Come Along With Me: Adventure Time – “Water Park Prank” and “You Forgot Your Floaties

Water Park Prank

Air Date: May 21, 2015 | Directed, Written and Storyboarded by David Ferguson | Reviewed by Malcolm Rambert

When I decided to write for this ongoing series on The Avocado, I wanted to abstain from picking episodes by some of the more experienced writers here and take what was leftover to write about. I’ve written before, but doing this freelance sort of thing for a blog with some semblance of an audience (AKA people commenting on what they read) is new to me. So when the sign-in thread for Season 6B came up, and the first episode I was assigned was “Water Park Prank”, my first thought was “yeah that makes sense lol”.

But before we get into the episode and the implied indifference people have to it, I think it’s appropriate of me to go over my personal experience and relationship with Adventure Time:

See, I never was someone that stopped watching cartoons or animation in general growing up; I can’t place on why, but I was attracted to the types of stories and craft that were being told and used through animated shows and movies. Maybe it has something to do with my diagnosed ADD or being a Gemini, but I’ll refrain from doing armchair psychology on myself for now. Talking about this type of stuff with other people online was very limited outside of the few online personalities that I watched like Pan-Pizza of RebelTaxi fame (who recently just finished and released his own 30-minute indie pilot, Loki IRL !!) or the Nostalgia Critic and his fellow ilk at the time. While I have some fond memories of these people and what they taught me (what you could learn in your teens about basic criticism anyway), they could only go so far in terms of educating me about the process and exposing me to different works that weren’t within their circle of tastes. The Internet didn’t exactly have much more options if you were of a much older age. 

Like, animation nerds (and I’m mostly talking about stateside as well as anyone else in the English-speaking world) used to go to the personal blog of now-disgraced Ripping Friends creator John Kricfalusi as a news source. Cartoon Brew, then mostly run by the extremely-opinionated Amid Amidi, was somewhat better but just as annoying; for example, given the show I’m writing about, him preemptively declaring the end of creator-driven TV animation because Lauren Faust wanted to develop the then-upcoming newest incarnation of My Little Pony RIGHT at the start of the 2010s will go down as one of the biggest eye-roll moments in the history of cartoon commentary. Toonzone (now renamed Anime Superhero)….is a forum site…It was pretty alright.

So around the time Adventure Time premiered in 2010, I was entering high school, and I started watching it like it was any other cartoon. And boy, you don’t realize how special something is until you look back on it in retrospect.

As you know by now, Adventure Time was seen as being special in many ways, so much so that you can definitely pinpoint that prior to it coming on the scene, there really wasn’t anything that looked, sounded or was acted tonally in the same way, at least not all together. For me, it’s kind of fun looking back and seeing those reviewing the show when it was new and trying to pinpoint what they liked about it, some more successful than others (these reviews by the Totally Rad Show crew in 2012 and Matt Crowley of the Videokind channel in 2013, for example):

I liked Adventure Time for a lot of reasons, but for the purpose of this review, I will focus on one reason, that being its guest-directed episodes.

The 1st one, “Glitch Is a Glitch”, came out in April of 2013, and it blew my mind. Animated series switching out and flexing on a new style or extremely expressive animation for a specific segment wasn’t anything new (just look at all the stuff being accomplished with this anime season’s CITY the Animation), but this was a whole episode of television where the entire episode from beginning to end was in a different style. I had never seen anything like that for an animated series at the time. Since I regularly went onto Tumblr to see people talk about this series after a new episode premiered, I quickly learned about David O’Reilly and his personal work. It was there I found his Vimeo account and found the original animation of the girl wearing headphones eating her own hair, as well as his short films Please Say Something and The External World.

Then comes the 2nd guest-directed episode, “Food Chain”. Being that this was a director of animation from Japan, it told me that this wasn’t going to be a one-off thing. Masaaki Yuasa had an iconic enough name for me and being an avid reader of manga, I wanted to be more into anime, thus hearing him say he was directing this inspired me to check out at least one of his previous works. This led me to his miniseries Kaiba on a bootleg site, which I was furiously committed to binging (even screwed up preparing for a high school track race I was in the middle of preparing for).

