Thanks to Netflix I had a chance to sit down and watch Adventure Time S1. It is not as if I haven’t watched the show, I’ve just seen random episodes here and there, but I wanted to watch it in order from the beginning. Really there is no need to do this if the first season is any indication, but hey I like to do things in order when I can!

Things I took away from this season: LSP is the best princess with the best voice, George Tekai is always down for a laugh, the most over the kids’ heads joke was when they sack the nut castle, and Whywolves are creatures possessed by the spirit of inquiry . . . and bloodlust.

I really wish Netflix would add more seasons but it sounds like that won’t be happening for a long time. I will have to supplement myself with comics.

After a long break we get the return of The Venture Bros. in season five. I enjoyed season four but it just felt like it was one step below everything that came before it. Season four was good. I usually got several laughs every episode. Some of the stuff around the Revenge Society and S.P.H.I.N.X. was amazing. I did a whole post on Everybody Comes to Hank’s. It just was never as good as it was in the original three seasons. Something about the plots just felt like they were spinning their wheels despite a lot of things going on in each episode. It was fun but lacking that spark that made the earlier episodes more than just quotable pop culture romps.

Other than the recent Halloween special (which was more of a hype man for the new season than anything else) there has not been a regular episode since November 21, 2010. I did hear quite a bit of rumbling on the day that the new episode came out that people were not than enthusiastic about the return and perhaps they should have let the 4th season be the finale. And the last one hour episode would not have been the worst place to end things all things considered. But the Internet loves to be a group of snarky bastards who claim that everything is over or sycophantic fanboys who can’t see anything in front of them so it’s hard to it as any gauge of quality.

Maybe it is merely a case of absence making the heart grow fonder but I have been majorly grooving the first three episodes of the new season. In retrospect the Halloween special seemed like a strong return to form. But it is much harder to make a solid season than lead with a strong beginning and then never live up to that start. So far I don’t see that happening. I mean I might get a flood of comments about how the is the WORST … SEASON … EVER but that would require us to get comments. But so far I have not really heard hide nor hare about opinions of the new season. But I have been on Twitter much less lately so that might have a lot to do with that.

But I think the key to the new season is it feels fresh. As much as I said this season is a return to form in many ways by changing things up a little while still keeping things authentic it feels like some real progress. The main problem with season four is it felt that no matter what happened or what changed the whole things was just movement in place. A mile run in a circle still bring you back to the same place you started. The new season just has a different feeling of momentum. And it feels great.

Oh but really I want to see Dr. Orpheus this season. I love that guy. Something about his Doctor Strange melodrama turned up to c (because sometimes even 11 is just too small a number) just tickles my fancy.

The Ongoing Investigations are little peeks into what we are watching and reading outside of our main posts on the blog. We each pick three things that we were interested in a week and talk a bit about them. There is often not much rhyme or reason to what we pick. They are just the most interesting things we saw since the last Ongoing Investigation.

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