Cartoon Network's Adventure Time Has A Musical Connection To Love Actually

The long-running animated cartoon series "Adventure Time" really was a show like no other, exploring the magical post-apocalyptic world of Ooo with Finn (Jeremy Shada) and Jake (Joe DiMaggio), a human boy and shapeshifting dog. It's an epic, sprawling story with an incredible voice cast that help to bring all of the colorful and unique characters to life, and that means there's some crossover with other popular movies and TV shows — heck, DiMaggio's voice is incredibly well-known in the animation world as the heavy-drinking bending robot Bender on "Futurama." But there's one connection people might not realize, and it's a pretty fun one!

It turns out that there's a musical link between the 2003 Richard Curtis romantic Christmas comedy "Love Actually" and "Adventure Time," courtesy of the movie's best musical moment and one of the show's best musical characters. "Love Actually" might not be everyone's favorite Christmas movie (and some of it really hasn't aged well) but at least now "Adventure Time" fans will have a little something extra to love when it inevitably pops up on cable during the holiday season.

One of the coolest characters in all of "Adventure Time" is Marceline the Vampire Queen, a laid-back, guitar-strumming goth chick who drinks the color red and ends up having a lovely romance with the high-strung Princess Bubblegum (Hynden Walch) in the spin-offs that happened after the series' initial Cartoon Network cancellation. She's rather musical, playing all sorts of songs on her guitar and singing along, and fans who listen closely might recognize her lovely voice as that of Olivia Olson, the actor who played Joanna in "Love Actually." For those who haven't watched it in awhile, she's the one who sings that boppy cover of "All I Want For Christmas is You" in what is probably the sweetest of the short stories in the film, following the young romance between Joanna and a little boy named Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster).

Each of the stories in "Love Actually" follows a star-crossed couple of some sort as they find love around the holiday season. In Sam's story, he's grieving the loss of his mother (also weirdly named Joanna) while his stepdad (Liam Neeson) tries to help him cope. He becomes fixated on the idea of telling his classmate Joanna about his crush on her before she returns to the United States, and in the end confesses to her in an airport terminal. It's super cute, even if the mom name thing is a tiny bit Freudian.

It's always potentially a little sketchy when child actors are made to kiss, but thankfully in Olson's case, the whole experience was absolutely magical. In a 2016 interview with E! News, Olson revealed that she was extremely nervous about the scene for some pretty understandable reasons:

"It was my first kiss and on-screen kiss too. I was really nervous because I kind of had a crush on Thomas back in the day and I was also worried because I was taller than him. It's so great that the first movie I was ever in became this holiday classic. It's really exciting that people are still talking about it."

There were unfortunately some downsides to her early fame as well, like being told she needed to lose weight despite only being in middle school. She ended up taking a break from showbiz for a little while before going into voice acting, knowing that she wouldn't ever have to worry about being judged by her appearance. "Adventure Time" gave her the opportunity to not only act but share her musical talents with the world again, bringing a bit of Christmas movie magic to the creative cartoon world.