 I remember liking it a lot, given its theme on the extortion and capitalization of one’s own memories as a sort of drug (great essay on it here by Blood Knife writer Will Riley @KasmKave), plus its character designs were very reminiscent of 60s anime, which I liked given I grew up reading and enjoying the Astro Boy manga Dark Horse printed at my local library. As noted in Paul A. Thomas’ excellent book Exploring the Land of Ooo: An Unofficial Overview and Production History of Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, Yuasa needed a team of people to help make this particular episode, which led to the creation of the animation Science SARU. This little factoid inspired me to make and post this meme on my Twitter when Scott Pilgrim Takes Off premiered on Netflix:

To this day, I can’t think of a single animated series, whether cartoon or anime or etc., that would let a director flex with their personal style and change the designs to a degree where the entire episode is noticeably different from what the rest of the show would look like. You might be wondering why I’m putting a lot of emphasis on this. The reason for this is that, cable television isn’t exactly too privy to showing the credits in their full form. It’s what TV Tropes calls Credits Pushback. This is most evident on kids-targeted stations like Cartoon Network. All that work by people just pushed to the side, or in some cases, just have the end of the episode fade out to black and airing a bumper. Unless you were watching the show on an early streaming service like Netflix (yeah, Netflix had Adventure Time in its early days. Crazy), the Cartoon Network website, or on a DVD release, you weren’t seeing much of who did what. This was the case for many fans of the show who were watching the episode premieres, on pirated sites that recorded the episode premieres, or (like me and my sister) watch recorded episodes on services like Xifinity on Demand.

To put it shortly, Adventure Time was the first time since watching the special features on the Finding Nemo and The Incredibles DVDs as a child that I wanted to learn more about the animation process and the specific people that made it happen. It helps that at the start of the 2010s was where animation production became more visible online, such as more animation news sites getting more attention like the French/English website Catsuka and Animation Magazine , as well as blogs run by the staff of individual shows (where would be without the The King of Ooo blog?). They’ve always existed, but people became aware that folks did give a damn on how animated works came to be, including the ones not produced in their own country!

I give all this background because when the episode ‘Water Park Prank” premiered, I didn’t have that same drive to look into who made it and what else they made, which makes me feel a bit bad. It’s not an episode I look forward to revisiting, but I also never found it to be unbearable either. It’s impossible to get a big read on what every fan or critic thinks of an episode, but it seems that everyone shares more or less the same thoughts.

Paul A. Thomas’ short review at the time called it “mediocre”, and A.V. Club writer Oliver Sava called it “forgettable but fun”. However, my most surprising discovery in my research was that based on the user rankings, this episode is the LOWEST RATED episode on IMDb in the show’s original 289-episode run. For comparison, the incredibly divisive “Breezy” is at 111th in terms of low ratings. It’s just one website mostly dominated by the Anglosphere, but I think it’s emblematic of something deeper. So let’s finally get into the episode shall we?

I think a worthy mention is the fact that the intro to this episode is exactly the same as most episodes in this series (see, I picked those top images for a reason! 😀). Those who didn’t watch any promos or the fact this episode got leaked online at the time will watch this and be led into a false sense of security, thinking the episode will have the characters look pretty much like they always have, followed by a quick stylized title card, and then BOOM!

To say that these designs are jarring to some would be an understatement. When doing 2D animation, it sticks very much to David Ferguson’s style. Watching it again now, I’m reminded of how many animated shows made for toddlers look vaguely like this in terms of design, like Hey Dugee or Xilam’s Paprika

Can’t quite place a name for it and honestly, I’m not too interested in doing that. I’ve been in a number of animation circles that get super technical about it and I’m gonna resist doing that for this review. I will point out that everyone in “Water Park Prank” also has wide-eyes instead of the dotted eyes the audience has become accustomed to. It’s one of those design choices that I can deal with, but you still wonder why they made the decision (Remember when the 2011 Winnie the Pooh movie came out and they gave Christopher Robin those big Disney eyes?)

