By now, if you aren’t one of "Adventure Time"’s devoted fans, you’ve at least seen a few kids, college students, or adult children wearing gear emblazoned with the show’s characters (Finn, the last human left in a post-apocalyptic cartoon world, and Jake, his magical dog best friend/brother). Maybe one of those adults has tried to pitch it to you as "not just for kids", or you’ve encountered an adult critic at a prestigious publication fawning over it. Maybe you just heard someone use the word "mathematical" as an exclamation. Or you encountered one of the hundreds of remixes of "Bacon Pancakes".
There’s a reason kids’ TV tends to produce a lot of infectious little songs like this—before they become effectively literate, music is an easy way for children to digest and process information. It’s why you still probably use "50 Nifty United States" to remember the names of all of the states, and why "Schoolhouse Rock" continues to be awesome/one of your primary sources of civics knowledge well into adulthood. It’s unsurprising, then, that "Adventure Time", one of the best and most complex pieces of television of the past few years, period, has created an excellent space for music.
In that light, "Adventure Time"’s "Stakes" miniseries, which debuts on Cartoon Network tonight, should be an event. Not only is it the show’s first foray into extended storytelling—with a single plot unfolding over the course of four days and eight episodes—it includes all sorts of cool action sequences and, best of all, it focuses on the backstory of the show’s most musical character: Marceline (Olivia Olson), the magical land of Ooo’s bass-playing, red-eating eternally teenaged Vampire Queen. But "Stakes", as fun as it is, ultimately fails to fully deliver, mostly because of a lack of, um, stakes. Instead, its most exciting moment is a snippet of a single song.
"Everything Stays" is pretty much a perfect "Adventure Time" song. It’s quiet, beautiful, and heartfelt—a lullaby for children at heart, no matter their age. It’s comforting in its simplicity, undeniably modern yet still timeless. The lyrics are comforting in their universality ("Everything stays, right where you left it/ Everything stays, but it still changes") while somehow remaining pointed and memorable enough to evade banality. If you approach it with an open heart, you won’t be able to help it evoking something painful and important—it should (and, for me, does) hurt to listen to. And by now, that’s about what you’d expect from songwriter Rebecca Sugar.
Sugar, one of "Adventure Time"’s early storyboard artists and writers, was also one of its most important songwriters, penning, among other songs, the now-ubiquitous "Bacon Pancakes". The hallmarks of a Rebecca Sugar joint are, in some respects, pretty superficially obvious. There’s a simple, stripped-down melody that doesn’t call attention to how stripped down it is so much as it doesn’t take more than it needs. There’s a lot of healthily-expressed pain and often uncomfortable earnestness. Like those bacon pancakes, they contain a pure, concentrated sweetness that should probably cause a toothache—but it doesn’t, because, like the pancakes of Ooo, Sugar’s songs are magic.
In part, that might be because her creative process is so consciously indebted to and supportive of others—she’s taken to heart the collaborative nature of "Adventure Time", a show where several teams of storyboard artists work on episodes simultaneously, giving them functional control over their own work while still toiling in service of the greater whole—allowing her to consistently rely on equally passionate people with their own complementary visions. In turn, the 28-year-old Sugar has demonstrated a commitment to the ideal that underlies the most powerful, positive version of what she’s doing. She really means it, and you should, too.
That’s readily apparent in the music that made Marceline such a success, almost all of which was written by Sugar. Take "Fry Song", the audience’s first serious introduction to the character, in which Marceline laments her poor relationship with her dad. Like "Adventure Time" itself, "Fry Song" just shouldn’t work—it’s a previously-intimidating character, backed by a goofy white boy beatboxing, singing a heartfelt song about her father eating her french fries. But it works.
The lightness of both the music’s improvisational quality and its tentative self-awareness ("don’t laugh," Marceline implores Finn) are important to the songwriting, but they’re not as important as the way it functions as a solid piece of metaphorical, musical storytelling. Not only is Finn literally being a supportive friend (through beat-boxing), Marceline opening up to sing for him actually uses the intimacy of putting yourself out there to express their growing closeness. And "Fry Song" winds up actually succeeding in its emotional purpose when Marceline’s father (who is also basically Satan) realizes how much he’s neglected his child.
All of Sugar’s best writing for Marceline mines the contradictory nature of the character—a sweet vampire posturing as an occasionally sexually aggressive teenage girl dealing with the psychic aftershocks of living for over 1,000 years—to riff on a series of ideas without having to be certain of their meaning. All of her emotions are raw, as in "I’m Just Your Problem", which introduces the "distasteful" menace of Marceline’s real feelings about her friends and past flame Princess Bubblegum, or "Remember You", which creepily and heartbreakingly dredges up her history with Simon—once a protective father figure, now the amnesiac, insane Ice King.
