A Criticism on my Media Criticism…kind of?

Recently, I wrote a media criticism paper on one of my new favorite shows, Rick and Morty, which, if you haven’t watched it yet, you should. Anyway, as I was writing this paper, I couldn’t help but notice how quickly things were progressing. It’s not often that I write for my own enjoyment, but I when I do, I usually get into a sort of “zone” where I obsess over adding more and more until I’m finally satisfied. Essentially, that’s what I found myself doing with this media criticism on Rick and Morty. With most of the papers I have to write for classes, I find that it generally takes longer, since I usually get distracted by something on the Internet or end up taking Netflix breaks. However, when I write about topics that I’m very familiar with or find genuinely interesting, things just kind of flow, y’know? I mean, I had another research paper I just finished on 3D printed prosthetics and organs, which was an interesting topic, but engineering isn’t really my area of expertise, so it was kind of a struggle.

What I’m trying to say here is pretty much that, whether it’s a script for a short film or a comic book, I should write more. I might want to avoid tweeting or keeping up with a public blog, because I usually don’t like forcing my opinions on other people, but that’s just my opinion. Personally, I wish more of the writing we had to do in high school was more applicable to creative fields, because, yeah, I know how to write an essay, but how in the hell do I write a novel? Or a comic book? Or a film script? Except for the last one, I feel like it’s something you kind of have to figure out on your own or take classes for.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that. I realize this post was kind of “stream of consciousness,” so sorry about that.

 

Adventure Time with Kevin the Human and Research the Paper

Okay, I’d first like to apologize for the terrible, terrible title, but it’s the only thing I could think of at the moment, so shut up!

Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to talk a bit about my current research paper. If you couldn’t tell by the aforementioned terrible title, it’s about the cult animated television program, Adventure Time, that, for whatever the reason, has become a popular franchise among children, teenagers, college students, and 40-year-old dudes alike. However, so far it’s been a bit of a challenge for me, seeing as how I have plenty of proof that it’s as popular as I say it is, but it’s not easy to find a “scholarly” article that says so. As a writer, when it comes to writing research papers I like to use scholarly journals and other reliable sources for my citations, but with a subject like Adventure Time, that’s becoming a bit of a problem. Recently, however, I learned that I could use the show itself as a resource, so hopefully that will make things easier.

It’s also kind of hard to not put my own bias into a paper like this, since I do enjoy watching the show on occasion. I mean, there’s a lot I can say about it from experience, but I feel like I need to find a more reliable source than myself for this paper to be credible. I think I might try to use more media news articles as I continue working on the show, due to the lack of sufficient scholarly sources. For something like this, sites like TheWrap and Deadline might be more helpful than short snippets from journals or articles, since they deal almost exclusively in media news.

I’ll figure something out eventually…

Is Adventure Time Really a Kid’s Show?

Ever since Adventure Time first aired in 2010, the show has had a massive and remarkably wide viewership. I’m not quite sure what it is that made this show such a unique specimen of children’s programs that it became as popular (if not more) with college students and adults as it is with kids. Spongebob Squarepants, which has lost a great deal of its older viewership with its newer episodes, was another instance of such a universal appeal, because the humor wasn’t dumbed down for kids, or too high-brow for children to understand. The same, more or less, goes for Adventure Time, but there’s something else about it that allowed it to garner such a massive and devoted fanbase. In my opinion, it’s because Adventure Time isn’t a show that’s just there to make you laugh at how goofy the character are or how ridiculous the situations are, but instead it’s a show that isn’t afraid to be serious. Sure, a serious note will be quickly counteracted with a joke or a funny line of dialogue, but the serious themes behind the show are always there.

