The Ice King was once a much-loved archaeology professor named Simon, whose Trotsky glasses happen to look exactly like Ward’s. Tom Kenny, the actor who plays the show’s sympathetic villain, the Ice King, sees a lot of Ward written into this character. This may be because the Adventure Time world is so imaginative, many think that to invent this kind of stuff, you’d have to be on drugs (which Ward says he doesn’t do). But it belongs in the pantheon of kids’ programming – including Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Ren & Stimpy and Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures – that has an immense cult following among adults. Adventure Time is ostensibly an animated children’s show focusing on the adventures of two interspecies best friends and freelance heroes, Finn the Human and Jake the Dog.
Yet somehow one of the most introverted people in Hollywood has created a show that, arguably more than anything on television, connects in the deepest way with children, teens and adults alike. He would far prefer to be at home with the lights off and the curtains closed, playing a video game and eating pizza. It’s that helming a hit series generating top-10 games in app stores, comics that have collectively sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and nearly a thousand individual items of merchandise is just not part of his DNA. “For me, having quality of life outweighed the need to control this project and make it great all the time.” So he stepped down from running Adventure Time to become simply one of the show’s writers and storyboard artists.Īsked if he’d ever want to create another TV show, Ward responds with horror: “No, never. He says this not with sadness or frustration, but with relief. And the more popular it gets, the more the ancillary things – like the merchandise and games and everything – keep getting bigger.”Īnd so, Ward confesses, one day during Season Five, unbeknownst to his fans, “I quit because it was driving me nuts.” A backward red cap hides the top of his head a checkered shirt buttoned to the top conceals his plump body and on his face, there is not so much a beard but a hair force field, keeping anything from penetrating the world he’s created for himself. “To spend that extra energy and time you don’t have, to make something that’s worth making, to make it awesome, wears you out,” he says. A four-day-old bowl of Fruity Pebbles lies neglected at his elbow, the milk evaporated to leave just a rainbow of crud stuck to the sides of the bowl. “Dealing with people every day wears on you,” Ward says, squeezed into a desk chair in the Burbank, California, Cartoon Network building. And it probably would to nearly anyone except Pendleton Ward, the cult-hero creator of Adventure Time, which in three years has generated 176 11-minute episodes with a dizzying array of not just characters but dimensions, plotlines, parallel realities and origin stories.
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