That's How Most People Get In: The Enchiridion

The Enchiridion aired on April 19, 2010.  It was boarded by Adam Muto, Pendleton Ward, and Patrick McHale.

Despite airing in the fifth slot, the Enchiridion was actually the first episode to enter production and initially intended to be the first episode of the show.  This actually makes a good deal of sense when watching it; in some ways, this hews even closer to the style of the pilot than Prisoners of Love, which took the pilot as a starting point and reconfigured it.  What the Enchiridion does is essentially make a sequel to the pilot.  This sensibility is evident through the heavy emphasis on goofy dances, bizarre obstacles, surreal interludes, and mock-fantasy dialogue, in this case Princess Bubblegum's discussion of heroism and the Enchiridion with Finn.  Similarly, Mannish Man the minotaur functions as a kind of loving parody of genre masculinity, something very much in the mileu of the pilot.

But we've already discussed the pilot.  We've already discussed Adventure Time's early use of fantasy elements, and we've already talked about what it means to begin a show.  Now is not the time to revisit any of this stuff.  Instead, it's time to talk about the specific group of people who storyboarded this episode and what they mean for the show as a whole.

This episode was storyboarded by, as previously mentioned, Adam Muto, Pendleton Ward, and Patrick McHale.  Ward we've discussed; McHale and Muto have largely slipped by us unnoticed.

This makes more sense for McHale.  This is McHale's first and last board, although it is by no means his first or last contribution to the show.  McHale is credited as the show's creative director for its first five seasons.  He has been described by Tom Herpich, a season one character designer and future storyboarder, as "the most unsung of Adventure Time's original architects."  However, this provides us with very little information as to what McHale's contributions actually were.  We'll look more at McHale as a creative figure when it's time to talk about Over the Garden Wall.

Muto, on the other hand, is much more present.  He's co-storyboarded three of the five episodes this blog has covered so far, and yet it is almost impossible to tease out his creative influence from that of the other storyboarders.  He goes on to co-storyboard eight more episodes in this season alone.  We'll talk more about Muto at a later date as well.

And so, despite attempting to look at these two figures, we're left looking directly back at Ward again.  Why is this?  It's time for a Grand Thesis on Season One of Adventure Time.

The thesis is as follows:  Ward aside, season one of Adventure Time is not a season of visionary artists bending the show to their own whims and wills.  Instead, this season's storyboard artists seek to fully implement and express the desires of Pen Ward.

On the Inkstuds podcast, Ward states that he originally conceived Adventure Time as script-driven, so that he could have more consistent control of everything to do with the show.  Adam Muto says in the Conversation Parade podcast that one original idea for the show was a weekly serial.  All of this speaks to the wish Ward had to present his artistic vision for the world by nailing it down completely.  Despite the fact that the show never became a script-driven serial, season one's artists all decided to follow the wisdom of Pen Ward anyway.  Next Time:  this Jiggler.