Anyway, it should be noted that the entire episode is animated using motion tween; in fact it’s the only episode of Adventure Time that is. I’m not as hard on the technique as some other animation heads, but if I’m being honest, this episode is not exactly being the best representation of such a tool.

One thing I noticed by the positive things commented on when people talk about this episode is that it feels like a return to how Adventure Time was in the beginning, and they are both right and wrong in that assessment. They’re right because they do end up doing a lot of things the first few seasons (and some of the tie-in comics, depending on who was writing them) would do. The first joke in the episode is centered around the fact that Jake is a dog; they create a new “random noun” princess character as well as a “random noun” kingdom regardless of consistency for geography; heck, Finn even calls Ice King “the Ice King” and not “Simon” like all the other episodes we’ve seen so far this season.

However, they are wrong in that tonally and aesthetically, a number of things are missing. Sure, the episode is simple….and that’s the problem. Even when it was starting out and it wasn’t super deep into “lore” or “feelings”, everything about Adventure Time wasn’t considered simple for most people. Like I stated at the beginning, people had a hard time even DESCRIBING it to people. People would say it was super funny, and this isn’t. Well no, there are some good bits, but they aren’t in your face about it; in fact a lot of it could be written off as dry humor (which fits considering Ferguson is from Glasgow, Scotland, and that just happens to be the type of humor they like across the pond). 

Animation enthusiasts would praise the animation and how it “brought back” these wild expressions they hadn’t seen since certain animated shows of the 1990s, and this episode noticeably is lacking any of that.

It would be irresponsible of me to not remind people that this episode was motion tweened, and because models themselves have to be a certain way, there is only so much you can do with puppeting and rigging.

But I think there’s a 3rd problem for where this episode lies within the entire show, and lies with expectations when it comes to serialized storytelling. In just this season alone, we’ve seen characters learn certain truths about themselves, question their role in the universe, and even see that what would be the most insignificant characters in another show can have great stories to tell of their own. Even the most comedic of characters like Lemongrab, Tiffany, and (as we’ll see in the very next episode) Magic Man have been given a profound semblance of depth.

With all this being said, going into an episode like “Water Park Prank”, the people would appreciate it if something wasn’t going to progress the “story” (if we’re going to call it that), at the very least, it should show off something spectacular, especially if it’s going to be the 3rd guest directed episode. TV Tropes has a term for when TV series “get good” with “Growing the Beard”, which is when a series stops being mediocre and meandering around and figures its shit out (this is a more crass description than the one they give). 

It should be noted that I’m on the side of Katie when she states that Adventure Time is a “television-ass TV show that never had long term plan” and thus, “consequently it’s a show that’s always in flux”. But there are those episodes where it sometimes feels like a regression to stuff that, in certain viewers’ minds, had already moved past; you know, the kind of episodes that make you go “Why are you doing THIS type of episode at this point in time”. There is no term for an episode like this that trope-obsessed people have come up with, so I’m pitching “Shaving Cut Episode”. For another example, I offer the Moral Orel episode “Genisius”. (If the show hadn’t been forced to end and got the 5 seasons that were planned, this episode wouldn’t feel as egregious knowing we had only a little over a season left.)

Thankfully, Adventure Time would go on much longer than Moral Orel did. Overall, “Water Park Prank” is a uniquely mundane episode that is inoffensive enough to not be that memorable, but also not damaging enough to ruin an entire season of television. After all, going back to that IMDb rating, it was still only 4.8 out of 10 based on around 13 hundred ratings; pretty tame for the “worst rated episode”. If Adventure Time was a battle shonen anime, overly-persnickety fans would label this as “filler”. In that sense, going to a water park is a bit more original than going to the beach or a festival. Plus, you can’t accuse the title of being misleading 😉.

