‘Adventure Time’ vs. ‘Regular Show’

This cross-post by Amanda Lyons appears as part of our theme week on Children’s Television.

I probably wouldn’t know anything about either Adventure Time or Regular Show, both awesome cartoons, if I didn’t have a young niece and nephew. Happily, I do, and they have brought these shows into my life. That’s one of the things that’s so great about having children around; they keep you young.

And I don’t think there has to be a winner and a loser – there’s room for more than one at the top, y’know? It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Besides, both of these shows are awesome. They’re funny, hip, contemporary, relevant; great for kids but stuffed with adult references and jokes as well, and the animation is really great.

(Also, as an aside, Mr. Meows and young nephew Meows both insisted, before I had seen Regular Show, that I am just like Pops. This troubled me; was this a good thing or a bad thing? Were they making fun of me? When I finally saw it, I still wasn’t sure, but I can tell you one thing: they are right! BTW Pops on sugar is analogous to me on coffee)

BUT. There is one thing that, for me, gives Adventure Time a bit of an edge over Regular Show, and it’s been compounded after sitting through a two-hour back-to-back marathon of both shows over the weekend. It boils down to this: while both cartoons are awesome, RS is pretty much a bro-zone while AT has a bit more room for the ladies.

Don’t get me wrong – RS is great, and I do love it. It’s apparently PG-rated and is often required by the Cartoon Network to be toned down. As far as cartoons go, it’s edgy for sure, definitely the hipster older brother of cartoon shows. It’s packed with knowing references to the 80’s and popular culture that may fly over the heads of my niece and nephew (while still making them laugh) but hit my sense of humor square on the target.

But over an hour of watching RS, though I really enjoyed it and laughed a lot, I also felt more and more left out. RS is hip, magical and weird, but all of this comes from men only. Women are marginal and disappointingly, exist only as glorifed T&A with typical cartoon long lashes. Bros get all the funny lines and all the adventures. Women are passive, side-line decoration.

This is thrown into stark relief when you look at the cast of characters. There’s only one (kind of) significant female, Margaret the red-breasted (huh, huh) robin. She’s a secondary character, and pretty much solely exists as a babe that Mordecai has a crush on. They take this pretty far sometimes – check out this clip – fairly hot and heavy for what is, at the end of the day, a kid’s show. (Update: in the newer episodes, Margaret features more and gets to do more stuff so she seems more rounded. They have also added in her utterly adorable friend Eileen and Muscle Man’s girlfriend Starla who’s pretty bitchin’, although she conforms to that weird cartoon law that boyfriend/girlfriend characters have to look more like brother/sister. At the end of the day though, these females are all secondary and important more for how they relate to the main male characters as girlfriends/love objects rather than characters in their own right.)

I’ve addressed this kind of thing before, in my post about The Hunger Games. Maybe some of you will think I’m being whiny and nit-picky. But I find it really disappointing because I want young girls today to have a different experience from the one I had – in which the world reflected back to me was for men only; where they had all the main roles, made all the jokes, solved all the problems, went on all the adventures, while women/girls just looked on adoringly and batted their eyelashes. And it’s not only girls who are affected by this – think of all the debates recently over whether women can be funny, whether they can possibly be authentic participators in geek culture, whether they can be effective leaders in the business world, blah blah blah ad infinitum.  Why is this (still) happening? Because both men and women are affected by a severe lack of positive female role models in our culture – or should I say, exposure of said role models, because they’re there, they just don’t get the air time. As documentary Miss Representation states, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” These cartoon representations may be fictional, but they affect us in our real lives, how we act and how we perceive other people – both boys and girls.

Watching RS I’m taken back to my childhood, to pretend play, and how I would always have to ‘be’ the male characters because they were the ones who were active and funny, they were the ones I admired. RS is the same – I mean, who would want to ‘be’ Margaret?? Sure, she’s cool and all, but she doesn’t do anything except get her norks out!! It worries me the kind of takeaway that kids are going to get from that, and it worries me that kids may already be encouraged to view females as sexualized bodies – it’s all around them already, do we have to put it in cartoons as well?

Oh yeah, there’s also this little gem, from an episode in which Mordecai goes on a series of bad dates. It’s your typical montage of bad date situations, but buried in there is a humorless-looking, unsmiling woman who aggressively asserts, “Oh, so you agree that women are misrepresented in most forms of popular media?” I get that the joke is about people who press their political views on you at inappropriate times, but I feel it’s telling that the writers chose to use a feminist viewpoint, and one that I would consider fairly uncontroversial at that. (Especially as this is a complaint I feel RS could do with taking under consideration – is someone feeling a little defensive? Or worse, do they consider this question annoying or irrelevant?) I also felt like it was a “joke” which had been discarded as passe by 1988, and it was perplexing and disappointing to see it come up in a kid’s cartoon. Do we want to train a new generation of kids to laugh off legitimate feminist concerns as a joke? One wonders how this would come across if they were to replace this “uptight” woman with like, a humorless civil rights activist. Not gonna lie, that did really annoy me (just call me a feminist killjoy) and RS definitely loses a few points for that one.

Conversely, Adventure Time is much more female-inclusive. The main two characters are still guys, but at least in their land there are a whole lot of females that get to be a significant part of the story – there are heeeeaps and heeeeaps of Princesses with a range of looks and voices. They are rulers and they have far more characteristics than their physical appearance. There’s also a parallel-universe episode where the main characters swap genders – only a one-shot (well, several-shot) but a fascinating idea, and not just done in the name of cheap gender-jokes, but executed in a way that makes it clear the opposite-gender versions of the characters are every bit the equal of the originals – althoooough the Fionna and Cake stories I’ve seen so far have tended to have a bias towards more romantic story lines, but then Finn isn’t without this either – it’s just that because he’s the main man, he gets more variation, as well.

AT is perhaps not as hip as RS, but it is just as magical – perhaps slightly more so. It’s definitely just as weird, existing in a deliciously surreal and at times kind of disturbing universe.

So, at the end of the day, while I raucously enjoy Regular Show (and identify to a worrying degree with Pops) it’s Adventure Time that really has my heart. Keep representing and taking us on your quests, Adventure Time! I love you for it.