The end of perhaps the most influential all ages cartoon of the 2010s, Adventure Time, airs Labor Day weekend. Time for One Last Adventure is our sendoff.
Way back in 1971, when America was mired in a pointless foreign war, its relations with China were touchy, racial relations were even touchier, and the president was a liar and a crook, John Lennon’s favorite drinking buddy, the violently underrated songwriter Harry Nilsson, did something very, very weird: he put out a studio album, called The Point!, that was accompanied by an animated film.
The film, to put it mildly, was bizarre. It’s a fable of Aesopian proportions and Flatlandian inspirations that tells the tale of a young, round-headed boy living in a little town called Pointed Village where, by law, everyone and everything is required to “have a point.” Explaining this as only a trippy tortured goofball could, Nilsson once recounted: “I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, ‘Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn’t, then there’s a point to it.’”
Some very sage gobbledegook. And yet the film’s point (heh), that bigots and intolerance can and should be overcome through grace and gumption, remains today, an era in which America is mired in pointless foreign wars, its relations with China are touchy, racial relations are even touchier, and the president is a liar and a crook. It also happens to have a very catchy lead single, which was then remixed into one of the best and, appropriately, strangest hip hop tracks of all time.
“OK, sure, fine,” you, skeptical internet reader might ask, “but what the hell does this have to do with Adventure Time”? Well…
Yes, that’s exactly what we thought. And we’re not the only ones. So next time you’re watching Adventure Time and wondering what could possibly have inspired Pendleton Ward’s wacky world (besides nuclear war and Dungeons & Dragons), you’d do well to remember that he never forgot The Point!
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