Season Review: Adventure Time – Side Quests Season One

Adventure Time is back! Or rather, it’s going back to its “good old days” and recreating its first couple seasons by doing more self-contained ten minute episodes about Finn and Jake just doing fun and quirky adventures with all those vibes before things got dark and lore heavy and incredibly serialized. And while I and many others have enjoyed them continuing to progress the story that the original series ended on with Distant Lands and Fionna and Cake, by having the franchise grow with the viewers who watched it as it aired, having a series that does more of what the show started as was kind of inevitable. We’ve seen Gumball and Regular Show do basically the same thing in making newly titled shows that are essentially just more of the original shows and what people enjoyed about them, so it would only make sense that Adventure Time would eventually follow suit. Heck, I’m surprised that Steven Universe hasn’t done this yet, though that may be in the cards after Lars of the Stars eventually premieres. Part of me wishes that Cartoon Network had more new shows that it could rely on to bring in new viewers instead of trying to recreate the 2010’s, but I’m also not exactly against them doing more of the shows I enjoyed on principle as long as they are sufficiently entertaining.

And sufficiently entertaining is basically how I would summarize these twenty episodes of Side Quests. They feel pretty much the same as original recipe Adventure Time from the first few years of the 2010’s. Well, not ORIGINAL recipe like the Nickelodeon pilot but what many people would think is the original recipe. Finn is the only voice change, now voiced by Sasha Knight instead of mainstay Jeremy Shada, but he fits in perfectly well with the Finn that this point in the story would sound like, and bounces off well with every reprising voice who could basically do these roles in their sleep now. If you’re a stickler for the continuity of the original show, you might be somewhat irked when some details pop up here that originally revealed later on in the series, but I think it’s fine since they’re just making use of the world already created to fit into this earlier version. And if you’re not really into going back to this writing era of the show, (or the toddler focused Heyo BMO coming eventually), you’ve got the Bubblegum and Marceline show coming to continue making stuff for the older AT audience. This is just a solid few hours of vintage flavor adventures that you can take or leave as you please.