Page 1 of 3
Before Cartoon Network ever touched it, Pendleton Ward actually pitched an Adventure Time pilot to Nickelodeon back in 2008. They passed on it. It wasn't until the original short blew up online that Cartoon Network came knocking a year later, and the rest is history.
Jake's whole laid-back, do-whatever-feels-right vibe wasn't pulled from thin air. Pendleton Ward has said he based the character on Tripper Harrison, Bill Murray's slacker camp counselor from the 1979 comedy Meatballs, right down to the way Jake will drop the goofiness and give Finn real advice when it actually matters.
That whiny, dramatic voice you hear every time LSP shows up on screen belongs to none other than Pendleton Ward himself. He also does a handful of other side characters like Shelby and the Snow Golem, but LSP is the one that stuck as his signature role in his own show.
Everything weird and colorful about the Land of Ooo exists because of a global nuclear exchange the show calls the Mushroom War, which happened roughly a thousand years before Finn and Jake ever met. It wiped out most of humanity, physically reshaped the planet, and somehow left behind a world of sentient candy people and elemental kingdoms in its place.
In the alternate Farmworld reality shown in "Finn the Human" and "Jake the Dog," Finn wishes the Lich never existed, and it rewrites history so that Simon Petrikov froze the mushroom bomb solid in midair before it could detonate, sacrificing his own life in the process. It's a rare glimpse at what Ooo could've looked like if the apocalypse had been stopped.
Keep your eyes peeled in the background of almost every single episode and you'll spot a tiny snail somewhere in the frame, usually waving right at the camera. It started as a silent running gag from the animators, but the show eventually gave it actual plot relevance when the Lich possesses it to escape the amber prison.
Ice King's crown wasn't made for him at all. The show eventually reveals it was forged way back in the Mesozoic Era by an ice elemental named Urgence Evergreen, meant to stop an evil version of the catalyst comet from wiping out life on Earth. Simon Petrikov just happened to be the poor guy who found it centuries later in a Scandinavian dockyard.
Before he was rambling about princesses and penguins, Ice King was a scholar named Simon Petrikov, engaged to a woman called Betty Grof. He found a strange crown on an expedition to Scandinavia, and wearing it slowly ate away at his memories and sanity until Simon disappeared entirely, leaving the deranged wizard fans grew up watching.
In the series finale, Betty finally manages to cure Simon by using his own crown against the cosmic being GOLB, but the wish comes at a cost. She ends up permanently fusing with GOLB herself, giving Simon back his humanity while she disappears from Ooo for good.
John DiMaggio doesn't just voice Jake the Dog, he's also the guy behind Bender in Futurama, and honestly you can hear a bit of Bender's swagger in Jake's delivery. The connection got a fun little nod when Finn and Jake popped up for a quick cameo in the Futurama episode "Leela and the Genestalk."