Additional Notes:

• I feel I was too negative on this episode, so if you have the time, I recommend checking out David “Swatpaz” Ferguson’’s work, specifically on his website and Vimeo. After all, the reason he got the opportunity for this episode in the first place was because Pendleton Ward was a huge fan of his experimental animation. He was even brought back to animated a segment for SPOILERS the first Distant Lands episode “BMO”. He even helped storyboard a proof-of-concept trailer for Untitled Goose Game, as well as voicing some characters. I also recommend checking out some interviews, since they are quite sparse; namely this one on the podcast Drawn Out and the Animation Industry Podcast (AIP). Worth listening to if you want to hear about the stress of being a freelance animator.
• Seeing as how this episode is a return to basics of sorts, I wanted to showcase this video from December 2012. Back in Tumblr’s early days, a bunch of Adventure Time fans, some hailing from countries like Colombia and the Phillipines, got together to make a collaborative video paying tribute to and expressing their love for Adventure Time. Some of them were popular fanartists like illeity or just regular folks. Either way, I love finding stuff like this that’s still up to observe and document. It’s a real time capsule and it’s cool to see that the love for this show wasn’t something that was temporary or secluded to just the United States.

Stray Observations:

• This episode aired 4 days before I officially became 19 years old. That’s mildly interesting.
• The gag where the main coin turns into a bunch of loose change when it hits the floor drain is perfect. Best joke in the entire episode. 
• I like the little voice David gives for the lifeguard whistle guy. He should get into voice acting more.
• On the wall during the credits, you see other residents of Ooo who have been permanently banned from Water Park Kingdom (in order): Ricardio, Lemongrab, LSP, Tiffany, the squirrel that hates Jake, Magic Man, and Donny.

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I am sure I have mentioned before that in an AMA Rebecca Sugar once said, of working on Adventure Time, that it taught them to “write cartoons like they’re poetry”. She said that about one year before this episode aired, several years after she left AT to begin work on Steven Universe, and yet it feels like they were talking about “You Forgot Your Floaties” specifically. This is one of the most poetic, symbolic, open to interpretation episodes of the entire show, which is especially impressive when you realize that it’s also one of the most plot-relevant episodes in the entire 10 season run. Like, just a quick rundown of major threads that are informed by these 11-minutes of riddles and poetry

It’s a dense episode, and one I’m frankly poorly equipped to properly tackle. I have a mind built for prose. I know there’s a bunch of occult references that are going right over my head1This is a Jesse Moynihan joint, after all. But, this episode inspires me to try anyway.

Magic Man is a character who spends his very first episode insisting that he has nothing under the surface, that he’s an uncomplicated jerk with no potential for redemption. And back in season 1 this was likely true, the show using him as a one-off character to teach a subverted moral of “never extend kindness, because the person you’re kind to might turn out to be a jerk”. But by his second appearance, in season 3’s “Sons of Mars” this has already been complicated. We see the photo of Margles, we see him half-inadvertently help Finn use his Martian transport to save Jake. We learn he used to live on Mars, and that he wasn’t always such a huge jerk.

And so while Magic Man spends the start of this episode trying to insist to Betty that he’s the same uncomplicated jerk he was back in “Freak City”, we know he’s bullshitting. And Betty does too; she’s done her homework, and she’s ready to go blow for blow with Magic Man in this battle of…wits? Of something akin to wits, at least. Of trying to figure out Magic Man’s motivations, of trying to understand how sincere he is at any given moment, of trying to get what you want out of him while he tries to do the same to you, in a magic ritual he views as his home turf but you’ve planned to undermine.

Betty: So, you’re not afraid of what I might see in you?
Magic Man: No, dumb-dumb. You imagined the lock before the key. You think this is the key but it’s a waste basket.

That’s the line that always sticks with me, whenever I try and interrogate this episode. “You imagined the lock before the key” It has the cadence of wisdom, but it’s Magic Man so it’s also at least partially full of shit. And indeed we see directly that at least part of it is bullshit. Magic Man describes himself as smooth and gray as far as one can see, which is true on the surface. But Betty smuggles in his memories of Margles, the photo on his Shelf of Special Friends that implicitly puts to lie his own self-conception despite how strongly he might protest. Betty specifically calls out her trance-mask of Margles as “the key”, which would make the imagined lock one Magic Man himself dreamt up, his own personal narrative of being an uncomplicated asshole.

