”Adventure Time” coming to an end is about the most unmathematical thing we can think of. Thankfully, the show won’t officially hit the algebrakes until 2018, and in the meantime we have the new Season 6 DVD to enjoy.
In honor of all 43 Season 6 episodes coming home for our binge-watching pleasure, showrunner Adam Muto answered some of The Huffington Post’s questions via email, revealing the surprising inspiration behind one of the biggest moments from the show and debunking a popular theory:
1. Sean Connery partially inspired Finn’s dad.
In this exclusive clip, you can see the development behind the moment when Finn finally meets his biological father, Martin, at the Citadel.
Muto told us the story came along because “the central question of where [Finn] came from” was something the show wanted to address.
“Finn already had good loving parents in Joshua and Margaret, so we wanted to be sure that Finn wasn’t just a carbon copy of Martin. Steve Wolfhard (who wrote the first Martin-heavy episode ‘Escape from the Citadel’ with Tom Herpich) loves characters that are liars. It was fun to embrace the idea of Martin being as roguish and dishonorable as Finn is heroic,” said Muto.
The showrunner also revealed you can partially thank Sean Connery for the character.
“Martin’s design is adapted from the alternate dimension version of Finn’s dad seen in the episode ‘Finn the Human.’ His first outfit was based on Steve’s impression of Sean Connery’s costume in ‘Zardoz’ without having seen the movie.”
2. One episode could take more than a year to make.
When asked what fans don’t know about behind the scenes of “Adventure Time,” Muto said, “The thing that seems hardest to grasp is exactly how far ahead shows are written. It might be 10 to 12 months between the conception of an episode and its premiere date. If not longer.”
3. There’s not one “most important” episode.
The showrunner couldn’t pick just one episode that’s the most important of all, but he did give us a few.
“Over the course of the series there have been episodes like ‘It Came from the Nightosphere,’ ‘Simon & Marcy,’ ‘Jake the Brick’ and ‘Hall of Egress’ that represent either major plot developments or interesting narrative experiments,” he said.
4. The show is still trying to get the entire casts of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “The Office.”
Over the years, “Adventure Time” has quietly been collecting cast members of “Star Trek” and “The Office” as guest stars.
“[Show creator Pendleton Ward] is a big fan of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’” said Muto, “So it just seemed like it would be cool to have as many ‘ST:TNG’ guest stars as possible. ‘The Office’ thing just happened naturally, and once we noticed it we leaned into it.”
Muto added, ”We still have a season left to record, so we may end up closer to reaching these arbitrary goals by the end. Our head of story, Kent Osborne (star of ‘Uncle Kent 2’), ran into Oscar Nunez at the Emmys and excitedly offered him a role. But then he felt bad like we were playing Pokémon GO with real people. So we’re not trying to force it.”
5. No, “Adventure Time” wasn’t “all a dream,” but no theory is too crazy for the show.
Many fans out there speculate that “Adventure Time” could just be Finn’s coma dream, or it's stories told by the Ice King. Muto says almost nothing seems “too strange” for an “Adventure Time” theory, but all the ideas that the show was a “dream/delusion/role-playing game” are “too easy.”
The showrunner said, “I’ve seen a lot of interesting ones connecting events across multiple seasons. The more convoluted, the better. The theories connecting ‘Adventure Time’ to ‘The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack’ are pretty cool.”
”Adventure Time: The Complete Sixth Season” is now available on Blu-ray and DVD.
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