It's Adventure Time

An in-depth look at Adventure Time and the people who make it.
Adventure Time’s dozens of characters are complex in a way that is rarely seen on television for adults, let alone children; each seems to inhabit his own world. In E.M. Forster’s memorable phrase, they are round characters, “capable of surprising in a convincing way.” Lumpy Space Princess is a lovable but ghastly teenager, tediously obsessed with her old boyfriend, the unprepossessing Brad; she treats her well-meaning parents very shabbily. Marceline the Vampire Queen’s father is present just enough to make it impossible for her to ignore or forget his cruelty and selfishness—qualities she has inherited, to some degree. Princess Bubblegum is afflicted with intellectual arrogance and an inability to anticipate the dangerous consequences of her scientific experiments. (One of the story’s most provocative threads concerns the tension between science and magic).

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When the World Thought California Was an Island

The idea of California as an island existed in myth even before the region had been explored and mapped. “Around the year 1500 California made its appearance as a fictional island, blessed with an abundance of gold and populated by black, Amazon-like women, whose trained griffins dined on surplus males,” Philip Hoehn, then-map librarian at UC Berkley wrote in the foreword to a catalog of the maps that McLaughlin wrote.

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The Definitive Oral History of Mystery Science Theater 3000

As fun as MST3K was, life aboard the Satellite of Love wasn’t always easy: The show was never a ratings smash, and tension between Joel Hodgson and producer Jim Mallon led to Hodgson leaving the show just a few years into its run. In later years, members of the show’s ­Midwestern-based, DIY-determined staff found themselves struggling with the sort of big-TV bureaucracy they’d long fought to avoid.

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