On April 5, 2010, on the Cartoon Network channel, a new show aired. The show was called Adventure Time, and it had been promoted as a lighthearted fantasy adventure show. The first episode was called Slumber Party Panic, storyboarded by Elizabeth Ito and Adam Muto.
One of the quirks of the typical Cartoon Network original series episode is that it is eleven minutes long, among the shortest episode lengths of anything in the medium of TV. In American television terms, that's half of a sitcom or 25% of a drama. That's not to say that cartoons have less story than dramas or sitcoms, just that they have significantly less time to tell them in.
The first and most obvious effect of this is something we can call narrative compression, in which a story is reduced to its most bare-bones components sprinted through in the fastest way possible. Right off the bat, Adventure Time excels at this. Within one minute of Slumber Party Panic beginning, the show demonstrates its magical setting, identifies the episode's genre by panning from the magical castle to the spooky graveyard, introduces us to our protagonist and a major recurring character, establishes a basic relationship between them, and sets up both major engines of the episode's plot: the decorpsinator serum and the invasion of zombies.
This is especially important in terms of the fundamental question asked by viewers of all new TV shows: why do we like you? Particularly in narratives as compressed as Adventure Time's, it is important that shows answer that question very quickly and efficiently.
So to pose the question: what is the case that Slumber Party Panic makes for Adventure Time? What pleasures does it offer?
First off, Adventure Time showcases its basic aesthetic pleasures. The show has a clear overall house style, full of bright colors and unweighted lines, but it's clear that this is a style open to a lot of aesthetic variation. The show briefly takes on a pseudo-horror tone during the episode, and through shot composition and color palette it's clear that, even though the compositions are following the same overall rules, the visual tone is strikingly different. Compare the candy people's slumber party -
The house style is visible in both, in character design and color composition. However, the extremely muted, earthy color palette of Starchy's encounter with a zombie is used as an indicator of the show's aesthetic versatility, as well as its genre versatility. Another pleasure offered by the show in this episode is its ability to work in a variety of different genres simultaneously.
If Slumber Party Panic is examined in detail, it's very clear that it's a mashup of an enormous variety of genres. First of all, the whole episode is set in a Candyland-like fantasy kingdom, ruled over by a monarch; it plays with teen movie tropes like seven minutes in heaven and truth or dare; the episode is structured as a zombie invasion movie not unlike Dawn of the Dead; there's a moment of grotesque body horror as the blindfolded candy people begin eating the insides of the zombies; and the episode veers abruptly into science fiction territory upon Finn's breaking of his royal promise with Princess Bubblegum.
This is a particularly interesting moment. Despite having introduced a huge number of characters and situations, the episode successfully accelerates enough that both the sleepover plot and the zombie invasion plot are finished by the eight-minute mark, at which point the episode's primary subplot (Finn can't reveal the zombies' existence to Jake because of the royal promise he made with Princess Bubblegum) becomes the engine for a new plot, in which Finn accidentally breaks the royal promise and has to reckon with the Guardians of the Royal Promise, who force him to answer a math question.
This gets at another one of Adventure Time's primary aesthetic pleasures - its general, whimsical atmosphere. Despite the speed of the narrative, Adventure Time has a relatively low gag density compared to other Cartoon Network comedies. Instead, Adventure Time goes for funny situations, ambience, and dialogue. For example, a plot point in the episode is Princess Bubblegum explaining that the candy people can't know about the zombies or they would "flip out." Finn asks what the Princess means by this, to which she responds, "I mean they would fliiiip ooooout." This isn't a joke in the setup/punchline or pun mold, but instead a joke that relies upon viewers finding the anachronism and absurdity of the Princess's statement, as well as the accompanying animation, funny on its own merits.
This episode is Adventure Time's opening thesis, which shows off the show's positive aspects and its general charms. Now that it's established the basis of what Adventure Time is, it can begin filling in what this episode only sketches out. Next time: Trouble in Lumpy Space.
