Adventure Time (season 10)

And so Adventure Time comes to a close with a satisfying extended finale and the dangling possibility of spin-offs if ever there’s enough demand. And even though I’d say Adventure Time overstayed its welcome, having felt the premise was wearing thin as early as season 4 and largely losing interest by season 6, it's a little sad to say goodbye to the show after it being part of my life for over a decade. I’ve said it many times giving my thoughts on the various seasons, but Adventure Time strayed a long way from the exuberant, free-wheeling, surreal pilot that made me fall for the world in the first place. And even though audience numbers have dwindled from a peak of 2.5-3.5 million US viewers during seasons 3 through 6 to season 10 never even getting close to one million, interest in the show remains high and Finn and Jake will endure as amongst the most recognisable characters for an entire generation. That’s quite an accomplishment, and absolutely the show’s humour and ambitious scope have shaped what cartoons have been able to do on kids’ networks ever since.

Aside from the finale, the rest of season 10 was no better than the last few seasons have been, and the main set-up lacked the focus of previous sagas like the voyage to find Finn’s mother or the threat of the elementals. One thread that gets worked through the season is the impending threat of Gumbald, which ultimately was totally abortive and would probably have been better left out of the story altogether or resolved ahead of the finale instead of a dumb Minecraft advert serving as the last full episode before it. Then there’s what will become of Fern, a clone of Finn who brings up some interesting existential questions and whose story reaches a brief but ultimately satisfying conclusion.

Otherwise, a lot of episodes give characters a little more resolution. Jake learns some more about his background, Flame Princess deals with her father (in a pretty stupid rap battle episode) and Tree Trunks and Mr Pig work out some kinks in their complicated relationship. Then there are some relatively random episodes, like the Minecraft one and the story of Finn trying to get a joke published in a magazine. The 13 episodes – or 16 if you consider the finale 4 separate ones – were again aired over the course of a full year, making immersion and interest exponentially harder to maintain.

One sad thing about Adventure Time is how it lost its capacity to surprise me. In the beginning there were lots of very random and hilarious things that came as a surprise, especially how episodes ended. Then I was surprised by various revelations about the past in world-building terms, especially with Simon’s background. But it’s been a long while since I’ve found anything about Adventure Time very novel. In this season, well, I’m glad they confirmed a homosexual relationship within canon which they could have just skirted around and left vaguely ambiguous, as they had since it was heavily implied back in season 3. And it blindsided me when they said they were holding Finn’s 17^th birthday party – I know the character has aged but I still saw the little blobby potato guy as about 14, maybe 15. He definitely doesn’t seem like a 17-year-old, even now. But those aren’t the kinds of surprises I was talking about. Things that made me laugh before were things like King Worm coming out of nowhere to hypnotise Finn and Jake, or Jake proudly announcing that he’s 28 in the pilot.

So it was with the finale. There were plenty of things I didn’t expect – the framework hinting at terrible things having happened to the main cast; the way Gumbald and co are basically shrugged off in favour of a bigger, better plot; Lemongrab and Lumpy Space Princess having an amusing end to their character arcs together – but none of it actively surprised me. It’s been a long time since I remember Adventure Time actually making me laugh. And to be honest, while of course one of its strengths was revealing a rich, often very dark backstory, there haven’t been any real revelations on that front for half a decade. We didn’t need to know more about Princess Bubblegum’s dark past. Simon’s story could have been neatly wrapped up at any time and the most delightful thing about it was that he had this backstory at all – which was teased in season 4 and revealed in season 5. This is all a long time ago now. It isn’t really Adventure Time’s style to go out with a real bang, and indeed it didn’t, hinting over and over again about a huge apocalyptic battle but never really having one and having the day saved by singing and the unconvincing soft-of-self-sacrifice of a very underdeveloped minor character, Betty. Perhaps worst of all, it didn't feel like Finn had much of a place in the finale, there was no sense of closure to his character development, and perhaps Penn Ward not being on the show for many years also meant Finn got left behind as a character. 

Even if this wasn’t an ideal finale, though, it was a solid end to a show that ran its course and accomplished a lot. Adventure Time was always a show with uneven quality but it’s probably made me laugh more than any other show in recent years aside from Gumball. And it managed to occasionally be deeply touching, too, with Simon’s backstory providing a show that revels in violence and slapstick with a real heart. I’m not sure I’d want to sit through the entire run again, or even recommend to someone that they need to watch every single episode like I did. But the first few seasons and certain key world-building episodes are true classics of animated television, and I will defend the show to the end against detractors who hate how popular it got. After 11 years, it's a little sad to say goodbye to Adventure Time. But it was also high time the show ended.

Powerpuff Girls: Season 6

I didn’t finish watching Powerpuff Girls for a long while. In part, it was because it’s a shame to see the end of a classic show, but mostly it was because by season 6, it wasn’t really feeling like a classic any more.

The show had been on air for over 6 years by the time it finished, and felt like it was running short on ideas. Weird and politically incorrect Rocky and Bullwinkle parodies, returning a monster baby to its mama and poor Buttercup being told she’s got no particularly special talent over the other girls don’t feel like the playful and inventive episodes of old. The season plays out without the sparkle of inventiveness or irreverence that characterised its early run. A steampunk episode, featuring the Steamypuff Kids, is pretty fun, though.

The Powerpuff Girls have endured in a way that not many similar shows have. There was the anime spinoff, the spiritually similar early My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and now a new revival that I haven’t seen yet. The designs are enduringly popular and rewatching old episodes never fails to put a smile on my face.

