Football

Storyboarded by: Lyle Partridge and Luke Pearson

Originally Aired: November 6, 2015

Tis’ I, Stars (they come & go) resurrected from the obscurity of non-commenting & participating in the AT watch along for months!* Finally returning to you to give you my thoughts on a BMO heavy episode! Yay!

*if you’re wondering I spent a good deal of the weekend1except for when I was attending a kink event 🤭. I guess I’ve been busy exploring many parts of myself 🤷🏾‍♀️ catching up on a bunch of season 6 episodes, that Cedric had pointed out to me as being critical:

• “Evergreen”
• “The Visitor”
• “Jermaine”
• “You Forgot Your Floaties”
• “Hot Diggity Doom”
• “The Comet”
• “Varmints (& I threw in a review of “Bonnie & Neddy” too as that felt important from the thumbnail & the season premiere)

I spent most of Sunday night watching & reviewing the above & adding my thoughts to those wonderfully reviewed threads. Sorry if I haven’t covered the other episodes & threads yet. Time was very short. Some of my reviews get increasingly depressing as I interject real life woes into some of my comments 😅🙃. Sorry, I’ve not been in the best of places/mindsets lately. It has been a fairly difficult, but also positive & busy time for me 🙏🏽.

Also added 4 episodes that I’d missed pre-Jake the Brick, which is where I had left off at (around 3 months ago I believe & roughly/coincidentally when Sirilicious passed away 👀😣):

• Little Brother & Ocarina2https://the-avocado.org/2025/06/02/come-along-with-me-adventure-time-little-brother-and-ocarina/#comment-6796733121
• Thanks for Grabapples Giuseppe & Princess Day3https://the-avocado.org/2025/06/09/come-along-with-me-adventure-time-thanks-for-the-crabapples-giuseppe-and-princess-day/#comment-6796775989

Now I’m mostly caught up to early-mid season 6. Just gotta catch up on the rest outside of the above plot crucial ones I needed before this episode 🙏🏽. Though ironically I probably would have been fine.

I’ve digressed from talking about the happy go lucky BMO.

Awww Just hearing that voice again after so long 🥰.

Oof, shocking how prescient dealing with the identities discussion is, given my own recent struggles with identity & gender 👀. I dunno how qualified I am, as a sort of baby trans. Though being misgendered can be a little traumatising atm tbh. Sometimes different traumas will rear their heads in different ways. Like talking down to oneself in the mirror 👀😳.4Admittedly if I can’t see my feminine self then I tend to end up feeling quite negative on myself & not my more genuine self? Took me a long time to figure that out. I dunno it’s still very complicated and the support is varying to non-existent 😞.

I’m just saying, I don’t really see another person in a mirror like BMO does (D.I.D). I just see whoever is looking back at me (unlike BMO & football) & sadly I don’t like what I see in terms of where I wanna be5though I do from time to time impress myself with how feminine I actually already am, even without hormones 🤷🏾‍♀️. Guess I’m kind of lucky there. If any of all that makes any sense 🙃. Y’all starting to see why I haven’t been around lately 😅.

Looks like BMO & Football have a way more healthier relationship than I do with a mirror 😅🙃. Oh to be BMO or football… Why is it so much easier to be kinder to another person & not oneself 🤷🏾‍♀️. Good on BMO & Football.

Awww, all the love!6is it self-love? If they’re 2 separate individuals? Hehe oh boy this plus AppleTV’s Pluribus have got me asking a lot of philosophical identity questions 😅

Huh, Football asking to be on the other side of the mirror brings to mind the magical realism of this reality. Can separate identities and personalities be brought out?

Awww Football having a fun old time outside!

This is totally me when the weather is good & I’m out in nature… well on the inside at least. I’m still British y’all. Stiff upper lip & all that 😅.

Haha, Jake getting into (by morphing into a segment of) Finn’s scoopable food is a fun aside for the boys! Strangely the only one in the episode, but I guess I can’t complain as a BMO (errr technically Football) heavy focused episode.

An interesting question by Jake “is BMO your little papa?” Though for the most part the guys accept Football very quickly. There are still questions. That usually only lead to more questions. Oddly Football chose not to answer!

