These Toys Get It

Adventure Time gets it in a way most cartoons don’t—it lets the characters actually matter. Finn and Jake, obviously, but also Marceline with that exhausted cool, Ice King with his pathetic desperation, BMO being some kind of innocent logic-machine that somehow became the emotional core of the whole thing. It’s funny and sad and genuinely strange, and it shouldn’t work as well as it does.

Mike and Katie from TADO made toys of the characters. Real ones you could hold. I’m not sure if they were selling them or if it was just for the exhibition, but the point is someone looked at these drawings and decided they deserved to exist as plastic objects. That’s some real love for the material, rare enough these days.

The exhibition was in Alhambra in 2012, a small gallery in a small town, no big promotional push. Just artists making something because they cared. Getting a BMO figure hits different than getting some generic collectible. It’s that little Game Boy thing with limbs, the impossible innocent in a show full of broken people, and somehow it ends up being the most real character in the whole series.