But the problem is that there’s only so far you can go. Sure, you can give the little kindergarten-age heroes crushes on some boys and have them go from fist-fighting with their antagonists to going camping with them, but they’re still funny little bug-eyed kids with insane super powers. There’s nothing to discover about their pasts and no angsty teenage plot arcs they can go through. So flipping to alternate worlds of the wild west or making a whole episode in the style of the Who’s concept albums starts to feel a little like scraping the barrel.

But apparently there are enough stories to tell for a new series to come out. So I guess my Powerpuff adventure doesn’t stop here.  

Adventure Time: season 9

There was a bit of confusion in regards to where season 8 ended and where season 9 begun, but now it’s been officially determined what season goes where, and season 9 covers the multi-part saga where the elementals have taken over and transformed Ooo, then the handful of episodes in the aftermath where Jake looks weird, Finn has to deal with his rogue clone Fern and there’s one more battle with a leftover bit of the Lich.

This sets up the plotline that will dominate season 10, revolving around members of Princess Bubblegum’s family, but feels like a bit of a throwaway season. It doesn’t have a strong identity, not even having been defined as a full season until a while after it finished, and is dominated by a multi-part series that not only isn’t very exciting (Slime Princess’s episode being the most memorable but mostly for being a little disturbing) but is in the shadow of much more compelling and plot-driven multi-part arcs in the season before it. The episode with Jake and his brother Jermaine is a nice human touch in a weird series, which I say in full awareness that the characters are not humans. Otherwise, though, this season is very light on the real character development and world exploration that made Adventure Time hit compelling new heights a couple of years back.

I’ve definitely moved on somewhat from Adventure Time. Obviously it’s a long way from the silly short that kicked it off, and it’s been wildly successful especially with older stoners. But it feels like time to wrap it up, because most of the intriguing background elements that were slowly revealed have now all been shown. There’s not much more to say about Simon’s past, Finn’s parentage, the Mushroom War or the weird alternate universes, and morsels like what happened to Marceline’s mom centuries before the show begins are probably best left understated.

I’ve enjoyed Adventure Time and I’m still watching season 10, but there are better shows to watch and I hope the show gracefully comes to a close soon. Ah, I see that’s what’s planned, so that feels like good timing to me. 

The Amazing World of Gumball: season 5

Season 5 of Gumball had some of the most enjoyable episodes of the show’s run, with some of the most interesting character development, though also a couple of the show’s only duds too.

Looking back to season one, Gumball has come a long way, looks a lot better, and tends to have very slick, economical writing with good jokes, very likeable characters and that same love for animation that drew me in the first place. I don’t remember ever laughing quite as hard at a cartoon as I did at the end of The Ex.

What I really like about Gumball is that while it sometimes re-treads old, familiar cartoon plotlines – love potions, working with a hated teacher to pass a test, trying to get rid of Granny’s unwanted gifts – it’s very much a cartoon that focuses on contemporary lifestyle. A lot of cartoons these days, not counting satirical comedies for adults, try to have their characters in some weird timeless setting where people don’t use the internet or have smartphones and high school is, well, the way the writing team remember it. Maybe they have a game console that bleeps and bloops and shows some 8-bit graphics. That goes hand-in-hand with the sorts of references that are safe to use – classic movies or 80s iconography, classic rock bands with iconic looks, perhaps even some classic literature. Well, Gumball throws all that out and references internet memes like Friendship Ended with Mudasir and Yu-Gi-Oh chins, has its kids use Facebook, Instagram and Wikipedia clones, catfish their grandpa and in a truly brilliant move has an episode made in collaboration with the makers of ‘Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’ (which is superb in its own right).

There’s also a Yelp-reviews-as-blackmail episode, but South Park already did that, and it wasn’t really a highlight of either show’s run. The show’s take on social justice also went semi-viral last year, and while it was a very intelligent commentary on it often being used (especially online) by self-righteous people not because they care about the issues they’re talking about but because they want to dominate in arguments and cover their insecurities by being the most tolerant, it was a real shame the clips that circulated didn’t show how Gumball learns that he was misguided in the way he tried to debate. The show ultimately concluded that forgiveness and genuine compassion trump argumentative self-righteousness.

Other references are more safe and straightforward, and it seems like the show is embracing the referential aspect of its comedy and running with it, sometimes a bit far. I enjoyed the Final Fantasy parody episode, and the episode where Gumball tries to befriend Ocho to get to Mario works mostly for the character humour and not the references, but for example Harry Potter references fall flat (especially when two different episodes’ references to Ron being annoying and Gumball preferring Voldemort to Harry kind of clash with each other). Other than a surprising Kyary Pamyu Pamyu skit, ‘The Singing’ was one of the show’s worst episodes, a lazy compilation of unoriginal song parodies – also breaking the unwritten rule that Gumball and Darwin will always appear at least once. It’s these kinds of clip shows that don’t really work, with ‘The News’ another example, bringing to mind the worst random episodic gag episodes of Rick and Morty.

This season again devotes time to some of the more minor characters to develop them. Even Sussie gets an episode, which ends in truly bizarre, somehow uplifting style. Rocky gets an episode too, though not much new is said about him. We also get a relationship episode for Darwin, obliquely referencing his bromance with his adoptive brother, as well as a bit more development for Gumball’s grandpa Frankie, and a nice episode where Nicole reflects on what might have happened had she never met Richard. I really enjoy episodes developing the main cast, but subversions of what’s expected – like Gumball pining for his nemesis Rob when Rob decides to move on – are the most brilliant.

