Dark Wizard Matter

In her 2002 essay A Time And Place For Everything , Karen Lury talks about the branding of children's television channels, including Cartoon Network: "In one ident, the channel's morning schedule is presented as if the programmes were paintings, so that each show is represented as a framed picture, and they are seen hanging across the screen, side by side.  Each programme is therefore apparently 'exhibited' at a certain time of day."  Karen Lury's essay precedes Adventure Times debut on Cartoon Network by eight years, but her close observation of this branding is deeply relevant to both Adventure Time and Cartoon Network as a whole.  Prior to Adventure Time, Cartoon Network rarely forayed into serial narrative storytelling.  There were exceptions, but these exceptions were clearly demarcated as experimental and were never Cartoon Network's flagship shows.  For example, the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon ran from 2003 to 2005 and had an overarching nar

In the run-up to Adventure Time's final episode in September 2018, a variety of thinkpieces began appearing in prestigious publications.  An ode to Adventure Time, one of TV's most ambitious – and yes, most adventurous – shows   appeared in Vox.  Adventure Time, TV's Surreal Masterpiece, Comes to an End  showed up in the New York Times.  Adventure Time: goodbye to the most ambitious cartoon since the Simpsons   ran in the Guardian.  This is in a lot of ways typical; Adventure Time was, for a while, a pop cultural juggernaut.  At its peak in its fifth season, Adventure Time pulled more than 3 million viewers, which is exceptional for a Cartoon Network show, as well as higher ratings than comparable shows like Regular Show, Steven Universe, or We Bare Bears ever achieved.  By its fifth season, Adventure Time had already earned its spot in the New York Times. However, it is worth taking a glance at what some of the articles have to say on the subject of the show, and part

The Adventure Time  episode Simon and Marcy is in some ways similar to a host of blockbusters that have come out in recent years.  These are things like The Day After Tomorrow , or 2012 .  In both of these movies – as well as in the Adventure Time  episode – the world has been destroyed by some kind of ecological catastrophe, and they focus on a small group of survivors that must carry on in this new broken world. Of course, Simon and Marcy  is framed in a profoundly different way than either of the two eco-disaster films mentioned here.  Both The Day After Tomorrow  and 2012  use the present epoch as their basis – both films are in large part about how the American government is reacting to ecological disasters.  Simon and Marcy , as the card shown suggests, instead is told from a future perspective – its function in the broader series is to illuminate the past and flesh out the history of the episode's two protagonists. On the topic of the films under discussion here,

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first post on this Adventure Time  blog.  This blog is two things – first of all, it's a long-term project for a class I'm taking, and second of all, it's a semi-continuation of a blogging project that I attempted to start three-ish years ago and never got off the ground.  My goal for that blog was to write about every Adventure Time  episode in order; I got about 12 episodes in and fell off.  At the moment, I'm no longer interested in that approach.  Instead, I'll be writing blog entries about more general topics – this post, for example, will soon become a post discussing Walter Benjamin's analysis of Mickey Mouse and how that pertains to Adventure Time , and some future topics include questions of auteurship, animation, and the nature of quality television, using Adventure Time  as my lens. And so, without further ado, let's begin discussing Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was a German theorist who was primarily active in