15 Feb 2011

The Real You follow-up post! Plus Bubblegum sketches-

The Real You was my first episode with Princess Bubblegum! I've drawn her a lot since. Here are some sketches-

(download)

Ok so I have a lot of things to say about this ep! (Contains spoilers...)

In the original outline, the joke was that Finn put on the glasses... and in becoming smart he also became incredibly boring. Jake and Bubblegum didn't like him anymore because he was so boring... and they begged him to take the glasses off so that he could be cool again.

I think it's socially irresponsible to make a story about how if you're smart everyone will hate you, and if you're not everyone will love you. There's so much of that on television already. It's dangerous to keep telling generations of kids that it's not ok to be smart! And it's insidious... as we've gained more access to information, we've been told to ignore it by the people that benefit most from public ignorance!

So Adam and I decided to have Finn become totally transcendent... and I wanted to make sure that in the end, his smart self was right about everything.

Finn makes the black hole so that everyone at the conference can have a near death experience, which will flood their brains with DMT (this is a drug but it's also naturally released by a near death experience...) When he says, "we were all born to die," he means that our brains and bodies are built to know how to die.

(This was based on something a babysitter said to me when I was little. She told me that, since all people will eventually die, you might say that we only live to die. I'm sure she thought it would be funny to scar some kid for life... it worked, I never forgot it.)

Anyway Finn knows that bubblegum will take off his glasses, and that he'll figure out how to destroy the hole as his normal self, and that everyone will love the conference because it was so exciting. But as his normal self he's too stupid to understand what he's done or why PB suddenly likes him.

 

The zoom was a reference to "Powers of 10", and the hyperbubble was based off the hypercube theory, which I learned about in Carl Sagan's show "Cosmos." (A hypercube is a 4D object, which casts a 3D shadow called a tesseract. You can only see the 3D shadow because you can't understand a 4D object. I think this theory was debunked but I really like it.)

Also I wanted the whole episode to be more like the movie "Mindwalk." (I DARE you guys to get through this movie!)

I also put in something from a natural science class I took in college. We were looking at bugs under microscopes at the natural history museum. One guy in the class looked at his bug and cried out in shock- "Oh my God- everything small is just a small version of something big!" I thought that was so funny... because it's not really true! But it still blew this guy's mind!

 

Speaking of mind-blowing experiences, please check out next Monday's episode, Guardian's of Sunshine!!!!! Boarded by Tom Herpich and Ako Castuera! Plus 3D animation by Jacky Jiang!