I love this show! My little sister got me hooked on it.

Never saw the appeal of this show. Just another mindless half-baked show from Cartoon Network.

It's hilariously stupid. And Cartoon Network didn't create it. Nickelodian had it first but they axed the show because of inappropriateness.

It's actually pretty clever, and the morality is internally a bit more layered than the majority of other "kid's shows"; also, the "TV-PG" rating suggests that Adventure Time is made with an older audience in mind than shows like Foster's Home for Imaginary friends or My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. The background for the show's universe also regularly is revealed in newer episodes to be post-apocalyptic Earth, with the regular references to "the Mushroom War" suggesting a nuclear apocalypse.

Yeah, it's got early 20th animated surrealness that hearkens back to the often downright goofy Felix short and the (sometimes risqué) Max Fleisher reels (especially the old silent Felix shorts --I can't name specifics off the top of my head, but a lot of Jake's antics, in specific, are giving direct nods to pre-talkie Felix), and the "cartoon physics" of Adventure Time is also internally consistent, unlike a lot of old, pre-"children's ghetto" animation[1] where the "worlds" various series were set in were as fluid and maleable as the story needed them to be, even if it proved inconsistent with previous shorts in the series --but that was also a time when animation was more about letting the imagination roam free, and doing weird and surreal things just for the sake of it, and live-action filming was for story-telling.

True, I don't think Adventure Time is "zomgz, best. thing. EV4R!", but it's certainly better than "hilariously stupid", much less "mindless and half-baked". For an animated show, I'd say it's doing for cartoons what Calvin & Hobbes was for newspaper comic strips: It's got something far more intricate going for it than "the goofy and surreal adventures of a boy and a talking animal", and the references to pre-WWII cartooning are all over the place, especially to those in the know. (Serious, Bill Watterson's illustration style for Calvin & Hobbes was so steeped in the style of George Herriman's Krazy Kat and with frequent nods to Little Nemo and others.) In aesthetics, Adventure Time is certainly giving less of a nod to its influences than Calvin & Hobbes gives its own, but that's more to the fact that it's an animated cartoon than a printed comic, and so there are far more elements to draw influence from than mere aesthetics.

Also, the thing about Nickelodeon "having it first" is only technically true. There was a short considered the "pilot" that aired on Nickelodean's series Random!Cartoons, but the series was picked up by Cartoon Network after Nickelodeon passed on airing the series twice. So as a series, it never aired on Nickelodeon, but an early short that would serve as a pilot for the series did.

[1]serious, practically none of the pre-Snow White cartoons were made with an audience of children in mind, and few made between Snow White and 1945 were made with children in mind; somewhere between '45 and '57, cartoons became "ghettoed" to "children's fare only", for reasons not exactly clear

I have actually seen episodes of this show...and really, you are creaming your pants over this?

Back in my days, we had GOOD shows. "Voltron", "Robotech", "Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers", "DuckTales", "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", "Thundercats", "Garfield and Friends", "The Smurfs", now THOSE were good shows!

Mind you, I like modern cartoons as well, but this is just part of the mindless glut that passes for cartoon shows these days.

I get what you are saying: they are trying to be like the Looney Tunes. But trust me, the Looney Tunes were never THIS lame. Maybe that new Looney Tunes show that on Cartoon Network right now, but not the originals. Gimme Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Road Runner, or Sylvester trying to catch Tweety, or Bugs outwitting Yosemite Sam and Marvin the Martian any day of the week.

Pardon?

That comment was uncalled for, because the person you were addressing clearly was not "creaming his pants" over the topic under discussion ("True, I don't think Adventure Time is 'zomgz, best. thing. EV4R!'...").

It's perfectly fine if you don't like something, but discussions get infantile when they turn into "my opinions are more valid than yours because the stuff I like is better, nyah, nyah, nyah."

Topic closed.

-- Nephele