Hell, even the waste basket gets some allegorical heft later in the episode, as we see Prismo’s wish magic return one instead of Margles2And also learn that you can say “Balls!” as an interjection with a Cartoon Network PG, which, I wouldn’t have thought you could get away with.. Magic Man used to be cool, in the words of the former King of Mars, and we see this initially persisted even past the abduction of his wife by GOLB, a force even stronger than Prismo, quite possibly the strongest force ever defined in this show. The waste basket is the moment he gave up hope, the moment where he was fully claimed by the Madness and Sadness that drive all magic.

But, maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe Magic Man wasn’t wrong to call The Lock “imagined”. Our backstory flashback is complicated by its own framing device, of a magical trance with a motivated interloper. When M.A.R.G.L.E.S. responds to Magic Man’s request to know about her with:

All I am is in you, so know yourself, Magic Man

Is that what the real M.A.R.G.L.E.S. said? Or is that Betty, in disguise, prompting Magic Man to reveal even more, to open himself up to her, enough that she might understand his Magic, Madness, and Sadness well enough to rescue her own lost love. And to what extent is the abrupt ending of the trance, cutting off at the moment Magic Man realizes that M.A.R.G.L.E.S. can’t bring back Margles either, that he is truly hopeless, something that was planned all along, by either party? On a literal level, the trance ends because Bread Finn smashes up the equipment powering it. But, Finn was turned into an egg by Magic Man, and baking him was something MM suggested to Betty. Perhaps some part of him didn’t want to simply become the next Glob. Maybe the same nightmares that gave birth to M.A.R.G.L.E.S. influenced him once again, pushing him to release himself from the prison of Madness and Sadness that has held him hostage for the past two-hundred years. Whatever of Margles that still exists does so only inside him; surely she’d want him to heal from the trauma of her obliteration rather than be held prisoner by it for all of time.

Or maybe this was always Betty’s play. She was always playing the game more than Magic Man may have expected. She was the one who smuggled Margles/M.A.R.G.L.E.S. in, after all. She was the one who actually put Finn in to bake, maybe with no understanding of what was happening, maybe with full understanding. These two are playing a high stakes game, where both sides know the other is dishonest, is trying to manipulate them, and each side believing they are in control of the situation anyway. Before the trance, Magic Man says to Betty:

I see.
Betty: You see what?
MM: The coconut crab who swims in your neighbor’s pool at night. Maybe Simon’s in there, too. Who else holds their breath in there, Betty?

Maybe he’s simply taunting her. Maybe he’s just making conversation, in his own strange way. Maybe he’s baiting her, encouraging her to believe that Simon can still be saved, if only she digs further into his wizard biz. Regardless of motivation, he’s onto something. When the trance breaks, and Betty emerges having stolen (slash, been given?) Magic Man’s powers, she sees that crab emerge from the dark pool of her mind. It bears Simon’s face3though, one Betty has not seen before, one of him with blue skin and a long nose but still mostly holding his sanity, the face of the Simon who raised Marceline. The face of a Simon who, though touched by the crown’s magic, is still reachable. The Simon Betty needs to still exist for any of this to have been worth it., and it mouths but does not speak aloud the title of the episode.

Betty dove straight into the loomy gloom of M.M.S., with the brazen confidence of someone who feels she has no other options. But, she’s a newcomer to this world of magic. Until just a few months ago she lived in the largely mundane 21st century of Earth, pre-Mushroom War, pre-Mutagenic Bomb. Now she’s in the deep end, with nothing to support her. She either swims, under her own power, driven only by her own instincts, or else she drowns. Whatever happens, it’s too late for Betty to back out now. She forgot her floaties; let’s hope for her sake she didn’t need them.

Stray Observations: