Superb Episode of “Adventure Time” Leads Off 2nd Season

“It Came from the Nightosphere!” is an exceptional episode of Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time that combines inventive drawing and animation with funny, heartfelt storytelling. It aired last Monday, which was the show’s second season premiere. Writing and storyboarding duties belonged to Adam Muto and Rebecca Sugar, while the story is credited to Merriwether Williams, Steve Little, Patrick McHale, Pendleton Ward, and Thurop van Orman.

Rebecca, who created the student film Singles and first appeared on Cartoon Brew in October 2007 at the precocious age of twenty, also composed Marceline’s song which is heard in the episode. You can listen to the original version on her blog. Also, be sure and see these incredible drawings of Marceline made by her. She provided a few details about the episode on her blog:

I wrote a song for this episode, Marceline sings it at the beginning while Finn beatboxes. When Pen pitched this storyboard to CN, he beatboxed as Finn and I played the music on a uke and sang as Marceline. It was super terrifying, my first network pitch.

I also did all the monster stuff at the end! Adam Muto did all the meat in the middle! Generally, in our episodes, anything that is actually witty was done by Adam. I’m usually responsible for sex jokes and violence.

Also, just for fun, here’s Sneezy, a short animation piece that Adam created with Pen Ward a few years back. The stylistic evolution and growth from Sneezy to Adventure Time is fascinating to watch: