Adventure Time – box set review

On the face of it, a cartoon about a boy called Finn and his companion, Jake the dog, having adventures in a magical kingdom called Ooo shouldn't really appeal to anyone over the age of five. But Adventure Time is so wonderfully complex, funny and imaginative that anyone of any age can enjoy it, in a befuddled sort of way.

This is mostly down to the show's creator, the perfectly monickered Pendleton Ward, who doesn't aim the humour at any age bracket: silly and clever can appeal to anyone. But what really makes Adventure Time stand out is the way it builds its mythology and characters with every 11-minute episode. We learn, with a half-buried car here and a globe with a chunk missing there, that Ooo is Earth after an apocalypse ("the mushroom war") and that Laplander-hat-wearing Finn is one of the last humans. The myriad magical creatures (Jake can change size and shape) are some form of mutations.

That's not even the point of the show, which launched on The Cartoon Network in 2010 and is now on its fifth season. Rather, Adventure Time is more a warning against taking things at face value. Sure, it has characters with the soppiest names: Princess Bubblegum, Rainicorn (a rainbow-coloured unicorn), Peppermint Butler (a sweet manservant with a mysterious past), the spoiled Lumpy Space Princess, and so on. But if you watch enough episodes, you'll see these are more than just single-note "funny" characters.

Take the Ice King, a former human turned wizard who is the show's main villain. His MO usually involves kidnapping one of the many princesses and trying to force her to marry him. But as we learn more, we see he's not so evil, just pathetically lonely, stuck in his frosty castle with his penguin minions (his favourite is Gunter). And what could be sweeter than Princess Bubblegum, ruler of the Candy Kingdom, populated by sweets and pastries and protected by huge Gumball Guardians? Except she's also a rather ruthless scientist who can be very dismissive and even abusive to her confectionery citizens. Many of the characters, such as the sour and screetchy Earl of Lemongrab, are the results of her bizarre experimenting.

But best of all is Marceline the Vampire Queen, a millennia-old vampire/shape-shifter/bass player who looks and acts like a teenage girl. She started off as a baddie, but soon it's revealed that her evil plans are often just elaborate gags. She's also responsible for some of the show's best songs, such as Nuts ("I thought you were nuts/But you're really, really, really nuts.")

In attitude and, sometimes, style it harks back to the wildly surreal cartoons of the Fleischer Brothers from the 1930s and 1940s: their Betty Boop and Popeye shorts would play in cinemas just as comfortably before young and not-so-young audiences. Add a little Pee-Wee's Playhouse, a splash of Frank L Baum's Oz books, mix in some Dungeons & Dragons gaming, Maurice Sendak and Hayao Miyazaki and you're still nowhere near to narrowing down what this show has to offer. Ignition Point starts off with farts and burps being set alight, and ends with a parody of Hamlet. In Thank You, we wordlessly explore a stange relationship between a fire wolf and a snow golem. And in the black & white BMO Noire, cutesy robotic games console BMO turns private eye in order to locate a missing sock.

Ward and his team show little sign of slowing down: season five will be a mammoth 52 episodes long, enough for weekly adventures all year round. There are even Ward-penned video games, such as Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I Don't Know!.

Even if you've not watched the show, you'll have seen people wearing its merchandise. It's steadily reaching phenomenon status.