One of my favorite episodes of Adventure Time is called “I Remember You,” and it starts off with the Ice King (the show’s sleazy princess-loving antagonist) singing a song by Marceline the Vampire Queen (the show’s resident hipster) and dancing around like an idiot. Eventually, he decides to write his own song, and finds some pages from his old scrapbooks to use for inspiration. He then flies over to Marceline’s cave home and pesters her to help him write a song with him. The thing is, the two of them, according to the scrapbook and Marceline’s own recollection, the Ice King and Marceline used to know each other before the events of Adventure Time, in an era called The Great Mushroom War, which is why the Earth (now Ooo) is a magical land of whacky creatures and places. So essentially, this is a children’s show that deals with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. We even see flashbacks in this episode where the Ice King (then Simon Petrikov) meets young Marceline, still just a child, and helps her survive the post-apocalyptic hellscape as he is slowly losing his mind and memories because of a cursed magical crown. Despite not actually coming out and saying it most of the time, Adventure Time deals a lot with heavy subjects, like death, nuclear destruction, and being alone. You can even equate the Ice King’s memory loss and mental deterioration from the crown as a metaphor for Alzheimer’s disease.

[Season 6 spoilers ahead]

The two-part season 6 premiere of Adventure Time, which aired April 21st, also had some very heavy themes and actually went in a direction that is relatively  unprecedented for a kids show. In this episode, Finn and Jake are trying to find a way to The Citadel, where Finn’s father (who Finn, until recently, never knew was alive) is rumored to be held. However, to get there, the two have to commit a cosmic crime, and their friend Prismo, an inter-dimensional wish master, offers himself as a sacrifice so Finn can see his father. All they have to do is wake up Prismo’s human body, and his inter-dimensional form will disappear until he goes back to sleep. However, The Lich, who is the series’ only truly evil antagonist (voiced by the great Ron Perlman), instead wakes him up. He also essentially disintegrates Prismo’s human body, effectively killing him, and gets transported to the citadel, where he releases all of the evil prisoners there, and Finn’s father. This episode ends with Finn’s father abandoning him yet again, and Finn’s arm being torn off by his cursed sword, which can never be healed (however, Finn’s amputated arm has been hinted at for a long time, now). So now we’re dealing with murder, paternal abandonment, and amputations. I’m not exactly sure what to make of this last episode, but it all seems pretty heavy for kids to be watching. Even though Adventure Time is a kids show, maybe it’s the only one out there adventurous enough to show the consequences of human action.

Out of Left Field

So far, “Something Ricked This Way Comes”, the latest installment of Adult swim’s Rick and Morty, is one of my all-time favorites of the series. The A-plot of this episode focuses on Summer’s new job working for the devil in a “little vintage thrift store”, where he exploits his customers’ insecurities by giving them magical items, for which they pay with a hefty curse. It takes Rick all of a few seconds to figure out that he’s the devil, so he decides to prove that science beats evil by creating a device that “detects and catalogs all of [his] Twilight Zone/Ray Bradbury/Friday The Thirteenth: The Series” voodo crap magic“. Again, Rick and Morty manages to spoof classic science fiction and fantasy tropes in some of the best ways possible. The show somehow goes from a classic Ray Bradbury tale to The Social Network in under 22 minutes because Rick beats the devil, Summer helps the now-suicidal prince of darkness start an internet company, which leads to him inevitably “Zuckerberg” her, as he is wont to do.

The B-Plot of this episode is nothing too special, unfortunately, because it focuses on the relationship between Morty and his father, Jerry, as they argue about whether or not Pluto is a planet. After Jerry makes a big stink about Pluto definitely being a planet, the two of them get abducted and brought to Pluto where Jerry becomes a celebrity and stupidly reassures all of the Plutonians that Pluto is a planet. A conspiracy theory unfolds, and it all kind of ends up meaning nothing in the end, but the end of the episode itself makes the entire episode worth it.

My favorite thing about Rick and Morty is its ability to continually surprise me and throw curveballs when I least expect it. After Summer gets “Zuckerberged”, she and Rick team up to get revenge. You’d think they’d do something clever, like…I don’t know…take down his internet company, or expose him as the devil, or do something like that. However, what happens is beautifully unexpected and I love it. They break into a ridiculous Rocky-esque workout montage set to DMX’s aggressively badass “X Gon’ Give It To Ya” which leads to them getting ripped and eventually beating up Steve Jobs the Devil and, during the post-credit scene, a neo-nazi, a Westboro Baptist Church Member, and a collection of other scumbags.

Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland just keep finding new ways to surprise me, and if they can manage to keep doing exactly it is that they’re doing, I’ll keep watching.