A Eulogy for Regular Show

That’s it, it’s over. Last Monday the very last episode of Regular show aired (although I confess parts of this will have been written before that due to the magic of forewarning) With 8 seasons and 1 movie how do you even sum up a cartoon that’s lasted since 2010. Well you don’t. It’s beyond the scope of anything I could really do in a single blog post. So I turn to what I can do, and that is celebrate it. Thank it for its achievements and draw attention to its greatness. And just to differentiate my piece, from god knows how many others there won’t be a countdown of the best episodes, the best moments or anything like that. I’m going to do what I do best. I’m going to ramble. Then I’m going to edit it into something mostly legible, and ship it out. Because, in hindsight, this cartoon meant a lot more to me than any other I’ve ever watched and it’s only now I’m realising that.

So what is Regular Show? Well I have the Wikipedia synopsis staring me in the face right now,

“The series revolves around the lives of two working class friends, mordecai and rigby, both employed as groundskeepers at a local park. Their regular attempts to slack off usually lead to surreal, extreme and often supernatural misadventures”

And as with anything you condense down into a single sentence, it sounds normal, dull, run of the mill and with a name like regular show, you wouldn’t be amiss to think that.

I do admit to not beginning to watch it until roughly its 3^rd season, only going back to watch it all the way through once it hit its 4^th because at that point I was at the height of my Adventure Time fandom and once I started to watch it, it was the cartoon I most often put down and would always find myself binge watching to catch up. Whole season would be viewed in a day and then forgotten. Because to me, Regular Show was always the cartoon that quietly chugged along, overshadowed by the media giant of Adventure Time and the fan loved Steven Universe. Always there, but never centre stage.

And that is a complete crime because it is hands down the best cartoon of this decade. I alluded to this last week, with it being my favourite cartoon ever. And frankly it is, the more I think about it the more it seems funnier than Adventure Time and more emotional than Steven Universe. Out classing both with ease and after a little bit of thought, I can trace it back to one thing. Regular Show knew exactly what it was all the time, it never tried to be more, or less. It was just Regular Show. Whilst Adventure Time was displaying the bright happy surrealist comedy and Steven Universe was pushing social boundaries further and further Regular Show was being profoundly human.

It was a show that featured a Blue Jay and a Racoon as main characters, their boss was a Gumball machine, and their co-workers included an immortal yeti, a ghost with an arm sticking out its head, a goat that was a spy for the KGB. And all of this was normal to the narrative, somehow this show had managed to take the surreal and make it real. Nothing felt out of left field in this show, no matter how objectively odd it got, it still seemed perfectly, well, regular (I’m sorry that’s the only time I’ll use that joke) The characters never stopped to question why these things were happening, or how it was even possible, they just took it in their stride. Through the medium of just having characters never draw attention to the weird, the writers made possibly the most beliveable world of oddities in cartoon history.

And now I find myself struggling to touch all the points I want to, not knowing where to start. There’s too much I want to say about this cartoon I will keep returning too it, hell I’m already starting to watch it through again from start to finish (now that’s actually doable) I think instead of discussing plots, character arcs or reviewing the final episode I will save that for another time. So goodbye Regular Show, you were the scrappy underdog of the Cartoon Renissance, and with you now gone, it seems like that age is at an end.

The Problems With Adventure Time

Okay, so now I’ve proved to myself I do like Adventure Time it’s time to tear it a new one. Or at least put into words a few obvious problems it has that plague its most recent seasons which should serve as a primer for further discussions. It should be noted, that Adventure Time is not the only one guilty of these problems, it’s just that it set such a high standard and did kick off that wonderful cartoon renaissance I talked about a while back. Adventure Time is so far the cartoon of the decade. And if it’s to keep that title all its warts should be given just as much scrutiny as its best parts.

