Directed by:
Cole Sanchez
Written and Storyboarded by:
Seo Kim &
Somvilay Xayaphone

When you first start out in a field, an artistic one, or an academic one, or a professional one, odds are good there will be people much more well established than you. People who you look at and go, “wow, I wish my work was half as good as theirs.”

So you keep working. You keep pushing. You keep grinding on, day after day. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s just work. But you keep going.

Maybe you make a connection. You help someone. Your work makes a difference in someone’s life.

One day you look up, and you realize you’ve been doing this for years. Decades. Maybe one day you’re at a trade show, or an industry event, or even just a sandwich shop, and you run into one of the greats. And you have no idea how to behave.

And maybe your hero is having a hard time. Maybe the industry is in rough shape. Maybe they’ve been struggling lately. And maybe they say that they like your work. And you realize that this person you looked up to, whose work you grew up idolizing, is your peer now. That you’re both standing side by side. What do you do then?

I’ve covered James Baxter here before. He’s one of the titans of the animation industry, a truly generational talent, whose drawings have a fluidity and natural grace that few can match. Easily 1/3rd of the incredible animation set pieces that Millenials remember from their childhoods came from his pen and pencil, with him doing elaborate 3-d style camera swoops and spins by hand.

But by the 2010’s, a lot of classical hand-drawn animation had fallen by the wayside. James Baxter himself would start and then close his own animation company, mostly doing contract work for other studios before going back to Dreamworks. In 2014, he gives us the first James Baxter episode with the Adventure Time crew, and it seems likely that he enjoys working with them and/or was glad for the steady work, because after that he puts in turns with most of the currently running CN shows before going to Netflix.

I’m not basing this on anything at all, but this episode really makes me feel like it meant a lot to the crew to get to work with him, and that it meant a lot to James to have a younger generation of people tell him how important his work was to them. And that maybe, just maybe, this episode might be about how James loses the signature art form he’s been practicing his entire life, and realizes he has to move on. They say “never meet your heroes”, but sometimes you get a chance to save them.

Stray Observations:

• I love that Raggedy Princess calls it the Rag and Bone Kingdom, that’s great.
• I pointed out the Waiting for Godot reference above but I still have no idea what else it might be about.
• Shelby is amazing here.
  “You gotta slap him.”
  “What?”
  “Slap him with some real talk.”
  “Oh.”
  “You gotta stab him.”
  “… What?!”
  “With a giant syringe.”
  “…”
  “Of respect.”
• “You remind me of James Baxter, because you’re like his opposite.” BMO going for the throat.
• The horse city is such a great random detail, especially because we never see it again. The business horse throwing a drink in the face of the homeless guy is a real good twist of the knife to make it recognizably cruel and modern.

Storyboarded by:
Aleks Sennwald and Hanna K. Nyström
Originally Aired: January 27, 2017
Reviewed by: Prestidigititis 

It’s weird that, in the land of Ooo, with its deep mythos and literal existence of magic, we’ve got a ruler like Princess Bubblegum: a figure of staunch scientific rigor. She can create little candy people with little candy lives, rearrange them from bits and pieces, construct giant guardians and sphinxes with mind-powers…clearly, what passes for “science” after the Mushroom War is pretty cartoon-world-weird. Still, we’re assured that her capabilities stem from a firm grasp on a strict set of physical laws.

She holds fast to her science like it’s dogma. We’ve seen her downright offended by the suggestion that science can’t explain something happening in the world of Ooo. Which makes it odd that her number one helper (even above Finn to a degree) is Peppermint Butler, a candy person who we’ve seen engage with some of the most mystical and occultist endeavors in the show’s run.

This contradiction gets a little oxygen in “Jelly Beans Have Power,” where the revelations given by Patience St. Pym back in this season’s earlier “Elementals” comes to a (small) head. Pym’s understanding of the cataclysmic comet cycle drew her to attempt to unite all the Elementals, harness their powers together, and prevent the mass extinction event she new was coming. But as we saw, the Princesses weren’t havin’ it.

But Pym did change something in her meddling: the current avatars now have their Elemental Powers available to them. We already knew Flame Princess could do her fiery stuff. Slime Princess is super-jazzed that she can unleash gross snot bolts from every part of herself. And Bubblegum? She’s not quite there yet, despite the efforts and encouragement of her staunch ally (but polar opposite) Peppermint Butler. 

Princess Bubblegum is responding to her power-up in the way she usually does: with skepticism. But there’s more than just tunnel vision at play here. Bubblegum doesn’t like when she feels she’s not The Best that Ever Was, the Gal with All the Answers. It’s one reason she hems toward the despotic path in her rule, and why she gets so frustrated when someone dares suggest science can’t be at the base of everything. If she doesn’t have a true grasp over what makes things tick, and she has no tool at her disposal to keep things running as she wants them, then who is she really?

It takes a visitation from an earlier Candy Elemental to help her unlock some of the real power within her. A vision prompted by a strange rune allows Chatsberry to instill a mastery of some untapped candy elemental power within Bubblegum. Chatsberry’s admonition is counter to all that Bubblegum understands. While science is the study of the world outside, magic requires connection to the world inside. Science shows Bubblegum a connection to who she once was, while Chatsberry insists she needs to connect to her new self. Presumably, the one Pym awakened.

This episode marks a turning point for Princess Bubblegum. Not merely folding an appreciation of real, honest-to-Ooo Magic in with her beloved Science. More importantly, one where she replaces her own undoubting rigidity for something more fluid. Being appreciative of what she is becoming, rather than standing on the things she worked diligently to learn from direct experience. Science trusts what’s behind it, by looking outside. Magic trusts what’s yet to be known, by turning inward.

The plot beats of the episode are almost gleeful, and very very funny. (Maria Bamford turns in another flawless performance as Slime Princess.) While protecting her kingdom from Pym’s weird crystal cootie catcher, Bubblegum’s first use of her newfound powers comes with collateral damage. Another visitation by Chatsberry helps Bubblegum look to find what she needs most of all: a way to retain her faith in science and reason. Chatsberry shows her the right weapon for the job; it’s her appreciation of science that helps her figure out the constituent parts of the soda pop and scotch mints bomb. 

In the end, Bubblegum has to look both within and without, to science and to magic, to what she was and what she’s become to rise to the occasion. Instead of fabricating the ingredients for her weapon in her lab, Bubblegum goes within herself to harvest them. The power then was quite literally at her fingertips. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Knowledge, magic, power. It’s all very scientific, when you get right down to it.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

• Of course, the soda bomb is a reference to the Mentos and Coke phenomenon that took over the internet for a while. No way was The Freshmaker going to allow their candy to be weaponized on a kid’s cartoon—or maybe they just wanted lots of money for their blessing. Doesn’t matter either way; the scotch mint and soda combination works just fine. Mentos are in fact a brand of scotch mints.
• The coda at the end of the episode, with Pym doing her little corkboard scheming back at Ice King’s, serves as a little prelude to what will be the third, and final, Adventure Time miniseries, Elements. Which is good, because Patience St. Pym is too cool an antagonist to fall by the wayside.
• “Okay, great seeing you and your secretions.”
• Was the frightened juice box puking or peeing out its straw from fear? Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that.
• “Jelly Beans Have Power” is a callback to the season two episode “Crystals Have Power,” but there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between the two episodes aside from the titles. And that cootie-catcher. (Although that could’ve just been ice.)