References to the likes of Gremlins and Jurassic Park aren’t particularly surprising, even at the same time, but unexpected references include the chest-thumping from The Wolf of Wall Street, the scream from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Gumball has always been a show that throws in unexpected and amusing references, and this isn’t the first time we’ve seen obscurities from the Internet – How-To Basic was referenced last season, there was an episode about going too deep on Youtube and ending up with Rickrolls and Youtube Poop, and there have been art choices very reminiscent of the Yaranaika face and Dolan in the past, so I’m not surprised how this aspect of the show is developing. There’s a need to be cautious, though – too much and it will become unfunny or detract from the heart and soul of the show. Already Gumball’s malleable 2-D nature is becoming a bit overdone, especially when it’s ignored when he decides he’s the only kid without special powers. Still, so far the show isn’t overstepping and I’ll be watching the show into its sixth season happily.

Oh, and there’s one throw-back to the awkwardness with the Hot Dog Guy. Marvellous!

The Amazing World of Gumball: season 4

Gumball remains my go-to show for fun and relaxation, and it's fast becoming my favourite western show currently airing. Probably Adventure Time has hit greater heights in its run, but is way less consistent and not nearly as smart. 

Gumball is quietly subversive and is remarkably up-to-the-minute. They can make all the old familiar references any cartoon can make, to Terminator or Dragonball or The Legend of Zelda, safe established nostalgic works that are obvious points of reference, but this show will also put in nods to The Last of Us or even YouTube series like How To Basic. 

One of the standouts this season was the anime homage. I was a little sad only Nicole got to have a fun humanised version for her big fight, the kids ending up as limited-animation chibis, but the Toriyama tribute was spot-on and the fight pretty entertaining. Still, it was one of the laziest episodes of the season, because it did just what you'd expect a cartoon to do when parodying anime. It's much better when they throw everything at the screen, like in the Hallowe’en special where you have the schoolkids dressed up and half a dozen references thrown at the viewer at once.

Several characters get more development. Nicole and Darwin get their pasts filled in. Anais gets to be the centre of some episodes that flesh her out, still awkwardly trying to make friends or becoming a crime scene investigator in a fun send-up of gritty detective shows. Even Richard gets a modicum of depth as his biological father enters the scene. Gumball himself, meanwhile, is intentionally shallow and doesn’t need fleshing out, but there’s something very entertaining about watching him get obsessed by stupid things like finding out why one friend doesn’t slap him affectionately on the butt like he does with his other male friends, even though they all find it intensely annoying.

My favourite two episodes were the ones with the Hot Dog Guy. Gumball tries to be random by hugging this stranger for no reason, and of course it soon spirals out of control and becomes incredibly awkward, neither of them actually wanting to spend time with one another but ending up in situations where it would be rude to refuse one another’s company as things get increasingly homoerotic. Yes, weird for a kids’ cartoon. No, not really homophobic because it’s not funny from the angle that being gay is inherently comical or disgusting, but awkward misunderstandings are both funny and adorable. Yes, weirdly adorable even though one is a little blue cat and the other is a large hotdog.

I’m definitely keen to keep watching, and with the sixth season just starting, it seems I have plenty more. 

The Amazing World of Gumball season 3

Gumball is my go-to show to watch at the moment. It’s such exuberant, silly fun with such likeable central characters and such joy in the medium of animation. Not every episode is a hit but enough of them are that I’ll always have fun in any viewing session.

The season starts in a slightly sad way as the original voice actors pass the torch to the new kids. Replacing kid actors is generally necessary in these kinds of shows, though they seem to be letting Jeremy Shada keep voicing Finn long-term since he replaced his brother in Adventure Time. In fairness, by the time the voice work for Gumball season 3 started, the boys’ voices had changed a lot, even when they weren’t exaggerating it, and it was nice to even give them a send-off rather than just making the switch behind the scenes. I’m not generally that keen on meta-humour dominating a whole episode, and the season finale where the cast contemplate selling out for money didn’t work for me, but in this case it was sweet and worked well as a pretty original concept.

Otherwise, the season is mostly more of the same. The kids get into scrapes with various classmates and family members, struggle with allergies, try to watch scary movies without Anaïs, or think up an imaginary friend. The show does a great job of taking tried-and-tested concepts and subverting them, or sometimes affectionately pastiching them. The show also does the surprise anticlimactic ending even better than Adventure Time.

But this season doesn’t just coast along doing the same old things. There’s a fair bit of character development. Some background characters get more fleshed out, with Sarah and Alan getting episodes centred on them, and one episode is even centred on ‘extras’. There’s also quite an interesting side-story where uninteresting background characters disappear into ‘The Void’, with one not only being rescued from there but another becoming a much more major player when he manages to escape.

Most significant, though, is the development of Penny. Initially Gumball’s comedy crush, the two of them have genuinely gotten closer, culminating in Penny literally coming out of her peanut shell. It’s a very interesting development and it’s sweet how the couple are still so awkward and it doesn’t end up taking over Gumball’s entire life. Perhaps more interesting is the effect it has on Darwin. He’s initially very jealous and protective of his best friend being taken away from him, and his protestations of love for Gumball get pretty ardent. It walks a nice middle ground where potentially gay kids could see him as a perfectly normal boy with a gay crush (albeit on his adoptive brother, which is a bit weird), yet it’s also completely possible to see his devotion as a ‘bromance’. Religious groups can’t go crazy about it corrupting youth but at the same time it leans towards the normalisation of if not homosexuality, then dismantling the limits of what can be portrayed on kids’ TV in terms of appropriate expression for boys.

Which is not to claim Gumball is spearheading a cultural revolution. It’s just a nice background touch to a smart, entertaining and inventive TV cartoon. Which I will certainly continue to watch.  

The Amazing World of Gumball: Season 2

In the five years since I watched the first season of Gumball, it got a lot more popular. Clips from the show occasionally pop up on Facebook, going a little viral. It’s fully incorporated into Cartoon Network promotional material like its 25^th anniversary clip. It’s won a number of awards and generally entered into public consciousness to a much greater degree. I’m pretty sure it will be remembered nostalgically in a decade just like Powerpuff Girls and Fairly Odd Parents are remembered today.

I actually watched a fair chunk of season 2 before I stopped for a few years. Back then it was hard to find anywhere to watch the show. But I absolutely loved the episode The Job, where the show’s penchant for mixing animation styles is taken to extremes. It’s a beautiful, fun episode with a whole lot of weirdness going on, and one of the most inventive episodes of a show animation-wise that can ever have aired on TV.

Broadly, though, the show continues in the same way as the first season. Short, exuberant 10-minute episodes cover things like Gumball feuding with Banana Joe over a chewed pen, going to see the simple life of a rather Amish-esque potato or getting embarrassed over a stupid video of Gumball going viral.

The Watterson parents get more fleshed out here. Richard becomes a little less irritating and more sympathetic, even doing stupid things like getting into petty quarrels with his neighbour or being too wet to kick out the partiers who take over his house. We also get an insight into how he became the way he is, with an appearance from his overbearing mother. As for Nicole, that tough-love competitive spirit of hers reaches extremes, first in how far she pushes Gumball in a paintball game, and later in her own refusal to lose, which develops into her being some incredibly strong beast more or less unbeatable in the established world.

Other characters get more exploration too. Hector becomes more than just some feet and shins. Carrie shows more of a dark side. Insane new girl Sarah gets her introduction, though only seems a little obsessive in this season – and brings with her a very amusing set of friends from another school who look and move like 70s cartoons. Another human introduced is Santa, played with aplomb by Brian Blessed, national treasure.

Then there’s Gumball and Darwin, who were pretty well-developed from the start. They remain two of the most joyful characters to watch in any cartoon – impulsive, selfish and fun-loving Gumball paired with cute, sweet-natured, caring Darwin. In one episode they explore their dynamic, Darwin wanting to take the lead instead of following as the straight guy, and it’s an interesting examination of their dynamic. They’re still totally adorable, and their relationship is still very often homoerotic and has no qualms subverting gender expectations – the boys are quite happy to dress up as girls for their fake TV show (adorably rendered in anime style by Mike Inel online), hyperventilate into one another’s mouths or comfort each other by hugging and stroking. It’s totally adorable.

And on that note, this season pushes more boundaries than ever before. What this show gets away with is considerably more surprising than Adventure Time’s ‘Get in his pants’ joke. Of course everything is only implied – double entendres like “Did you see what he did to that guy’s cherry”, or visual boundary-pushing like Gumball and the balloon boy Alan meeting in the boys’ bathroom and Gumball having to reinflate him by, well, blowing him up. And then coming out of the bathroom looking decidedly disturbed. It pushes at what’s permissible and that’s one of its strengths.

Of all the cartoons currently airing targeted at kids, it’s the one that appeals the most to me. As an animation fan, in terms of humour, in the cuteness of the characters, in the unpredictability of the episodes and in terms of subverting expectations. The last two episodes in particular poke fun at the ideas of a whole world being made of living things and how horrific that would be, and the idea of cartoons resetting after each episode without consequences.

Funny, easy to watch, cute, likeable and inventive, I’ll definitely carry on watching Gumball. 

Adventure Time – season 8

After realising season 7 had ended some time ago, I binge-watched the rest of season 8. I have to say, it brought with it a lot of what I had hoped for in the last season. 

Yes, there were some strange throwaway episodes, like diving after a sea lard and finding a strange new world, or the return of James Baxter the horse (though I did like how he got his name). But most of the season was dominated by two much longer, more intriguing plotlines - the development of the elemental guardian plotline that reaches fruition in season 9, but more importantly, Susan Strong providing Finn with a link to find the rest of the humans - and his mother. 

This plotline leads to the final lengthy arc of this season, with its own unique introduction and a bleak portrayal of the future of humanity. Once again, we see the idea of humanity preferring life in virtual reality and getting trapped inside. But Finn's mother and the rest of the humans are part of a different society, perhaps one that works a little too well. 

Finn gets some fine emotional moments and development, and it had already been a strong season for him as we got more exploration of the idea of alternate Finns being trapped in his swords. Finding his mother and of course ending up confronting problems she'd caused before eventually having to return home provided some great emotional highs and lows. Plus Susan became a fully-fledged character too, with her own past to confront, and had a cathartic reunion in the end. 

Now that both Finn's parents are well-established and he's growing up, there aren't so many loose ends left to tie. I think the next season bring Princess Bubblegum's darkness and the loose ends that remain in Simon's stories to a head, and then I feel like we might finally come to the end of this brightly-coloured, often rather dark cartoon that from its beginning has been squarely targeted at stoners and adults. I hope it draws to a natural close before too much longer. There's no point stringing it out until it gets stale, and while this season has been very satisfying indeed, I don't think there's that much more remaining in plot terms to bring out these kind of heavy hits in future. 

Adventure Time – season 7

The last few seasons of Adventure Time have seen very sporadic release schedules. Sometimes there’s a slew of episodes all coming out in a month and sometimes there’s nothing for weeks and weeks. It’s not clear where seasons begin and end most of the time, and I was under the impression that season 7 ended with the episodes ‘Preboot’ and ‘Reboot’, mostly because they took five months to come out after the previous episodes – but now I find out that’s midway through season 8 and I should have done my season 7 impressions in the March of 2016. Oh well.

