‘Adventure Time’: The Trippiest Show on Television
People come to Los Angeles so they can have an experience like Pendleton Ward’s: Two years after arriving, he was about to move into his car. Three years after that, he had one of the biggest cult hits on television: a rapturously surreal post-apocalyptic animated saga that has since spawned a merchandising empire, 14 million weekly viewers, a 17 million-strong Facebook following and virtually unanimous acclaim.
That’s gotta feel pretty good.
And it probably would to nearly anyone except Pendleton Ward, the cult-hero creator of Adventure Time, which in three years has generated 176 11-minute episodes with a dizzying array of not just characters but dimensions, plotlines, parallel realities and origin stories.
“Dealing with people every day wears on you,” Ward says, squeezed into a desk chair in the Burbank, California, Cartoon Network building. A four-day-old bowl of Fruity Pebbles lies neglected at his elbow, the milk evaporated to leave just a rainbow of crud stuck to the sides of the bowl.
“To spend that extra energy and time you don’t have, to make something that’s worth making, to make it awesome, wears you out,” he says. A backward red cap hides the top of his head; a checkered shirt buttoned to the top conceals his plump body; and on his face, there is not so much a beard but a hair force field, keeping anything from penetrating the world he’s created for himself. “It’s a beast of a show. And the more popular it gets, the more the ancillary things – like the merchandise and games and everything – keep getting bigger.”
And so, Ward confesses, one day during Season Five, unbeknownst to his fans, “I quit because it was driving me nuts.”
He says this not with sadness or frustration, but with relief. “For me, having quality of life outweighed the need to control this project and make it great all the time.” So he stepped down from running Adventure Time to become simply one of the show’s writers and storyboard artists.
Asked if he’d ever want to create another TV show, Ward responds with horror: “No, never. That sounds like a nightmare!”
It’s not that Ward is ungrateful. It’s that helming a hit series generating top-10 games in app stores, comics that have collectively sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and nearly a thousand individual items of merchandise is just not part of his DNA. He would far prefer to be at home with the lights off and the curtains closed, playing a video game and eating pizza.
Yet somehow one of the most introverted people in Hollywood has created a show that, arguably more than anything on television, connects in the deepest way with children, teens and adults alike. Adventure Time is ostensibly an animated children’s show focusing on the adventures of two interspecies best friends and freelance heroes, Finn the Human and Jake the Dog. But it belongs in the pantheon of kids’ programming – including Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Ren & Stimpy and Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures – that has an immense cult following among adults. This may be because the Adventure Time world is so imaginative, many think that to invent this kind of stuff, you’d have to be on drugs (which Ward says he doesn’t do).
Tom Kenny, the actor who plays the show’s sympathetic villain, the Ice King, sees a lot of Ward written into this character. The Ice King was once a much-loved archaeology professor named Simon, whose Trotsky glasses happen to look exactly like Ward’s. But one day on his travels, Simon came across a crown. And whenever he put it on, he gained incredible powers – which include flying, generating ice and, probably not coincidentally, the sprouting of a huge beard. But he also became misguided, narcissistic, dangerous and partially insane.
“I would guess that the way the Ice King feels like he’s going mad and things are spinning out of his control, that must be what it’s like to run a show like this,” says Kenny, who is also the voice of SpongeBob. “I’m sure Pen has felt like he’s losing his grip on reality because he’s the arbiter of everything. Sometimes it’s burdensome and you yearn for simpler times.”
Recently, Ward signed up for improv classes because he thought they would be a fun distraction. But, it turns out, all they did was make him even more uncomfortable. “I didn’t think that I had a bunch of walls until I started taking that class and then I was like, ‘Whoa, this is forcing me to get out of my comfort zone,'” he says. “I realized I love my comfort zone. I spent a long time building my comfort zone. It’s precious to me, and I love it and I want it.
So what is Ward protecting himself from?
He is at a loss to figure out what it is: All he knows is that he prefers being isolated, though, like the Ice King, he has a “craving to be social and hang out with nice people and have them think that I’m nice, which doesn’t make any sense to me.”
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