Characters are not punished:
Jake is a god awful Father and Princess Bubblegum is a cruel dictator. To name the two most obvious issues here. So starting with the latter, Princess Bubblegum constantly experiments, abuses and belittles her people. Once they finally wise up to the fact they can depose her, it doesn’t last long and she returns declaring them idiots. There is no change there, she hasn’t learnt a lesson, it’s framed as if the candy people have. That lesson being you shouldn’t self-govern and leave it all to Bubblegum. Which from an outside perspective is frightening but she gets away with it.

Now Jake being an awful father. He ignores his children until he is forced to interact with them or when they appear in his life. He effectively runs away from that responsibility and it never comes back to bite him. His partner welcomes him with open arms whenever he appears, only one of his children ever calls him out on it, and that’s resolved within that episode with the child being put at fault. It’s another horrifying think that just seems to be pushed aside to hold some form of status quo.

Both of these behaviours are normalised in the context of the show by presenting them as funny, we are expected to laugh at these characters when they do these things, but are given no narrative payoff to their actions, they simply are this way, and won’t change and other characters won’t ask them to change.

Relationships aren’t believable:
As a tangent, why are Lady Rainicorn and Jake a couple? With Jake practically ignoring her for large spans of time, ignoring their children. Leaving literally a day after they’re born. I don’t even really think they set up how they met, even in passing. And when they are together it seems a little forced and well, sterile. It’s a little depressing to think about in hindsight.

Plot points are not dealt with or expanded:
This one has a very obvious example. Remember when Finn lost his arm. And everyone was congratulating Adventure Time on the cleverness of its visual story telling as it had been implied several times before the episode that he would lose his arm due to some perverse fate. And then everyone was hypothesising about the new status quo Finn would have to adapt too, with a very obvious disability and how that wou…… or a bee could have sex with his arm 4 episodes later and void the whole thing. Adventure has this issue that it can’t sit still, or think through one specific idea, it is there for 1 or 2 episodes, if you’re lucky it’s 2 right next to each other, if you’re unlucky there was 5 episodes of filler and sometimes it just never appears again or is even recognised by the characters later down the line.

It’s a shame that after basically any large development, the show will inevitably return to a status quo with the characters vastly unchanged from the experience

The world doesn’t progress around the characters:
Everything in Adventure Time appears to happen in a small bubble, all on it’s lonesome. Events from one episode never seem to have a dripping effect on other people and often aren’t bought up again. It’s almost as if people forgot previous adventures leading to a disjointed overall narrative. I could take whole chunks of recent adventure time, reshuffle the episodes and you would never know they were out of order.

And now I think I’m out of gripes, probably because these are all fairly big gripes, and I’m loathe to spend another 1000 words just repeating what I’ve already said so to finish……

It should be noted that, yes, all of these issues raised are non-issues in various episodes, for example whilst Jake and Princess Rainicorn’s relationship is alien, Marceline’s and Ice Kings is incredibly well done.  What I’ve done here is point out that Adventure Times biggest issue is its inconsistency, one episode will be stellar, the next will fall flat and the next will be inconsequential to anything. And it’s obviously not that it can’t be done, as next week I follow up this post with, the more I think about it, my favourite cartoon, Regular Show and how it deals with all these issues.

My Favourite Adventures

Let us take a break from all this talk of anime and turn our attention back to the west. So lets kick off with a normal list of my 10 favourite Adventure time episodes, before next week’s post in which I tear Adventure Time apart. I thought about doing a top 10, but I felt that I only have a clear number 1 favourite episode so I’ll deliver that one with a flourish whilst the rest can live on as mostly equals. So let us get stuck in. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Holly Jolly Secrets:

The only time adventure time did anything vaguely Christmassy and it serves as one of the few gabs in the earlier series to show that something interesting was going on with adventure time that far eclipsed what other cartoons at the time were doing. It focuses on Finn and Jake watching some VHS tapes they found whilst exploring and stumble across tapes that were made by Ice King before he became Ice King. What follows is a 22 minute special that humanizes a character that was previously used as punch line. Canonising the fact that his prince obsession stems from the desire and then regret he felt towards his fiancée Betty whilst his Ice Crown drove him slowly insane. It’s a stereotypical twist that in hindsight is seen coming, but, the fact that this episode was made after we were used to seeing the world of adventure time in Black and White, it begins Finn, Jakes and the shows Sympathetic treatment of the Ice King. From here they are quicker to talk him down than punch him down.

