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Adventure time bmo snaps8/6/2023 ![]() Now we’re looking at a tail dreaming that it’s a clown that’s hoping that it isn’t merely dreaming of becoming an artist. Together, it’s a vicious portrayal of life as an unappreciated artist: this is one of the few spaces in which one can create, yet one must survive by pandering to masses wanting nothing but to gratify base desires. It’s a public speaker’s nightmare, this mass of teeming, identical ants, silently judging, and ravenous for entertainment. The audience is ruthless, and drives Blue Nose off the stage amidst jeers and booing, wanting a return to tossed pies and bruised fools. The boy does a lively dance, then collapses as from heart failure, and ascends to a spotlight in the tent’s roof opening. He then spots a bumblebee boy asleep in the orange display, as played by a marionette puppet. Inside the circus tent, the seats are filled with a crowd of ants, an image that hearkens back to that classic MGM cartoon about a lively flea circus (check it out here, it’s an old-school charmer), but it also has this terrifyingly lonely aspect to it also, which soon intensifies.Ī snail’s high-flying dive into a thimble elicits tremendous applause, then Blue Nose’s act begins: a phonograph plays a broken tune in the background, and Blue Nose is selling oranges from a cart, but nobody’s buying, in a simple parody of his own career. Aside from the hat, the tail pads some skintone onto its face, a rodeo clown’s frown, and a blue line for a nose, and we now have a sleepwalking tail that believes (believes? is?) it’s a clown. BMO and NEPTR look on as the tail heads to the woods, where a turn-of-the-century circus tent is erected, and a ladybug ringmaster hollers at ‘Blue Nose’ to get to makeup before the show starts. It’s undoubtedly bizarre–Jake’s tail stretches off downstairs, dons a derby hat, packs a hobo-sack full of nuts and berries, and hits the road. Aside from adding that meta-theatricality, their voyeurism also recreates the magic of early cinema as a spectacle-parlor, a dark room where you pay your penny, the curtains pull back, and you watch something strange unfold. The spectating robots places humanity on the stage, which makes Blue Nose’s later hardships a pantomime of the basic struggle to express honestly. Finn once played hide and seek with him and forgot about the hiding droid for a couple of months, and Ice King can’t even remember his existence, and once kidnapped him thinking he was BMO. NEPTR is in the same outsider boat, as he was created physically by Finn, but brought to life by Ice King’s magic, and considers both of them father figures, which hasn’t been easy on the little guy. BMO loves to play at being human not being a little boy or girl specifically, much to the delight of speculators and fans who love to read gender issues in BMO episodes, but just as a human that pees, brushes its teeth–he even pantomimed pregnancy by putting an egg in a cup and taping it to his belly. It was a stroke of genius on the writers’ part to have the robots as our fly’s eyes on the wall, as they have an intriguing relationship towards Adventure Time‘s non-mechanical cast, and towards humanity in general. Because he’s not an artist at all–he’s Jake’s sleepwalking tail.Īpparently, the tail does this nightly, or at least often enough for BMO to know of it and invite NEPTR along for the ride. In this case, the necessity of lampshading such heavy subject matter as a silly sleepwalking adventure adds to the theme of the uncertainty of the artist’s identity and role, both to the audience and to himself. The episode picks apart the plight of the artist in mainstream culture, who struggles to retain both identity and integrity in the face of popular demand. “Sad Face” follows in sort of the same vein, as a tribute both to the elegant simplicity of classic cinema, and also by virtue of its affecting, greyscale atmosphere and Lynchian surrealism. It’s the eponymous time again!Īdventure Time has put out multiple noir homages so far, such as “BMO Noire,” in which BMO riles up the (imaginary) criminal underworld of the Treehouse to find Finn’s missing sock, and the lovely “Rootbeer Guy,” a Hitchcock-style case of surreal events which force an average joe to peel back the layers of mundane, urban life to get at truth. ![]() ![]() On last Monday night’s episode of Adventure Time, “Sad Face,” Jake’s tail goes on a somnambulant adventure as the circus performer ‘Blue Nose,’ who contends with a slave-driving ringmaster and a merciless audience, all as BMO and NEPTR look on.
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