Oof Football talking about being lonely & trapped rings all to close to home 👀. Although I at least at not trapped in a literal box. I think 🤔.7I do tend to lock myself inside my room. Mostly for privacy.

Don’t do this to BMO, Football!

Wow even Footballs blush is a different colour? A slight darker green.

Huh, Football uses feminine pronouns whilst BMO is the male. Which tbh I’d gotten the other way round in my estimation 🤷🏾‍♀️.

The mirror world BMO keeps freaking Football out! BMO is pretty scary when he wants to be! Mjst be something about the extremes. This is a real turn around from their beginning encounters, at the start of the episode.

“THIRD HOLE!” More unknown things about BMO’s origins?

Awww Football got a better home 🥲. I totally get Football not wanting to be alone. Now he’s with his best friend from college: Carlos 🤭.

Lol, BMO loves his traffic cone so much! HOORAY! 🤭

This is a fascinating episode with a lot of themes & modern day allegories. The obvious ones would be identity issues such as Dissociative identity disorder (D.I.D) & gender identity issues? The former I’m no authority on (though I feel makes up the primary thrust of the episode), but the latter I certainly have some experience on. Very very current experience: Hell just the previous Saturday night, I teared up looking in a mirror. It can be tough at the beginning of a journey. Although not particularly associated with my gender issues & more loneliness & isolation 🤷🏾‍♀️. Brought on by the treatment by others, for the most part due to my gender 🙃. Passing is a thing & an ugly standard that brings unnecessary weight & unneeded expectations. Primarily attached to gender expectations I’ve found? I suppose these were not issues BMO or Football faced as they were largely accepted by Finn & especially Jake.

I’m interested to see what others thought.

Extra thoughts:

• The episode is one of the most heavily censored in the UK, Spain & Portugal broadcasts?! At first I thought it was due to terf island behaviour, but turns out it was mostly for breaking mirrors & the extended screams & upset BMO & Footballs scenes? I also thought the mirror thing was some kind of superstition, but I think the mirror breaking censorship is to avoid children repeating the behaviour? Also Dirt hole was censored to Dirt in the UK & Spain? 🤷🏾‍♀️
• Wouldn’t be a decent episode without Football kicking a lemon(?) around like a Football (you know the proper Football 😏🤭):

• Apparently there appears to be a hat or special item theme going on?

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Summer Showers

Storyboarded by: Graham Falk

Originally Aired: January 7, 2016

Review by: CedricTheOwl

Since Lady Rainicorn gave birth to the Rainicorn pups way back in season 4’s “Jake the Dad”, Adventure Time has gradually given the pups a feature episode.  Jake Jr. tried to hustle her old man in “One Last Job”. Kim Kil Whan tried to evict Finn and Jake from their treehouse in “Ocarina”.  Later in season 6, T.V. followed a trail of diary entries to learn the backstory of Nurse Poundcake in “The Diary”.  Now with Summer Showers, it’s Viola’s turn to take the spotlight.

I know reviewers who use subtlety and they’re all cowards

Throughout the previous pup-centric episodes, one major story thread has connected them:  Jake’s negligent parenting style.  Jake Jr. pulled a double cross heist on him specifically as a way of acting out for his attention.  Kim Kil Whan did the same, though his acts of rebellion were done entirely within the confines of the law.  T.V. wasn’t specifically confronting his old man with his adventure, but the way he lives his life does speak to an unhealthy level of arrested development and attachment to Lady Rainicorn.  Jake’s parenting style has never been central to any of these stories, though it is most strongly alluded to in “Ocarina”, but there’s clear signs of a simmering resentment towards Jake growing in House Rainicorn.

Viola is different though.  Back in “Ocarina”, when the other pups were complaining about Jake’s perennial tardiness, she was the only one to defend him.  She offered up a pretty lame excuse for his lateness, and his thoughtlessness once he did arrive served to steel Kim Kil Whan’s resolve against him.  That episode leaves her looking a bit naive and self-deluding, but “Summer Showers” offers us a more nuanced look at her inner workings.

Our episode opens with Viola auditioning for a play that LSP is putting on.  LSP immediately recognizes her talent… as a personal assistant, ordering her to do her laundry while the other hopefuls rehearse.  Viola swallows her disappointment (and some additional insults from LSP she overhears during the other auditions) right up until she gets a call from Jake.