Season 7 was actually the time that the show lost me somewhat, with season 8 episodes only recently having piqued my interest again. This season’s major events include Princess Bubblegum getting deposed by the cowardly King of Ooo, a lengthy exploration of Marceline’s past and where she got her different powers, and a real visit to the surreal parallel dimension Farmworld. There are also more hints to Simon’s past, with Betty at large in the present day.

But honestly, it’s partly the unpredictable release schedule, partly the feeling that the show’s major ideas are now played out and partly a few dud episodes like trying to figure out underwater political intrigues with blowfish and porpoises. There wasn’t much badly wrong here, but a lot of momentum felt sapped by the longer storylines, which unlike those of season 8 didn’t really feel like they advanced the plot of characters very much, especially Marceline. Princess Bubblegum got a little more depth, though.

In fact, the problem with this season was that unlike the seasons surrounding it, with major arcs largely focused on Finn, there’s not enough contrast between light and shade. Marceline is all darkness, Bubblegum only treading between bright pink and grey. What defines the current Adventure Time, a very long way out from its quirky initial pilot, is that it can contrast its silliness with surprising depth and ambition. I can see that this season brought to the fore some of the cleverer elements thought up for secondary characters, but they really pale beside Finn or the Ice King’s stories. And that leaves this season a little sub-par. But certainly, it remains fun to watch.  

Adventure Time: Season 6

The sixth season of Adventure Time brought a lot of the mysteries that had been building up from the start to the fore, and answered a few of the show’s big questions. Unfortunately, when actually brought into the foreground, some of the answers we were given ended up much less exciting than the open possibilities we had before. Not only that, but a slew of throwaway or dull episodes, a strange release schedule that meant this season aired over the course of more than a year, and severe disappointment over guest animators means that this was where Adventure Time lost me. I still watched the season, at a considerable delay, and I will still at some point watch the next. But I no longer feel particularly excited about new episodes or watch them quickly. I can catch up later. Having watched since Adventure Time was but a silly, random pilot episode where it felt like anything could happen, this is a little sad for me.

Season 6 had some great ideas. The Lich was transformed into a giant baby, and a highlight came when Lumpy Space Princess did a very bad job caring for him. Finn gets an arm cut off and goes through a series of replacement limbs, though nothing much came of them. The latter half of the season constantly foreshadowed significant events coming with the approach of a ‘Catalyst Comet’, with a good sense of continuity and build-up. There was a very interesting flashback episode to long before the start of the series, with Evergreen. And Finn finally met his father, Martin.

But none of these satisfied very much. The Lich turning into Sweet Pea and the backstory introduced in ‘Evergreen’ both held my attention well, but what they set up has yet to develop into anything important, which is also the case for the reappearance of Simon’s wife Betty. The idea of Finn’s dad not being a hero or positive role model but an opportunist with a tendency to abandon those who bond with him is refreshing and quite clever, but makes episodes centred on him a bore. The appearance of the comet was built up well, but especially compared with the Lich in the last season was dealt with far too quickly and the random ways Finn could deal with everything he faced were deeply artificial.

I enjoyed the increased development of minor characters like The Cosmic Owl, Peppermint Butler and Jake’s family (both his kids and his brother), but at this stage I’m a little bored of Lemongrab, the King of Ooo and Magic Man – even if the latter is in a more interesting position now. Susan Strong is a character who probably didn’t need to recur, and the classic characters like The Ice King and Lumpy Space Princess felt under-used towards the end of the season. I really, really hope we never see Chips and Ice Cream or the Ghost Fly again.

Then we come to the guest animation. I was very excited to hear that Yuasa Masaaki was going to do a guest episode. Kaiba remains one of my favourite anime series of all time, and he did such a superb guest episode for Wakfu. But even though it was critically lauded, I thought ‘Food chain’ was a mess. Yes, it was experimental, to a degree, but mostly it felt bereft of new ideas, any actual sense of the established feeling of Adventure Time or any of the emotional sincerity that distinguishes his other work. For me, this was a huge disappointment.

I had no expectations of David Ferguson, but ‘Water Park Prank’ was, for me, the worst episode of Adventure Time yet and I very much doubt it will be topped. The awful ugly art style I could deal with, but the horrible pacing and story of the episode, which again seemed like there was little or no familiarity with what has been established as the Adventure Time world made me feel a faint sense of second-hand embarrassment throughout.

Still, the season was by no means disastrous. I just feel increasingly less intrigued as the show’s mysteries are answered, and feel that there’s a pressing need for the show to establish a kind of end goal for Finn to strive towards, now. Because at this stage it feels like aimless drifting. And we know how stoners can get way too stuck doing that.

The Boondocks – Season 4

And so The Boondocks came to an end. I was glad there was a little more of the show, that I could watch the last episodes knowing that no more would be to come, and there were a couple of good episodes here. But this was definitely more whimper than bang. Firstly, Aaron McGruder wasn’t on board, and what he brought to the show – what this season lacked – was very obvious. He is clearly a good bit smarter than any of the remaining writing team, and knows that there needed to be an intelligent undercurrent subverting everything all the characters said for the show to work. It wasn’t there.

Secondly, the animation – which was never top-notch – has been given over to Studio Mir. Now, I suspect Studio Mir and Studio Moi have a fair bit of cross-over, but it is downright strange having Legend of Korra and the last season of The Boondocks very obviously animated by the same people. When Korra starts pulling Grandpa faces and all the comedy has the same not-quite-beat-perfect rhythm to it, and you know that the same people are animating the epic story of flying bisons and world-changing defenders of civilisation one day and intentionally offensive gay stereotypes the next, it’s a little unsettling. Plus I’m guessing Nickelodeon pay a fair bit more than Cartoon Network, because The Boondocks looks a fair bit cheaper and more rushed.

