When they came back from the animator, he was like, "It's magic! You just do some drawings and then it becomes a cartoon! It's amazing!" McHale: I remember when Pen did the boards. He's a month out of school, we don't do student films." And Eric (Homan, Frederator vice president of development) said, "You know, in most of these pitches you have a fake laugh and in this one you really laughed."Ī short is made, in which Finn (then called Pen) and Jake rescue Princess Bubblegum from the Ice King and Finn/Pen travels in his mind to Mars where Abraham Lincoln advises him to believe in himself. (Afterward) I said, "Well, we're not doing that. After leaving CalArts, Ward took his rejected minute, turned it into "a larger thing" and pitched it again.įred Seibert (founder, Frederator Studios): He's standing there with a guitar I have taken thousands of pitches, no one else has started a pitch singing. "Random! Cartoons" was a series of shorts produced for Nickelodeon by Frederator Studios, designed to field new talent and potential series. And they didn't like it - my drawings were baaaaad in school. Nickelodeon was taking pitches from CalArts students. Ward: It was just a sketch I kicked out into a minute-long short, where Finn and Jake save Princess Bubblegum from the Ice King using rocket boots. Pat McHale (creative director, later creator of "Over the Garden Wall"): The teachers were great, but being around other people that are super talented, that are also working towards the same kind of thing, gets you excited and, like, "I'm terrible, but I want to be better." Ward: CalArts had a lot of pretty typical drunken-college-kid party stuff going on, but animators would always just hole up inside of their cubicles and work. "Adventure Time" is born as "a doodle" in Valencia at the California Institute of the Arts, where Pen Ward is a student, alongside future key collaborators Adam Muto and Pat McHale. My mother, who is an artist, would keep Post-it notes in her purse to keep me busy 'cause she was a single mom with three boys and I would just go with her everywhere. I was doing flip books in first grade on Post-it notes. And you're like, "Wow it's alive!" I was interested in animation from a really early age. Just making the eyes squeeze down into little thin lines and then back up into little dots. Pen Ward (creator): Have you ever developed a photograph? That first time and you're like "Magic is real!" That's what animation feels like when you first make a character just blink. Pen Ward begins cartooning as a boy growing up in San Antonio, Texas. It'll make you laugh and break your heart.īelow, some of the many people who made it - several of whom have gone on to create beloved, award-winning cartoons of their own - remember some of what it was like. "Adventure Time" is cosmically cosmopolitan many things are alive and all imaginable things are potentially welcome - notwithstanding that the tale has brought Ooo to the brink of civil war. The comical bumps up against the chaotic, the domestic beats back the dreadful. The series developed over time, from a story of sword-swinging amateur heroics into one more concerned with family and friends and affections it is spiritual in a way that doesn't deny the power of broken wind. The Land of Ooo is where they live, with its Candy Kingdom, Ice Kingdom, Flame Kingdom, Nightosphere and Lumpy Space, each with its issues, its creatures, its customs, its king or princess. Its characters have been modeled for sale in plush and plastic and pixels, as Lego pieces and video game avatars.įinn (Jeremy Shada) and his shape-shifting dog (John DiMaggio) began the series as romping adventurers, fighting monsters on a generally charming if often dangerous mutant Earth, about a thousand years after the apocalyptic Great Mushroom War. 2 in an hourlong finale, having filled Comic-Con convention halls, inspired innumerable cosplayers and fan artists, and picked up rave reviews, multiple Emmys, a Peabody Award and a Macy's float along the way. Its 10-season run on Cartoon Network comes to a close Sept. It doesn't quite work out for the dead - candy zombies wreck a slumber party in the first episode of "Adventure Time," but for the living, Pendleton Ward's animated epic becomes a cultural phenomenon. "If my Decorpsinator serum works, then all the dead candy people will look as young and healthy as you do." "Princess Bubblegum," asks Finn, a human boy, "when we bring the dead back to life, will they be filled with worms?" In 2010, a new cartoon debuted with these bold lines.
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