They meet up for lunch, and unlike a lot of Jake’s post-age-up interactions with his kids, there’s no overt tension.  Viola is happy to see him, while Jake is unusually knowledgeable about her career and interests.  Jake asks if she got the part she was going for, and the white lie she tells brings him a lot of relief.  He confides his concerns about his parenting choices to her, and how her landing that part makes him feel like he’s not a complete failure as a father.

I must confess, I didn’t remember a lot about this episode going into it.  I have a feeling this will be a more common occurrence among the later season episodes, when hiatuses were more frequent and reruns less so.  On the rewatch, it was this scene that ignited my interest in the episode.  Viola seems much closer to Jake than the other pups, and in turn Jake has no hesitation about sharing his innermost parenting fears with her, thoughts that most parents would be very hesitant to share with their children.  She wants to impress him with her success, and by extension he seeks validation for his own parenting choices in her achievements.  The scene is impressive in how much character detail it conveys about the two in such a short scene.

Back at the theater, Viola’s absence earns her LSP’s scorn, as she drags her out in front of the entire cast to publicly shame her.  I can’t find much about storyboarder Graham Falk’s biography, but this scene feels like it was taken from some personal experience with an irate theater director.  Graham Falk’s work on Adventure Time and his own animations tend to draw inspiration from silent film.  Stage acting is pretty closely intertwined with early silent film, as many of the actors in early film were drawn from theater and vaudeville.  Knowing that, it’s a lot clearer why this episode puts so much focus on the behind the scenes stagecraft of the play.

After one too many unsatisfactory rain effects, Lumpy Space Princess takes Viola to the roof and practically orders her to sit there in the oncoming rain until she can get the effect right.  LSP’s rant then takes an abrupt shift, from berating Viola to raging about how she doesn’t feel like a true princess, and how she wants to be seen as special to everyone.  Then she reclines on the ledge and starts trauma dumping on Viola about how she’s felt lost ever since she moved out of Lumpy Space.  There’s something about Viola that apparently inspires others to confide their insecurities to her, regardless of how awkward it is.  It’s completely unfair of others to put that emotional burden upon her, but it’s one she’s grown used to bearing, if her interactions with Jake are anything to go by.

After sitting in the rain for a spell, Viola returns to the theater, teleporting there once she finds LSP has locked her up on the roof.  She manages to meet LSP’s exacting standards for what rain should look like, and rehearsals proceed.  Viola seems to get stuck with every odd job LSP can throw at her, but through it all she memorizes the lead’s every line.  She even matches her lip synching to Tree Trunks unique delivery cadence.

Speaking of Tree Trunks, on opening night she comes to LSP with some bad news:  her husband Mr. Pig isn’t thrilled with the idea of her sharing a stage kiss with the leading man in the play.  She backs out of the starring role, which sets the stage for Viola to fill in.  But LSP is upstaged by no woman-dog-Rainicorn, and decides to take the role on herself.  Finally at the end of her patience, Viola teleports LSP to the Ice Kingdom and takes the lead role for herself.

This scene is the most Graham Falk shot in the entire episode.

The curtain opens, and with her family in attendance, Viola performs the role flawlessly.  She’s even good enough to quell LSP’s fury as she storms back into the theater, instead taking a seat to watch the play’s conclusion.  As Viola takes a bow, Jake takes it upon himself to give his little girl a one-man standing ovation, courtesy of his stretching powers.  Backstage, Viola finally comes clean to Jake:  she was never intended to be the lead, she was just in charge of the rain effects.  Far from being disappointed, Jake is even more impressed that she played the lead in addition to doing special effects.  The episode ends with Viola and Jake trading compliments, their bond as father and daughter magnified in its complexity but drawn just a bit closer.

Stray Observations –

• LSP has a three-cupped bra among her laundry.  This knowledge will haunt you to your graves.
• Of all the things LSP does to undermine Viola this episode, whistling to call her like a dog might subtly be the most insulting.
• Uncle Finn is having none of this play.  I can’t entirely blame him; this is about as far from his interests as can be.
• Viola is voiced by Paget Brewster.  She has an extensive acting career in network TV procedurals, but her experience acting in The Thrilling Adventure Hour almost certainly made her a great fit for this episode’s plot.