But technicalities aside, it’s important to judge The Boondocks on its writing. Some of the previous episodes of this show have been so perfectly-done that I would genuinely rate them as comedy classics. McGruder’s cutting, all-encompassing mockery of modern culture puts the show’s highlights up there with the best South Park episodes. But he’s not on-board any more, and instead the season is masterminded by a woman who wrote for Scrubs and McGruder’s former writing partner on the previous series. There’s an edge missing here – the satirical links don’t quite close, and mostly the set-up is great but the idea doesn’t get developed and stagnates. I think the writers felt like a good idea for an episode was enough to sustain the full 20 minutes. Instead, we end up with some good opening scenes leading to very boring mis-fires.

Old ideas are rehashed. Stinkmeaner comes back yet again to antagonise Robert. There’s an all-out Breaking Bad parody that raises the questions of why that show needs parodying at all. There’s a full episode tediously following Robert inadvertently joining the Freedom Riders that despite a lot of action goes nowhere and makes no point. When two of the better episodes are about Robert having an abusive relationship with Siri, and about him becoming a ‘male escort’, you know a show is on its last legs. Though the inevitable old-lady-pimp scenes were funny.

Still, of just ten episodes, three stood out as genuinely good. One was about a hair product that does wonders for afro-American hair, but is derived from Huey’s attempts to make home explosives. It unfolds in a by-the-numbers way, but its jabs at the beauty industry and the fact that even when it’s revealed the stuff is dangerous people still love it make for a clever and entertaining episode. Better than that is the very last episode, though it didn’t have the heft of a season finale. When Riley finally gets called out on saying everything is ‘gay’, it leads to a twisted sequence of events where he is extorted by a series of oppressed groups until finally he becomes ‘the poster boy for retardation’. 

It was an irreverent mix of political incorrectness and social commentary, which raised some good points: in condemning using ‘gay’ to mean ‘bad’, do we also end up censoring observations that something is an action associated with gay culture? Are the groups who garner attention and funding defending minorities actually out for the best interests of the group, or do they just use them and extort others who they can bully? Is there a kind of one-upmanship in different underprivileged groups? Sure, the South Park episode on the Special Olympics did much of this better, and the final stinger uncomfortably fell back on the ‘looking retarded is inherently funny’ concept, but with side-references to Of Mice and Men, a non-mainstream representation of the whole ‘check your privilege’ movement and some genuinely funny moments, it was a good episode.

But my favourite was ‘Freedomland’, in which the Freemans willingly sign a contract to work as entertainers in a slavery-themed amusement park. Now, it may seem like a cheap shot, The Boondocks doing modern-day slavery with the white guy using corporations instead of brute force to get exactly the same results, but it’s more subtle than that. Tom sleepwalks into the same position because he imagines it’s noble. Only Huey wants to upset the corporate system that put them in this position, at least until things escalate. Sure, it all ends in a silly kung-fu scrap, but it’s a clever bit of observational political comedy. And that’s what The Boondocks is supposed to be doing, not just ‘Hurr Grandpa is a shallow idiot and Uncle Ruckus is racist’.

The Boondocks was worth the ride. The last hoorah may have ended up being muted and unconvincing, but there were enough flashes of brilliance to remind me how good this show very nearly was.  

Adventure Time - Season V

The fifth series of Adventure Time was long - 52 of its half-episodes, spread out over more than a year, sometimes with only one or two episodes in a month. 

Thus, it seems like a long while since the cliffhanger of season IV, in which we were introduced to the mysterious Farm World, created when Finn wishes that the Lich had never existed. This of course goes awry, but Jake isn't too bothered because he has met a very chilled-out omnipotent being and is able to put things right. 

The numerous episodes since tend to fall into three brackets - straightforward, simple little stories, which are where the show mostly feels a bit tired - though Finn does get a flashy new sword; episodes referring back to previous bits of continuity and bringing them forward, such as where the Ice King regains his sanity and brings someone from his past back; and the out-and-out weird and experimental, like when everything is done in glitchy CG or when an episode is dominated by James Baxter the Horse on his unicycle. 

Really, though a few of the episodes could have been dispensed with and I wasn't a personal fan of the Lemon Hope saga, it was the interplay between these three that keep me watching and make me feel like there's more for the show to say - at a time when plenty of shows have outstayed their welcome. 

I am still interested in Simon's backstory. I am still interested in Finn's inept stabs at relationships. 

I am still interested in Treetrunks and her shady past, Bubblegum and her far shadier one, and even the Earl of Lemongrab with his numerous clones. 

The show can still shock me, like when Lumpy Space Princess misunderstands a device for sending things back in time and blatantly kills someone - only to be made to forget all about it. And I am interested in this newest cliffhanger, and where Season VI will take it. 

From its humble beginnings with the web pilot, I really thought that Adventure Time would either burn very brightly and briefly before ending or that it would get very tired and end up a bad parody of itself. 

There's something in its formula - including occasionally churning out a brainless, uninteresting episode - that makes it stay interesting and relevant, though. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm glad it's there. 

The Powerpuff Girls: Season V

By season 4, the Powerpuff Girls formula was wearing a little thin and getting a bit dull. I fully expected to see an episode in this season where I could go, ‘Yup, that’s where it jumped the shark’, but in fact the show-writers managed to rather exceed my expectations and as a matter of fact, I’d say that moment doesn’t come until the season 6 episode ‘A Made Up Story’, which given how close it was to the show’s end isn’t a bad stretch. Even the clips episode here is quickly subverted so that it’s quickly apparent that the flashbacks are actually all-new and often rather nonsensical snippets.