The performance, in which Marceline sings Simon’s words, accompanied by his shriveled present self, feels like watching an intimate, painful fight tearing apart a family—we, and Finn, feel like we should look away, but can’t. Because an expression of emotion so powerful is absolutely riveting. And if anything, that quality is intensified in the work Sugar has done on "Steven Universe", the show she created while working on "Adventure Time". (Both air on Cartoon Network—Sugar continued working on "Adventure Time" through the show’s fifth season, when committing to the two shows at the same time became impossible.)
As an extremely quick summary: the show focuses on the makeshift family formed by Steven, a young boy, and the Crystal Gems, aliens who defend the world, one of whom is voiced by the singer Estelle. The Gems’ family dynamic riffs on Sugar’s progressive, artistically productive childhood—Steven is based on her younger brother Steven, who works on the show himself. And even more than "Adventure Time", "Steven Universe" is practically a musical—songs like "Strong in the Real Way" or "What Can I Do for You?" are thematically and emotionally dense enough to take whole acts and episodes—or, in one case, a whole season of television—and transform them into minute-long, concentrated bursts of creative energy. That concision is part of what makes the music so striking as art, serving as both isolated work and a conscious part of a much larger whole. As Sugar puts it in Maria Bustillos’ epic treatise on "Adventure Time":
"Sublime art is unframeable: It’s an image or idea that implies that there’s a bigger image or idea that you can’t see: You’re only getting to look at a fraction of it, and in that way it’s both beautiful and scary, because it’s reminding you that there’s more that you don’t have access to."
Without writing a longer, separate essay (or a book), the use of music on "Steven Universe" is both sublime and consistently astonishing in its capacity to top itself and surprise viewers, from the video game-influenced, crystalline score by composing team Aivi and Surrashu to the contributions of the rest of the "Steven Universe" team (particularly storyboarder Jeff Liu) to the most minor songs by recurring characters. That includes an R&B-inflected, goofy PSA about working in a doughnut shop, a punk diss track sung by a band full of time-traveling Stevens, and a whole catalogue for Greg Universe, Steven’s doofy dad (voiced by comedy star Tom Scharpling) who used to be an aspiring rock star, complete with flowing mane and busted tour van.
Then there’s "Haven’t You Noticed (I’m a Star)", a Taylor Swift pastiche originally sung by Olivia Olson (who also voices Marceline), later taken up by Sadie, an insecure teenaged girl.
"Haven’t You Noticed (I’m a Star)" is the perfect version of a major pop song for a kids’ show: The singer is overloaded with friends, mirroring Tay’s infamous squad ("So many I can’t even name them/ Can you blame me I’m too famous"), but, amidst that performance of confidence, she is still trying to get the listener to notice. In the mouth of shy teen Sadie, it becomes a form of empowerment. And in the mouth of Steven, it becomes a way for the show to experiment with gender, putting the boy in drag without a care in the world.
The striking image of Steven proudly wearing a dress is intentional. Sugar tells Entertainment Weekly, "My goal with the show was to really tear down and play with the semiotics of gender in cartoons for children," a statement that would sound obscenely pretentious if it weren’t also one hundred percent sincere and also very obviously what the show is actually doing. Nicki Minaj (yes, that Nicki Minaj) appears on "Steven Universe" as the voice of a purple giant who subtly emasculates men. And the action climax of the first season is—wait for it—a full musical number by Estelle that soundtracks an extremely cool fight scene while also serving as an extended metaphor for the power of emotional intimacy and healthy relationships.
Music matters in Rebecca Sugar’s work, in a way it doesn’t in most entertainment, often not even in other musicals. Rather than (or in addition to) serving as simply a formal delivery system for the story, Marceline, Greg, Steven, and the rest of the characters on "Steven Universe" have an intimate relationship with music and use it to structure their lives (literally, in the case of the themes that back the various Gems’ fusing) in ways that allow Sugar’s work to consistently achieve something close to the sublime.
These are all qualities that "Stakes", to varying degrees, lacks. What initially promises to be a deeper exploration of Marceline’s background and childhood as a human becomes, instead, something closely resembling a video game, complete with a screen that ticks off each vampire she’s killed like bosses in "Street Fighter". Similarity to video games isn’t a bad thing for TV, but in this case it swallows the calmer, emotional moments that used to be so effortlessly threaded in, moments exemplified by Marceline’s mother singing "Everything Stays" to her daughter—voiced by none other than Rebecca Sugar.
Casting Sugar as Marceline’s mother, in her first bit of voice acting work, is a nifty way of acknowledging the history of the show, and of the character. "Adventure Time" will likely continue to run for quite some time. It’s unlikely that it will ever really be bad, but it might have overexposed its mysteries. Thankfully, that doesn’t lessen the value of Sugar’s musical contributions. Like Marceline and Simon, you can continue to have the same forgetful encounter over and over again, but the music will remain, right where you left it.
And maybe having the ability to engage with ostensibly kid-directed entertainment is just an opportunity to allow people of all ages to grapple with themselves, and to see the music again and again from fresh perspectives. "Something weird might just be something familiar viewed from a different angle," Marceline’s mother tells her daughter, and us, before singing her to sleep. "And that’s not scary, right?"