J-a-aaaa-mes Baxter!

Synopsis:

BMO is sad, he dropped the Human Incarnation of A Baby and it broke!

Finn and Jake don’t know what to do to cheer him up!

Luckily, a cool guy rolls into town, James Baxter The Horse! (Himself.)

Seeing how effective the Horse and Ball show is at cheering up their friend, the two Heroes decide that they want to get in on this cheer game too! Their first attempts at directly copying The Horse himself just makes everyone more upset.

So, on attempt Two they get the creative juices flowing and make their own thing! This Trumpet act successfully makes most everyone happy. Unfortunately everyone’s a critic and their act just enrages a local dead guy who’s ghost starts attacking the two for messing with his deal.

The day is saved though when the original GOAT gallops back into town and successfully calms the ghost down.

Review:

This is a simple little episode but it is still to this day one of my favorites in the whole series. James Baxter’s whole deal is just so delightful to watch and the story is very sweet! I also appreciate it’s lessons about finding your own creative things share with the world instead of directly copying someone else, and that despite what it looks like when you watch your inspirations, you can not please everybody. James Baxter’s voice and animation work on this are also perfect 10/10 no notes. Would Jaaaamesss Baxter again!

Stray Observations

• The end credits are special this episode. They’re extra James Baxter footage. 
• The Ghost spews milk at Finn and Jake. Where did that come from? 
• The Sound Institute Of So-Und is actually a pretty cool name and an amazing set location.

Director: Elizabeth Ito
Written & storyboarded by: Graham Falk

Sometimes you just get a silly idea and it spirals out of control.

You and your buddy decide to start a goofy competition, and the next thing you know you’re axing your way into the crawlspace where your other roommate is hiding because they’re convinced you and your buddy have been replaced by alien shapeshifters.

This episode is one of my favorites. Aside from being brilliant and hilarious, it’s also a sweet “moment of silence” for one of their story boarders who died tragically (Armen Mirzaian). This honestly makes the episode, for me. It turns a weirdly quiet and offbeat escapade into an touching little tribute. The fact that it was one of their story boarders makes the idea that Finn and Jake don’t talk even more relevant, because it’s like we’re watching a fully polished animatic the whole way through.

But even without that knowledge, taken together with “James Baxter the Horse”, these two feel like a love letter to the idea of animation as a medium in general. While James Baxter is their tribute to a great artist who inspired them to the medium of animation,

this seems more like a little romp through the internal workings of what goes into the show, as Jake goes sort of behind the scenes, so to speak, and we see what happens inside the walls of the series. At the very least, it certainly seems to be directly calling out a lot of the things that went into the stew that birthed Adventure Time. The title card, for example, makes me think of like a Mad magazine illustration or something.

But there’s so many little things here. This spider feels like it came straight out of an old depression era cartoon.

I swear I’ve seen these exact mice in an old Eastern European or Soviet era animation I saw in one of my classes on the history and theory of animation, but I can’t find it anywhere online.

They lure BMO out of the wall like Tom luring Jerry out of a mousehole with the smell of cheese and a fan.

And this dice bag!

This guy looks like he might be drawn by the Moomins guy.

I love this weird dude who apparently lives in their wall. I’m guessing it’s meant to represent the hard but invisible work that goes into writing a cartoon. That or it’s just them being weird, though the more I watch this show the more I think there’s a level of intentionality that goes into these bizarre little moments that makes it wrong to dismiss them as “oh they’re just being weird.”

Anyway, this episode is just a lot of amazing little tiny moments one after another, making it a bit hard to summarize. Instead, I’m going to point a few of my favorite moments out, so basically consider the remainder of the review “Stray Observations”:

Jake managing to think far enough ahead to fuck with Finn.

Except Finn apparently being prepared for this one specific thing.

They definitely use Jake’s ability to go off model to up the cartoony vibe a lot.

Bikini Babes are apparently a whole species in Ooo?

Everything about the fight scene at the end.

And then this tiny detail! Notice that Finn and Jake have distinct handwriting.

And then notice in the show opening, the same two sets of handwriting when their names are written on the banner.

Except… They’re swapped! They wrote each others’ names! How adorable is that?!