Business Time aired immediately after Ricardio the Heart Guy on April 26, 2010. It was boarded by Luther McLaurin and Armen Mirzaian, who previously boarded The Jiggler.
Now is the time to begin talking about the apocalypse in Adventure Time. This is the first episode to explicitly indicate that the world of Adventure Time is a post-apocalyptic one. However, it's very much worth pointing out that Adventure Time has been an implicitly post-apocalyptic show from the very, very beginning; the first image the show chooses to ever show its audience is this:
A field strewn with abandoned technology and unexploded bombs. However, it isn't until its eighth episode that it even begins to deal somewhat with this idea, and here only very, very glancingly, to the extent that the apocalypse can't really be the way into this episode. So we'll start somewhere else and work our way back to the apocalypse from there.
What's interesting about Business Time is how much it follows the model McLaurin and Mirzaian laid out in The Jiggler, and yet how it manages to have so much more thematic depth. Both episodes follow the structure of Finn and Jake finding something convenient to them that they try to exploit which leads to horrific consequences, ultimately forcing them to restore the status quo to that of the beginning of the episode. In The Jiggler, it's the jiggler, and in this episode it's the businessmen.
The businessmen are endlessly fascinating. First of all, their very physical appearance is pretty horrifying - they resemble nothing more than zombies and appear to have barnacles living on their flesh. However, the businessmen are also used as incredibly comic characters.
A lot of this has to do with how much the episode plays with the "frozen caveman" trope that's a staple of American cartoons. The episode trades in large part on the absurdity of replacing a caveman with a businessman in this specific context, going so far as to have the businessmen speak in the truncated language that's become associated with cavemen in popular culture.
However, it's not enough that cavemen and businessmen don't belong together. This is Adventure Time, which loves nothing more than surreal mixes of genres and storytelling styles. The episode also makes a lot of hay from the absurdity of businessmen unleashed in Adventure Time's fantasy landscape. The show gets quite a few good sight gags out of this, particularly the business men researching Finn and Jake's battle techniques while eating donuts and drinking coffee on a hillside, or the businessmen decked out with armor and weapons trying to defeat some battlecubes.
However, these characters have more to them than goofiness and body horror. The businessmen are also just fundamentally really sad. In the process of being frozen, they've had their identities stripped away and lost everything besides their most basic instincts - business.
This also leads into something else. By the end, the businessmen have become a source of existential horror - not just threats to Finn and Jake's adventuresome spirit, but threats to freedom and happiness throughout Ooo.
So what is the horror that the businessmen represent? The seemingly obvious answer - capitalism - is incorrect; the businessmen, despite their iconography, have absolutely nothing to do with markets of any kind. Instead, the businessmen seem to have one very specific goal: efficiency. Their solution to the problem of rescuing people and adventuring is to create a horrifying authoritarian system in which everyone is literally sealed inside a glass bubble. This is the source of the horror of the businessmen - they represent stasis and absolute fixity, in complete and total opposition to growth and development.
Which brings us back to Adventure Time's conception of the apocalypse. While it's clear that Adventure Time takes place in a world that's undergone some kind of cataclysmic nuclear war, it's also clear that Ooo isn't really a bad place. Life goes on. There's plenty of joy and happiness. Ooo has managed to grow and adapt to the horrifying circumstances of the world and fill it with kindness and life.
Next time: My Two Favorite People.
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