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Adventure Time: The Complete Seventh Season DVD: Solid but Not Substantial


Adventure Time: The Complete Seventh Season DVD: Solid but Not Substantial
7 out of 10

It’s adventure time, come on and grab your friends!  Adventure Time: The Complete Seventh Season is coming out on DVD on July 18 and is all wrapped up in a cute Princess Bubblegum package. The DVD contains about 25 episodes and includes the excellent “Stakes” miniseries focusing on Marceline the Vampire Queen. Here's the episode list:

1. Bonnie & Neddy2. Varmints3. Cherry Cream Soda4. Mama Said5. Football6. Stakes Part 1: Marceline the Vampire Queen7. Stakes Part 2: Everything Stays8. Stakes Part 3: Vamps About9. Stakes Part 4: Empress Eyes10. Stakes Part 5: May I Come In?11. Stakes Part 6: Take Her Back12. Stakes Part 7: Checkmate13. Stakes Part 8: The Dark Cloud14. The More You Moe, The Moe You Know15. Summer Showers16. Angel Face17. President Porpoise is Missing18. Blank Eyed Girl19. Bad Jubies20. A King’s Ransom21. Scamps22. Crossover23. Hall of Egress24. Flute Spell25. The Thin Yellow Line

The episodes themselves are well-done and have good image quality. The seventh season of Adventure Time doesn’t have a strong unifying thematic storyline like its previous season, but it definitely contains some episodes that fans cannot miss. The "Stakes" miniseries is a must-see for Marceline fans, as it explores her past, the origin of her vampirism and develops her character quite a bit.

You see a lot of examples of how characters have matured throughout the season, in fact. While Finn previously totally blew it with Flame Princess, he behaves in a way more rational and mature manner towards a girl he crushes on this season. B-Moe also has a coming-of-age episode where he takes the first step toward robot adulthood and learns a little about his family in the process.

This season also follows up on some previous storylines in a satisfactory way. The episode “Crossover” follows up on the fifth season episode “Finn the Human” and resolves the dangling plotline of the alternate reality Finn in a satisfying way. The Ice King’s story also progresses little by little and he seems to be on the road to recovery. It’s heartwarming how Finn and Jake jump to his aid this season, showing they’ve truly grown from being enemies to being allies.

Like most Adventure Time releases, this DVD set is very light on extras. The most substantial one is the 12 minute special, “Good Jubies: The Making of Bad Jubies”, which focuses on the production of the special stop-motion episode of season 7. To be honest, I didn’t really get why “Bad Jubies” was an episode that required stop-motion animation. Other episodes of Adventure Time that switched animation styles had the style switch as an integral part of the story. For example, the CGI-animated season 5 episode “A Glitch is a Glitch” had Finn and Jake trying to stop a computer virus, so CGI felt thematically necessary. However, there was nothing specific to the “Bad Jubies” story that specifically needed to be stop motion, it was just in that style for the sake of being different. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it just would have seemed cooler if the stop motion style had been more essential to the story.

However, the “Making Of” short really impressed on me how much work and detail goes into stop motion animation and really gives a good look at the process of making the episode and the reasoning behind it. Anyone who’s a fan of stop-motion or of differing animation styles in general should give it a look.

The other features aren’t very substantial. There’s the :Bad Jubies: Time Lapse",  short that shows the stop motion set being constructed in fast-forward mode. It gets tedious to watch after a while, just as the set was surely tedious to make. Other than that, there’s animatics for the episodes “King’s Ransom” and “Hall of Egress”, a song demo for “Jake’s Life” and “the Behind the Title Card” feature, which is just a look at the rough sketches for some of the episode title cards. That’s it. Like I said, light on extras.

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All in all, this is a decent purchase. While this is far from the strongest season of Adventure Time, it’s a solid one over all with lots of entertaining episodes that continues to build on the show’s narrative. It sets up a lot of plots that are continued in season eight and will hopefully be concluded with a bang in the final season of the series. I’m looking forward to the shows sure-to-be-epic conclusion in season nine.

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