I Remember You AND Simon and Marcy:

I’m sticking these two together because whilst they are a season apart in air date they are best watched together. They both focus on the relationship between Ice King and Marceline, a pairing that has been hinted at for a very long time but always left a little on the side. I Remember You brings this into full view as Ice King visits her to get help with some music production, mistakenly using a letter he wrote to Marceline as lyrics she uses it as a chance to try to reconnect with him. It’s a poignant and Slow episode, Finn and Jake appear briefly but then are quickly shuffled off to some other place so all focus is placed on Marcy and Ice King. The song is one of my favourite from the show and is wonderfully incorporated into the development of two characters that have become increasingly multi-faceted over the shows long run time.

Simon and Marcy follows on from this episode and features one of the only episodes set in the post-apocalypse world that the world of OOO evolves from. Simon has taken Marcy under his protection acting as a father figure for her. Fearing the use of his crown but becoming increasingly dependent on it to help Marcy get over a cold. It is another touching entry in the show and forms more backstory for these two characters.

Stakes:

Continuing with a focus on Marceline we have the 8 part extravaganza Stakes. Focusing upon Marceline’s loss of her vampire powers thanks to Princess Bubblegum. She then gains them again after having to defeat a set of vampires she once hunted down. The song repeated throughout the whole block of episodes “Everything Stays” is about how things can be exactly the same but a different perspective can change your perception of it. Marceline chooses to lose her powers, but then gains them again in the exact same way she had first got them, finally coming to terms with who she is. It also offers a brief glimpse at presumably Marceline’s mother, where the song “Everything Stays” comes from. As I’m pretty sure I’ve said on this blog previously, Stakes is a because microcosm of everything that made Adventure Time great and is one of my go to examples for when this show proved it could be clever.

Jake the Brick:

This episode is all about taking it easy and just watching the world go by. Jake is living out his fantasy of being a brick in a rundown shed far in the wilderness and he begins narrating what he sees to Finn via walkie talkie. The whole episode is just John DiMaggio putting his David Attenborough hat on whilst Finn places Jake on the radio for the entire candy kingdom to listen to. It’s another slow episode in which not much happens but the animators have a lot of fun with it, displaying character through action not speech. It’s just nice a calm, with a beautiful sunset wrapping up the whole package.

The Comet:

You know what children need to learn about, existentialism and cosmicism, both schools of thought focusing on pointing out the lack of meaning in life and in the wider world. The comet brings this to full front as Finn’s believe in a natural order to things is challenged by the vast emptiness and pointlessness of space. His dad represents this with his aimless appearance in a giant moth, it goes where it pleases, not driven by anything, just that it exists. Finally a god entity turns up and offers Finn an existence as a higher being. It highlights the fact that there is no good or bad choice, just that he has a choice. He declines the offer and his father accepts. At the end of the episode Finn holds onto his believe in a cosmic order because, in the empty and pointless existence, it is up to the individual to find a meaning themselves.

And that is why I love this episode, that it teaches children this lesson, that life is sometimes crap and sometimes great, it has no meaning and that’s fine.

Frost & Fire:

When looking at Adventure Time as a whole it’s clear to viewers that Finns character growth is directly linked to him going through puberty, the show is about him growing up, the ups, the downs and the very messy bits. This episode is one of the messy bits, and I’m not going to sugar coat it or try and write around the fact. Finn has a wet dream about his girlfriend Flame Princess in this episode. Due to a lack of any context for it however, he thinks that it felt nice so goes out of his way to have it again. Costing his relationship with Flame Princess as he manipulated her into fighting Ice King. This episode truly shows how immature Finn is in things of life, but it doesn’t stigmatise him for it. It shows what would happen if a young boy had no guidance on the changes his body goes through. I’ve said it time and again, Adventure Time is possibly the most accurate representation of puberty available on television. It’s kind of fascinating.