By this point, the bulk of the writers and episode directors on Powerpuff Girls are the people who will go on to write most of the episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, though Amy Keating Rogers had yet to contribute. Lauren Faust is established enough to really be taking a back seat here, but Chris Savino has his first work in this season and helps define it, while Cindy Morrow also joins to put in some small-scale episodes in her recognisable style.

Two things, I feel, kept this season from becoming tired – one, the use of an ace long kept up a sleeve in that finally, after being in every intro sequence yet not actually having been in any episodes since their first appearance in the first ever full-length episode back in season 1, the Rowdyruff Boys make their return, coming back for a full-length episode and then later for two more half-episodes. They are an interesting counterpoint to the girls and their return is welcome, making for some very enjoyable episodes, especially when poor Bubbles has to pretend to be one of them.

The second strength is that the show falls back on its old successes of imitating other shows and styles, but picks some very unusual things to imitate. One full half-episode parodying Rocky and Bullwinkle is so-so at best, but there’s a really lovely episode that imitates both silent movies and that era’s cartoons at once, the excellent episode about judging by appearances ‘Substitute Creature’ has some brilliant pastiches of pulp comic panels, and Chris Savino makes up for the slight misfire of the Rocky and Bullwinkle episode with a cracking rock opera tribute, ‘See Me, Feel Me, Gnomey’. While of course taking its cues mostly from The Who, it also has hints of The Wall and War of the Worlds, and it is a rather bewildering and dark tale about the girls taking a wish from a sinister little gnome to rid the town of all its evil in exchange for their powers, only for the gnome to then assume the role of saviour and force have everyone suppressed and lacking individuality. The girls and their father/creator decide this is not real peace and rebel. It’s a story confusingly-told, morally ambivalent and even rather disturbing when the girls drive the little man from a branch and to his death, and never aired in the States – rumour has it because the story hinted too heavily at weighing up communism and democracy, though I find this dubious – but who cares when it has wonderful 70s synths and guitar solos and a full-on Jack Black impression from Wakko Warner voice actor Jess Harnell? It’s not quite ‘Meet the Beat-Alls’, but it’s bolder overall and another, lesser-known highlight.

Otherwise, things are largely unambitious, often just poking at the boundaries of cartoon humour without taking many risks. There’s an episode where Bubbles hears a naughty word and everyone is shocked to hear the girls saying it – so soon they fight a giant potty mouth. There’s a swipe at the far Left when the girls are prevented from stopping Mojo Jojo’s crimes because an animal protection lobby group get self-righteous and force them to stop. 

The Mayor’s stupidity is played upon – and he sounds more and more like the Ice King – with him taking over Monster Isle and being turned into a rampaging monster himself when Chemical X makes him huge. And Cindy Morrow turns in bland but entertaining episodes about bet-wetting, some adorable fluffy animals turning master criminals but nobody except the girls wanting to prosecute them on account of being so cute, and an annoying passive-aggressive dog being looked after by the girls as they try to protect him and persuade him to tell them about a crime he witnessed. The mixture of full-on weirdness, small-scale drama, repetition of old ideas and attempts to get the girls into different scenarios – including seeing caveman equivalents of them – retains the fun.

So yes, while I genuinely expected this to be quite the disappointment as a season, it actually turned out to be pretty good. 

The Powerpuff Girls Movie – plus shorts and commercials

Midway through the fourth season of The Powerpuff Girls, where ideas were starting to run a bit low, the theatrical movie version came out. It may seem like an obvious cash-in now, but it was hardly common for Hanna Barbera at the time, this being in 2002 their first feature film since the lamentable Once Upon a Forest almost a decade earlier in 1993, and at the time the only extension of a Cartoon Network property to the big screen. 

Prior to this, their only film that could be called a cash-in on a current weekly series (as opposed to an adaptation of a decades-old favourite) was 1986’s Go-Bots: Battle of the Rock Lords, and until the constantly-in-production Samurai Jack film comes out, it remains the only instance of a big-screen version of a Cartoon Network property. If it seems like every series that makes it big gets a cinema version (just look at Equestria Girls!), as a matter of fact that doesn’t apply to Cartoon Network, and that in large part seems to be down to this film just not making money.

There’s no denying it – The Powerpuff Girls was a flop. Even with Treasure Planet competing against it, it was the lowest-grossing animated movie of 2002. On the other hand, quite fortunately it was done on a shoestring, so whereas Treasure Planet cost $140 million and made back about $111 million, this more modest effort cost just $11 million and ended up making $16.4 million, no huge loss but clearly no blockbuster.

Part of the problem is really that while the series seems clever, that doesn’t come over in its big-screen counterpart. Deciding on an origin story, essentially the film retells the story from the episode Mojo Jojo comes to understand he was in part responsible for the girls’ creation, then extends the plot to show how at first the girls are not understood by the wider public. They have a game of tag without knowing how to restrain their powers and tear the city apart. The Professor is arrested and the girls become pariahs – which becomes worse when Jojo manipulates the girls into building his observatory for him and facilitating his plot to empower all the zoo’s monkeys to take over the city. They have a moment of deep rejection on the moon before hearing the Professor’s cry for help and learning to use their power to save people – and mete out enormous violence on those deserving it.

