The Great Mushroom War | Explaining Adventure Time

Adventure Time is a silly, strange, and sometimes straight up stupid show. But underneath all the silliness lies a deep, dark story filled with war and magic and other strange things. Adventure Time is an awesome show. I’m a huge fan of it and I suggest you experience this odd story they’re telling before reading the rest of this. It’s best to see it that way.

I’m going to try my hardest to piece together and explain as much as I can about The Great Mushroom War for those of you who have seen the show and don’t really understand, or just wanna talk about it. I plan on making more of these for specific characters, but to understand them, we need to go back as far as we can.

When The Great Mushroom War started is never explicitly said in the show, but people have guessed it at least had to have happened after the 1980s. Yes, the Land of Ooo is the future of Earth (at least in an alternate universe). TV shows’ theme songs from the early ’80s have been mentioned in Adventure Time; that’s why people speculate the war took place not long after. How would Simon know about Cheers if it happened in the early 20th century?

Whoever was fighting in The Great Mushroom War isn’t clear, but it was obviously World War III. Someone made a nuclear bomb. A bomb that may have gotten its power from a comet (not sure). A bomb that may or may not be responsible for the big whole in the Earth… I personally think the comet is responsible for that one, but who knows? Could’ve been both the comet and bomb!

Anyway. When this bomb was dropped, green ooze came out of it. This bomb/comet is why we have the Lich. If you’ve seen the episodes “Finn the human” and “Jake the dog” where Finn wishes the Lich never existed, you’ll remember that when the bomb goes off, the Lich comes out. Maybe this was part of someone’s plan for the war. Crazy. But think about it! The Lich seems to have a desire to kill and destroy, like a bomb would if it had a consciousness.

Another thing you may have noticed in those episodes was the massive, green mushroom cloud created by the bomb/whatever the Lich is. This is what the war was named after, years later. The effects of this bomb and it’s radiation spread all over Earth. Soon, inanimate objects started to come to life. But, obviously, not all humans were killed by WWIII. There was a group led by Two Bread Tom that sailed away to another continent to be safe. But that’s a whole other part of the story.

I think it was in the episode “Simon and Marcy” where we see the remains of a city, destroyed and overrun with strange, gooey monsters (aftereffects of the bomb’s radiatio- wait. I just thought of something. Maybe those green monsters weren’t just the bomb residue come to life, but people who were touched by it! And that’s why they were all in the city… Okay. Ew. See how dark this show is?!) I remember seeing a label on something in the car Marcy was hiding in. The label hints at where Simon and Marcy were on Earth – Ooo, now – at this point in their surviving the apocalypse journey. But, yet again, that’s a different part of the story!

Years and years of the no-longer-inanimate-objects evolving eventually led to places like the Candy Kingdom. And all the princesses, their people, and basically anything else with a face in the renamed planet of Ooo. Where did that name come from anyway? Maybe that was the first thing all the new species could say.

In “The vault” we get a good look at some of the remaining damage of the bomb. Princess Bubblegum is trying to clean up her kingdom. There’s a lot of toxic waste surrounding the castle. I’m pretty sure the Candy Kingdom was built on top of a lot of this toxic waste, which might be how Bubblegum created all the Candy people.

So by the time we meet Finn and Jake and all the rest, quite a while after seeing Shoko fall into the toxic waste in “The Vault”, I’m guessing it’s been hundreds of years after the war.

Oh yeah. And the Lich was kind of important. That’ll be a separate post.

Feel free to send me recommendations on anything you think I’d like to watch/read/talk about.

Also I'm not caught up in this show at all so if anything is wrong, that's probably why. No spoilers, please!