Three cartoons from the same cult corner of the shelf, each with a world worth explaining. Aku is the shape-shifting demon of Samurai Jack, who throws a samurai prince into a future he rules. Nowhere is the empty corner of Kansas where Courage the Cowardly Dog guards his owners from a new horror every week. The Land of Ooo is the strange, sweet world of Adventure Time, built on the ruins of ours a thousand years after the Mushroom War.
Each show has its own shelf: Samurai Jack, Courage the Cowardly Dog and Adventure Time. Spoilers for all three endings below.
Aku, the master of darkness
Aku is a demon who can take any shape he likes. The show gives him an origin: a vast black mass of evil in space, burned away by three gods, Odin, Ra and Rama, except for one fragment that fell to Earth and grew into an evil forest. When Jack's father, the Emperor, shot a magic arrow into its heart, the mass took shape and called itself Aku.
The Emperor defeated him with a sword the gods forged from the Emperor's own goodness, and sealed him away. Years later Aku broke free and took the empire. The young prince was sent abroad to train with masters around the world, came home with his father's sword, and faced Aku. Before Jack could land the final blow, Aku tore open a portal in time and threw him into the far future, where Aku's evil is law.
That future is a world of robots, aliens and neon cities, where the first people Jack meets give him his name. The sword is the only weapon on Earth that can harm Aku, which is why the show keeps coming back to the same place: Jack looking for a way home, and Aku sending killers to stop him. Katana Duel puts the two of them face to face.
The fifth season and the ending
The first four seasons ran from 2001 to 2004 without an ending. A fifth and final season, in 2017, picks up fifty years later. Time travel has stopped Jack ageing, but he has lost his sword, no time portal is left, and Jack is haunted by the people he failed to save.
Aku's worshippers raise seven sisters, the Daughters of Aku, to kill him. Jack survives them; the last, Ashi, learns the truth about Aku and joins him, and the two fall in love. She is also, it turns out, Aku's own daughter, and that gives her the power to open a portal in time.
She takes Jack back to the moment he was thrown into the future, and he destroys Aku at last. But with no Aku in the future, there is no Ashi: she fades away on their wedding day. The last scene is Jack alone in a forest, watching a ladybird, the creature that first made Ashi doubt Aku, before he lets it fly away. He got back, and it cost him everything he found on the way.
Courage and the farmhouse in Nowhere
Courage is a small pink dog who lives on a lonely farm in Nowhere, Kansas, with Muriel Bagge, a kind old Scotswoman who adores him, and her husband Eustace, a mean old farmer who calls him a stupid dog. Nowhere really is the town's name.
The show, which ran from 1999 to 2002, gives every episode the same shape: something terrible arrives, a ghost, a curse, a monster or a polite stranger with bad intentions, and only Courage sees it. He is frightened of everything and screams at most of it, but he never leaves Muriel to face it alone. That is the joke and the point of the title. Late in the series, the show reveals his past: as a puppy, he lost his parents to a cruel vet who sent them into space, and Muriel found him alone and took him in.
King Ramses, Freaky Fred and the monster of the week
King Ramses is the ghost of an Egyptian pharaoh. Grave robbers steal a slab from his tomb and hide it on the farm; Courage finds it, and Eustace, told it is worth a fortune, refuses to give it back. Ramses brings three curses, a flood, a blast of terrible music and a plague of locusts, and his demand, "Return the slab", is one of the show's best-known lines. Eustace's greed costs him dearly by the end.
Freaky Fred is Muriel's nephew, a barber with an unsettling smile and an urge to shave things, who narrates his own visit and keeps calling himself naughty. He ends up locked in the bathroom with Courage and his electric shaver.
On the shelf
The Land of Ooo and the Mushroom War
Adventure Time (2010 to 2018) follows Finn, a human boy, and Jake, his dog and brother, who can stretch and reshape his body, through the Land of Ooo, with BMO, a living games console, at home. At first Ooo looks like a fairy tale, with a Candy Kingdom ruled by Princess Bubblegum. Slowly the show lets you see the ruins underneath.
Ooo is Earth, a thousand years after the Great Mushroom War, a war fought with bombs that wiped out most of humanity and changed the world. Magic and strange new peoples came back in its wake, and one of the show's great villains, the Lich, an ancient evil, was woken by one of the bombs. Finn spends years believing he may be the last human, and the series keeps answering that question in pieces. Adventure has Finn, Jake and BMO together.
The Ice King and Marceline
The Ice King starts as a joke: a lonely old wizard with a magic crown, a penguin called Gunter and a habit of kidnapping princesses. Then the show tells you who he was. Simon Petrikov was a human antiquarian before the war who put on an enchanted crown. It gave him power over ice and slowly took his mind, and with it his fiancée, Betty.
Just after the bombs fell, Simon found a little girl alone in the ruins and looked after her while the crown worked on him. She was Marceline. Simon left her before he could hurt her, and forgot her.
Marceline is half-demon, the daughter of Hunson Abadeer, ruler of a hellish realm called the Nightosphere, and more than a thousand years old. She became a vampire later in life, and she plays a bass shaped like an axe. In the finale, Simon is finally freed from the crown and himself again.
On the shelf
On the back of a tee
Aku and Jack are on the Samurai Jack shelf, the Bagge farm and its visitors on the Courage shelf, and Ooo on the Adventure Time shelf, all drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why they work on the back: all three shows are drawn in bold, simple shapes and flat colour, Aku's black and flame, Courage's pink against an empty sky, the Ice King's blue, and shapes like that hold up across a room.
Read next: Mystery Inc. and the men in masks: Scooby-Doo explained (monsters of the week, but with masks) and The four nations, bending and the Avatar State explained.
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