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With a show like "Adventure Time," there's no middle ground. The viewer must give themselves fully over to its addicting blend of non-sequiturs, goofball flights of fancy, and general weirdness, or go home. Perhaps that's the thinking behind episode collection DVDs like It Came From the Nightosphere, the second of the non-season DVDs that Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. have put out for the show. With a low retail price of around ten bucks, the disc will give newcomers a good taste of what the show is like.For anyone unfamiliar, the show follows the exploits of Jake the Dog (John DiMaggio), who can morph and stretch his body into anything at will, and Finn the Human (Jeremy Shada), a young energetic kid with a sword and a bear hood, who go on adventures across the land of Ooo. Recurring characters also include Princess Bubblegum (Hynden Walch), Marceline the Vampire Queen (Olivia Olson), video game machine Beemo (Niki Yang), Lady Rainicorn (Yang again), and Lumpy Space Princess (series creator Pendleton Ward).
The collection is titled for the Emmy-nominated episode "It Came From the Nightosphere," which is a pretty decent example of all the notes the show can hit. After Marceline sings a sad song (about French fries) that reveals her conflicted relationship with her father, Jake reunites them, only to have Marceline's Dad selfishly steal Marceline's guitar and go rampaging across the countryside sucking people's souls out. The rift between Marceline and her dad is handled with a nice seriousness that fits right in alongside absurd gags about penguins, and any episode that includes a song is a plus in my book. The episode is followed by "Rainy Day Daydream," another great example of the show's imagination, and not just because the episode is literally about imagination. Finn and Jake are forced to stay inside during a knife storm, and end up having to fight off Jake's overactive imagination, which turns the floor into hot lava and fills the rooms with monsters. It would be easy to simply illustrate all the things Jake is imagining, but the animators take it in the opposite direction, which is much funnier. Many of the episodes included in this set are from Seasons 2 and 3 of the show, but the few Season 1 episodes sprinkled into the mix give a good idea of how far the show has come since its first episodes. The most primitive of the early episodes is "The Enchiridion!", which, while perfectly entertaining, has a sense of being locked to a traditional story structure that later episodes have none of. Then again, maybe that's just an anomaly; the show's very first episode, "Slumber Party Panic," is also presented here, and doesn't feel as anchored.
As a collection, there's no real theme or connection between these episodes, although there seems to have been some effort between the two DVDs to make sure any of the show's few serialized story points should be covered for anyone that watches "My Two Favorite People" and then this disc; for instance, this collection's episodes "Mystery Train" and "The Creeps" go together, and the setup for a joke in "Memory of a Memory" occurs in "It Came From the Nightosphere"). That collection also has the introduction of Marceline, which is not included here. Episodes: "It Came From the Nightosphere," "Rainy Day Daydream," "Wizard," "Power Animal," "The Enchiridion!," "Slumber Party Panic," "The Real You," "Memory of a Memory," "Prisoners of Love," "Cyrstals Have Power," "Business Time," "Mystery Train," "Guardians of Sunshine," "The Monster," "Hitman," "The Creeps."
The DVD
The Extras
Conclusion |