Adventure Time: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray

I’m not an Adventure Time completest, I admit. But I do love the show. Season Four is about the time I started watching regularly, so most of the back half of the season included on this Blu-ray was already very familiar to me, and the earlier episodes I hadn’t seen before were a very pleasant surprise.

The season opens with Finn (Jeremy Shada) falling in like with Flame Princess (Jessica DiCicco) in the second part of the Season Three finale “Hot to the Touch.” But as many young boys discover, girls are mysterious creatures — and in this case, quite possibly evil. It’s nice to see some more complex emotional development in the characters this season, and it’s interesting to see more mature issues being addressed (like the public displays of affection between Tree Trunks (Polly Lou Livingston) and Mr. Pig (Ron Lynch) making everyone uncomfortable in “Dream of Love,” or the revelation that Lady Rainicorn (Niki Yang) is pregnant in “Lady & Peebles”).

My favorite part of the season, however, is the way the writers organically build the mythology of the show and each character, dropping hints here and there along the way that eventually add up to major events. For example, this season we get the first inklings of alternate worlds — and alternate Finns and Jakes. At first I thought this was just going to be a subtle thing that wouldn’t really pay off until later, but after the brief glimpse of an alternate one-armed Finn in “King Worm,” the season finale cliffhanger, “The Lich,” ends with Finn and Jake (John DiMaggio) being dragged into a dimensional portal by the Lich (Ron Perlman), after which we cut to that same one-armed Finn (with a robotic arm) hanging out on a farm with a Jake that appears to be a normal dog.

As far as cliffhangers go, this is an epic one.

Along the way we get some character development between Marceline (Olivia Olson) and her father, Hunson Abadeer, the Lord of Evil (Martin Olson), in the two-part adventures “Return to the Nightosphere” and “Daddy’s Little Monster.” Plus Marceline gets even more attention in the season’s penultimate episode (and one of the show’s best episodes ever) “I Remember You” as The Ice King (Tom Kenny) asks her to help him write a song with which he can woo princesses. However, in a shocking and heart-melting twist, the lyrics are taken from old letters he wrote to her when she was a small child and he was a normal man called Simon, a thousand years ago, just after the Mushroom War!!

This season also includes the brilliant episodes “In Your Footsteps,” “Goliad,” “Princess Cookie,” “Sons of Mars,” and “Ignition Point.”

All in all, Season Four is kind of a game-changer, moving Adventure Time into more complex emotional territory as well as opening up more intriguing narrative opportunities. The only complaint I have about this collection is that if we’re just now getting a complete Season Four release and Season Six is currently airing, who knows when Season Five will be released on Blu-ray too?

I don’t know if I can wait that long.

Special Features

There are commentaries on every episode by the crew. Unfortunately, they’re not the most interesting I’ve listened to. Everyone is very polite and courteous and there are nuggets of good behind-the-scenes info in there, but you have to dig for them. Imagine hanging out with your shiest, creative, overly polite friends and this is kind of like that; although show creator Pendleton Ward is a bundle of energy and helps liven things up whenever he can.

Let’s just say, nobody’s getting drunk and acting up while watching the episodes and commenting (I’m looking at you, Rick and Morty commentary!).

The other bonus is a 19-minute featurette about the music used in the show, called “Distant Bands: The Music of Adventure Time.” In this video, Ward, Rebecca Sugar, Patrick McHale, and Jesse Moynihan tell stories about writing some of the more popular songs, complete with the anxieties you’d expect shy creative people to have when doing something as extroverted as singing in front of others. It’s actually a fun little piece that helps to cement the idea that the crew making Adventure Time are just really cool, nice people. They’re exactly the sort of people you’d want crafting the entertainment your kids (and adult friends) enjoy.

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