Flute Spell:

Well that puberty has to finish somewhere and at some point, Finn slowly matures into a young man at age 16. His maturity is seen in this episode “Flute Spell” in how he deals with a possible relationship with Huntress Wizard. He spends part of the episode thinking of courting her, then realises she has someone else she’s interested in, so helps her out. At the end she reveals that whilst she is interested in him, it’s impractical for them to date due to both being to adventurous. A younger Finn would go back to his routes and mope everywhere. But his newer, more mature Finn accepts her decision and just keeps going with life.

What Was Missing? :

Now we get to an episode I can say is my third favourite. There are a handful of episodes where we see the characters deal with something so low stake it is more akin to them doing nothing. They’re wonderful character pieces and this episode is no exception. A door lord has stolen personal treasures from Finn, Jake, Marceline, BMO and Princess Bubblegum and they must sing a song to unlock it. And it is hands down one of my favourite songs of the show. “What am I to You?” features Finn questioning people’s perception of him and if they are the same to how he sees himself. As well as how personal treasures are not as precious as personal memories.

Little Brother:

Another epidsode on this list that doesn’t feature Finn or Jake. It begins to focus on Shelby (the worm that lives in Jakes viola) and the brother he suddenly gains. Wanting to raise a good brother he imparts the simple binary mora of good and evil. And with that, the newley christened Kevin is off into the roots of the tree house and into an episode that is a condensed down fantasy epic, following his trials inside the tree that makes up Finn and Jake’s house.

And now, for my favourite episode of Adventure Time, and it is an odd one to choose

Card Wars:

Yes, the simplistic episode about Finn and Jake playing some really nerdy card game. And from that simplicity it’s absolutely perfect. I’d do a more in depth explanation of the episode, but it really is the two of them sitting down and playing a game, the stakes are low, if non-existent and the only conflict in the episode is that Jake is both a sore loser and a sore winner with Finn having to try and placate him. As a guy bought up on board games it’s just nice to see two brothers sat down enjoying each other’s companies. It’s simple, it’s slow and it’s beautifully touching and is still, to me, the height of this show.

Anime Winter Season: Top Picks

So first post of a brand new year and where better to start than with a look at the upcoming season of anime. In basically the exact same form as my Fall review, you’ll find below my picks for the next few months and the reasons behind it.

So without further ado let’s start by looking at the sequel series I’m picking up:

KONO SUBARASHII SEKAI NI SHUKUFUK WO! 2

Otherwise known as Kono Suba, this anime was a personal favourite of last year. It takes the “trapped in a fantasy world” genre and flips it on its head with the aim of comedy, and good god does it work well. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve had the pleasure of watching. I see no reason that the sequel season won’t continue along the same lines, as the first didn’t really end, just sort of culminated in the promise of more.

The first episode is set to air January 12^th

LITTLE WITCH ACADEMIA

So I would hesitate to call it a sequel, because I believe it’s going to be a full restart told from the beginning of Akko Kagari enrolment at the Luna Nova Magical Academy. To quickly summarise though, Little Witch Academia is a set of 2 anime OVA’s detailing a very Harry Potter-esq magic school for witches. It focuses on 3 obvious outcasts and the random adventures they get into it and both shorts are incredibly well made. This is something that was just screaming out for a full series and at last Netflix swooped into provide. This was on my list faster than anything else really.

The first episode is set to air January 9^th

And that’s it for sequel stuff so onto the next section, THE USUAL STUFF. Prepare for a lot of my usual Slice-of-life stuff.

