If you’re a fan of the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time, you’ll be excited to know that the Season 3 Blu-ray and DVD sets hit retailers today!
Our family had a chance to preview the two-disc DVD set and enjoyed reliving the 26 episodes (over four hours’ worth of Finn and Jake fun!) and particularly enjoyed many of the extras. As I’ve talked about here and here, we have an Adventure Time superfan in our house, so he was thrilled to help me with this particular product review.
Most of the fans who would buy this Adventure Time set have probably already enjoyed most, if not all, of the episodes, so this review will focus on the extras. There aren’t many extras, so it’s easy to cover all of them.
The BMO Box
Like Seasons 1 and 2, the DVD box itself is fun. If you haven’t seen them, Season 1 features Finn and Season 2 has the Ice King. The boxes are custom die-cut sleeves of each character, and each disc in the set is an additional layer. In Finn’s case, one of the discs is his skeleton and another is his muscles. Very interesting, indeed. For Season 3, you get to enjoy the insides of our favorite video gaming console character, BMO.
The two discs inside are decorated with BMO’s heart and his CD-ROM drive. In addition, the information sheet inside the case includes cut-out arms that you can tape to the exterior of the casing for, as the Cartoon Network press release suggests, your “very own collectible BMO figurine.” Paper doll is more like it.
Alternate Introduction by Screen Novelties
The DVD includes the Lego alternate introduction assembled by the Los Angeles animation company Screen Novelties. It’s really cool! I tried to find some fun facts about how many Lego bricks were used and how much time it took for the talent to come up with the introduction, but I couldn’t find anything. It turns out, you can simply watch the introduction on YouTube:
Interview with Creator Pendleton Ward and Friends
There is a 7.5-minute interview with show creator Pendleton Ward, supervising producer Adam Muto, and head of story Kent Osborne. The title of the video is “How an Idea Becomes Adventure Time.” The video features a lot more than the title suggests. It’s mostly assorted commentary about the nostalgia, the assorted writers, and the storyboard artists incorporated into the show.
Muto’s parts of the interview are the best presented. The other two are a bit more babbling. I still encourage listening to the whole thing, particularly the section about how parents come up to the creators at Comic-Con to thank them for creating a show that the whole family can appreciate. You can also catch a glimpse of the young man who voices Finn, Jeremy Shada (who, by the way, was also a star of the short-lived Cartoon Network sketch comedy series, Incredible Crew.)
Commentary Tracks
Finally, like so many other TV-to-DVD releases, cast and crew commentary tracks are available for each of the 26 episodes. Personally, there are very few commentary tracks that I can stomach. I think for me, it’s the chaos of trying to listening to the commentary while watching something completely different on-screen.
I listened to two episodes’ worth of commentary tracks. There are several commentators introduced at the beginning of each episode who were telling assorted stories full of tangents. In the episode “Too Young”, I’d estimate about 20 percent of the commentary was actually relevant to what we were looking at. Some of the tangents offered some historical perspective and creative inspiration for the characters and storylines.
Conclusions
Adventure Time: The Complete Third Season (MSRP: $32.07 Blu-ay, $26.95 DVD) is available now, at major entertainment retailers such as Amazon.
GeekMom received this item for review purposes.
