Review: Adventure Time – Fionna and Cake “Fionna Campbell; Simon Petrikov”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Fiona Campbell lives a rather unstable life with her cat Cake, who one day becomes incredibly anxious. Fiona also has mysterious dreams of being a Sailor Moon style hero who is helped by an enigmatic Ice Prince and begins asking around about it to her friends and co-workers who all look vaguely like genderbent and human versions of characters from Adventure Time. Soon, Cake starts seeing odd lights around her and jumps into a specific ice cream lady’s cart.

Meanwhile in Ooo, Simon Petrikov is still adjusting to life after finally being freed from his Ice King persona, but still gets people asking about Fionna and Cake, the fanfiction series he penned during that time, including a fully grown Finn the Human, who is still adventuring since the passing of his friend Jake the Dog. Finn decides to take Simon on a quest, which Simon does not handle the best. Feeling lonely, even getting unintentionally rebuffed by Marceline, Simon uses a deformed Choose Goose and attempts to use magic once again.

OUR TAKE

If by chance you watched this show and felt a strong chill overtake your very being, don’t fret! That’s just the icy cold grip of death reaching out upon realization that Adventure Time first premiered over thirteen years ago. I was in high school back then! The miniseries Distant Lands also ended two years ago tomorrow and the past two years have felt very much like a blur, in which I often felt nostalgic for the previous decade, during which Adventure Time aired its entire ten season run. During those ten seasons, you may remember a handful of episodes focusing on genderbent versions of Finn and Jake, Fionna and Cake, who were typically written in the context of a fanfiction made by Ice King, who for some reason made versions of people he knew personally with different genders. That’s hardly in the top 20 most unsettling things Ice King ever did in that show and it seems to have turned out to be a cult hit in Ooo, the main setting of Adventure Time. But what Ice King, now returned to his original identity as Simon Petrikov, does not know is that a version of these two does exist somewhere in the multiverse, and it seems these two worlds are set to collide.

These first two episodes make good use of the now expected Max model of releasing two episodes a week out of the ten (because every animated show on there is always ten episodes and always released two at a time, UNLESS you’re based on a DC character). They act as two separate pilots, with one about the mundane existence of Fionna Cambpell and her incoming brush with destiny along with her supporting cast of human versions of the already alternate versions from the Fionna and Cake episodes, such as Marshall Lee, Marceline’s variant who is once again voiced by Donald Glover, as well as Ellis P (Lumpy Space Princess), and Gary Prince (Princess Gumball), along with numerous other cameos that I did or didn’t recognize and will likely be up on the wiki within an hour of this writing. The other episode reestablishes Simon, who we got a brief check in with in Distant Lands, but now returns to a main character role and clearly not adapting well to the world after regaining his sanity. Also nice to see Finn again, voiced again by Jeremy Shada, in a full fledged adult form. No clue if we’ll see him again or how much he should be in this, but it was still cool. And honestly, I’m pretty sure we’ll be getting much more on everything introduced here, so I’ll save it for next week. Overall, solid start.