Where it seems the series would deliver the twist that what the girls really learn is how to be incredibly violent and beat people up with a glib irony and a knowing wink, the film does none of that. And without its cleverness, surreal touch and knowing nods to an adult audience who knows that the clichés of kids’ TV are being subverted, the mood just doesn’t come over, to the extent that the adults who watch this without being stoners who already watched the show simply won’t get what made The Powerpuff Girls such a success. Couple with that the fact that it really doesn’t have much original thought put in, being an expansion of a story already established in the show, and I see why it flopped. There’s also the fact that while there’s a polish to the cheap, simple look of the show, it’s clearly not an animation from a leading studio – hence the tenth-of-Disney’s-budget thing, and it seems that while Cartoon Network were putting about big talk about their feature film, internally it had to be made clear that this was a small-scale project, reportedly with the voice actresses having to be talked down when they were a little deluded about the budget involved and went on strike because they didn’t get a big pay hike.

Watched as an adaptation of a TV show in the mode of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut or Beavis and Butthead Do America, though, it makes sense. The show’s simple style is retained, with a nice sheen overlaid to make it prettier and the action more impressive. The Gangreen Gang in particular end up looking much more striking as a result. To lose that would be to lose much of the piece’s charm, and after all this is primarily for the established fanbase rather than new viewers. Taken in context, as a cheap extension with nicer animation, it is charming and does the job very well.

Just don’t expect too much – and, sadly, don’t expect the old smartness that made the series work in the beginning.

I also took the time to watch the DVD extras (fun seeing the actresses recording their lines, with the ‘deleted scenes’ basically more dialogue in the construction scene) as well as promotional animations for the show, and several other adverts and eyecatches made for the series. It’s a lot of fun seeing promo animations made with the characters interacting with other Cartoon Network figures, but best seeing different animation styles, including the kind of cereal advert that the series lampooned. It’s great to see an attempt to integrate the girls into live-action shots with heavy shading, and other animators rendering the girls in slightly more lanky form. A footnote, to be sure, but interesting and entertaining to watch. 

The Powerpuff Girls – season 4

Somewhat new territory for The Powepuff Girls’ fourth outing, as I mentioned in my thoughts on season 3 – where before, other than a few special double-length episodes, Powerpuff Girls episodes were roughly 9 minutes, so that two could air in a typically American ad-laden half-hour of television, here all but one episode is full-length. Only one episode goes into each half-hour slot (though of course, there are still the eleven billion commercial breaks Americans have to suffer through every couple of minutes), meaning each plotline has a lot more room to breathe, and there are rather fewer abrupt endings in the Python mould (which Adventure Time has since taken to new heights in kids’ animation).

Unfortunately, these episodes exhibit the same flaws that some of the thinner full-length episodes contained in the previous series – that is, not having quite enough meat to fill the full running time so filling the minutes with fluff. We get extended musical sequences with very little going on, repetition and some scenes where a point is made of mundane things being prolonged, which puts on the mask of being amusingly absurd and redundant, but is very easily seen for what it is – time-wasting. And not the amusing bathos of an episode like ‘Him Diddle Riddle’, where the waste of time is the whole point, but one that shows a lack of ideas.

And there’s evidence for that lack of ideas elsewhere in this season – the episode where Mojo goes back in time to prevent the Professor setting out on the path of science is, as its final joke references, something of a rehash of a previous episode where he tried to prevent the girls’ creation (though the 50s jokes and the chance to see the young Utonium were worth it!), and there are echoes of the Bunny episode ‘Twisted Sister’ in both ‘Stray Bullet’ and ‘Knock it Off’. For the second time, there is a Powerpuff spin on a very generic cartoon concept – in Season 2, we had the typical ‘character’s life is saved, so they pledge loyalty to the main characters, only to be so terrible as a servant that it becomes necessary to get rid of them’ with ‘Slave the Day’, and this time we get the ‘Kids try to set up two adults, and then despite the fact that they don’t care much for each other, something happens to make them fall in love, only for it to be so exaggerated that it causes the kids huge problems’ angle with half-episode ‘Keen on Keane’. Though both are very generic and by the time the episodes in question came about she was not the one coming up with the core stories, it’s worth mentioning that this season’s ‘Keen on Keane’ was the first episode to credit Lauren Faust as a director, and these typical cartoon ideas are both redone in episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. 

Faust also now frequently appears as a supervising director and on the writing committee, alongside several other future Pony collaborators – Amy Keating Rogers, Cindy Morrow and Chris Savino.

Oddly, the ‘season’, which may have been fairly arbitrarily demarcated later, aired over a period of very nearly two years, often with months between new episodes, and The Powerpuff Girls Movie was actually released in the middle of that, a mark of the series’ success. For all its success and consistently enjoyable writing, though, it certainly does feel like a series that’s been overstretched a little and is reaching the end of its conceptual strength. What trump cards were kept in reserve get used up, and are revealed generally to not have much thought behind them anyway – Buttercup at last has her unique talent (beyond being the toughest fighter) revealed, and it’s another example of the show’s simplistic bathos, and though I feel a little sorry for her (I liked Bubbles when I was small, but Buttercup’s been my favourite for years), her sheer exuberance and sense of triumph at the discovery won me over a little. The roster of villains remains largely fixed, with the only memorable new face the one-trick Whimsical Willy essentially occupying the same sort of role as Harold Smith as the unexpected and underwhelming villain, and another monster shown to be not so bad after all – and it’s undeniably hilarious to have Blossom’s ice powers and Bubbles’ linguistic gift illustrated by having a giant flaming gerbil that speaks Spanish.

I think we’re reaching a territory where the episodes are all-new to me. I’d only seen a handful of these before, and none of the episode titles for seasons 5 and 6 look familiar. We’ll see. Perhaps something will be unexpected and innovative, but I really feel like it’s time for The Powerpuff Girls to come to a dignified end. Two seasons more seems just about right.