightless, all sugar and no substance. I watched a few episodes, figured I had missed the age window, and moved on. Years later I circled back, and the show I found was doing something entirely different. The floor had shifted while I wasn't looking.



Pendleton Ward built Ooo like a Trojan horse. At a glance it is all pastel delirium—cupcakes that talk, vampire queens, silly quests, bright nonsense everywhere. But the background keeps leaking a harsher truth. There are televisions half-buried in the earth, nuclear warheads rusting in riverbeds, dead skyscrapers jutting through sheets of ice. The series slowly lets you realize that this isn't some detached fantasy realm. It is our world, thousands of years after the Mushroom War turned it into a post-apocalyptic ruin. Ward asks you to hold both images at once: the childish foreground and the civilization-sized grave underneath it. It sounds like tonal suicide, and somehow it works. What could have been disposable kid-TV gradually reveals itself as a mournful little elegy. The New Republic had it exactly right when they called it "candyland on the surface and dark underneath."