Why Cartoon Network Ended Adventure Time At Season 10

It's difficult to encapsulate the impact of Pendelton Ward's animated juggernaut, "Adventure Time." Not only did the show serve as the launchpad for animators like Rebecca Sugar ("Steven Universe") and Julia Pott ("Summer Camp Island"), but it even served as the structural godfather for Donald Glover's "Atlanta." The series centers on a human boy named Finn and his adoptive brother Jake, a magical dog who can change size at will. The duo goes on magical adventures in very distant lands, meeting new friends, foes, and fascinating characters along the way. The nearly 300-episode series took home seven Emmys, launched a multimedia franchise, and got multiple spin-offs. It was a show that felt like it would go on forever ... until after 10 seasons, it came to a satisfying albeit bittersweet end.

As explained by Cartoon Network's chief content office Rob Sorcher in an oral history of "Adventure Time" published by the Los Angeles Times, there came a point where "Adventure Time" was playing less on the channel, but the production was moving forward with a "large volume" of episodes. The fandom was extremely passionate, and Sorcher knew that a sudden cancellation would be disastrous. 

"I really began thinking 'This can't come quickly as a sudden company decision, it needs to be a conversation over a period of time,' and it did also strike me that if we don't wind this up soon, we're going to have a generation of fans graduate through the demo and we won't have completed a thought for them," he said.

Adam Muto, executive producer and eventual showrunner on "Adventure Time," noted that the team was shocked the series was allowed to go on for as long as it did, considering the track record of Cartoon Network shows typically not lasting longer than six seasons at most.

"When we picked the last episodes, I tried to make it so that a lot of them could function as the last episode for that character," said Muto. This meant that the creative team could work toward a satisfying conclusion and an ending that the fans (and characters) deserve. Fortunately, this approach helped prepare the cast and crew for the inevitable. 

"Adam Muto had a really great way of putting it, that the ending of the show was getting stretched and stretched and stretched out because of how softly they let us know," explained Olivia Olson, voice of Marceline the Vampire Queen. "There were definitely talks for a long time of 'Okay, this might be last season' and then it was 'Okay, this is the last season.' And then 'Okay, next week is gonna be the final episode.'"

But this soft landing certainly didn't make coming up with the perfect finale any easier. "I freaked out a little because endings are so hard on TV shows," said Muto. "So it was like 'What is the perfect ending?' That was a new kind of question." He noted that he was going to delete his Twitter account once the episode aired, but that he felt like the show was concluding in a way that was satisfying to the people who made it, regardless of external reactions. One of the perfect endcaps was the return of Rebecca Sugar, who had since gone on to create "Steven Universe," with a song called "Time Adventure." The song was about how, as Sugar described, "How even if something ends, it continues to exist in the past, nothing ever really goes away, you only feel like it does because our mind has to process information one moment at a time in order for us to function as humans."

"Adventure Time" may be over, but as long as we have our memories (and the ability to stream old episodes), the fun never ends.