DEMI-CHAN WA KATARITAI

The set up for this is that a biology teacher is in charge of teaching 3 young demi-humans. And that’s it. It seems like it can go one of two ways. A slow burning character piece that shows the growth of the teacher and how the 3 children effect his growth (a favourite plot line of mine) or it could just turn into a gag a week thing as he struggles to keep their attention in class. My guess is it’s probably gonna be a balance of both with more of a trend towards gag a week. Just because that’s easier to do. But I’m hopeful here.

The first episode is set to air January 8^th

KOBOYASHI-SAN CHI NO MAID DRAGON

Moving forward with the theme of Demi-Humans, we have a very obvious straight man/funny man duo here, with a humble office woman paired up with a ‘kooky’ dragon that is trying to repay a debt through being their maid. The PV seems funny, and seeing as I don’t speak an ounce of Japanese and there were no subtitles, that means at least the tone and timing seem on point. IT’s worth a shot either way, I am hankering for more comedy anime.

The first episode is set to air on January 12^th

GABRIEL DROPOUT

An angel on a mission to bring love gets horribly distracted by turning into an otaku. It obviously will walk the fine line between being good and awful. But that’s what chances are for, and I’m sure it won’t be that bad. It’s at least a plot hook I haven’t seen before so maybe something new will come out of it.

The first episode is set to air on January 9^th

KUZU NO HONKAI

And to veer away from this slice-of-life comedy and into romance. Two students suffering the pangs of unrequited love turn to a relationship with each other to fill the void. IT seems like it could offer some interesting character moments and far too many emotions. Maybe providing something a little bit more serious in this sea of comedy I seem to be picking up.

The first episode is set to air on January 13^th

NYANKO DAYS

And now we are back to cutesy filled waters. I haven’t even looked up anything for this past the poster and short one line synopsis “Tomoko is a shy girl who comes home from school and is greeted by her three (personified) cats, Ma, Ro, and Shi.” I’m thinking this will be show I can just switch off to and enjoy some mindlessly Moe stuff.

The first episode is set to air January 8^th

The next section is me going out of my usual comfort zone. Completely motivated that I skipped over Yuri on Ice this season and didn’t hop on that bandwagon till it ended. Which I am incredibly ashamed about, because it was AMAZING

ACCA: 13-KU KANSATSU-KA

Ah politics. I think the closest I’ve come to a thriller anime was Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood so maybe it’s time I looked into a thing about the various admin departments of a country and the guy that oversees them all. The PV doesn’t really give me much to run on. Seems like it’s trying a little hard to be cool. But the animation is a little different and I think there is room for something deeper to appear.

The first episode is set to air January 10^th

CHOU SHOUNEN TANTEIDAN NEO

Literally the only reason I’m picking this show is because of its animation style. That’s it. I don’ even know what it’s about other then maybe a kid solving mysteries.

The first episode is set to air January 2^nd

Finally we move into the home stretch, and enter the last section of my choices, the THESE SEEM SO REDICULOUS I HAVE TO WATCH section. They will probably be awful, but I just have to find out.

FUUKA

It’s a romance anime about a guy that REALLY loves twitter…… but the main love interest breaks his phone on their first meeting so he can’t tweet anymore. This is so ridiculous and I love it. I just have to know how vapid and moronic the main character is, and how much they misinterpret twitter. Should be good for a drunken laugh.

The first episode is set to air January 7^th

SPIRITPACT

This one seems very over the top, a dead exorcist teams up with an alive one to-do exorcism stuff. IT will probably have all bang and no buck. Full of spectacle and nothing else. So good popcorn fodder, and I need at least one of those each season to act as a pallet cleanser. And a comparison of the worst to make everything seem better.

The first episode is set to air January 7^th

So there we go, 11 shows to welcom in the new year. Ranging from ones i know i’ll like, to ones i’ll most likely hate should be a good time for all. So here to a good year full to the brim of blogging (if all goes to plan I should have a large backlog to keep me going strong for a few months so look forward to more western centered posts mixed in with a this steady stream of anime content)