Adventure Time: Stakes, also known simply as "Stakes", is an American animated television miniseries comprising eight episodes from the television show Adventure Time, created by Pendleton Ward. It aired as part of the show's seventh season from November 16, 2015 to November 19, 2015 on Cartoon Network. Adventure Time follows the adventures of Finn (voiced by Jeremy Shada), a human boy, and his best friend and adoptive brother Jake (voiced by John DiMaggio), a dog with magical powers to change shape, grow and shrink at will. In this limited event series, Princess Bubblegum (voiced by Hynden Walch) removes the vampiric essence from Marceline the Vampire Queen (voiced by Olivia Olson), which unleashes five recently resurrected vampires into The Land of Ooo. Marceline, Bubblegum, Finn, Jake, and Peppermint Butler (voiced by Steve Little) are forced to deal with the fallout.
The miniseries' story was developed by series creator Pendleton Ward, showrunner Adam Muto, head writer Kent Osborne, and staff writer Jack Pendarvis. The eight episodes were storyboarded by Ako Castuera, Jesse Moynihan, Muto, Hanna K. Nyström, Herpich, Steve Wolfhard, Seo Kim, Somvilay Xayaphone, Lyle Partridge, and Luke Pearson. Andres Salaff, Elizabeth Ito, and Muto handled supervising direction, and Sandra Lee served as art director. Former Adventure Time storyboard artist Rebecca Sugar returned briefly to the show to voice Marceline's mother and to contribute a song entitled "Everything Stays".
Stakes was a ratings success, and was met with mostly positive reviews, with Sugar's song in particular being met with critical applause. Conversely, a few commentators felt that the miniseries did not meet expectations. For his work on the Stakes finale, Herpich won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation at the 68th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards in 2016. Stakes was released on DVD on January 19, 2016.
Plot After losing her umbrella leaving her stuck in the shade of a tree in the desert, Marceline the Vampire Queen (voiced by Olivia Olson) approaches Princess Bubblegum (voiced by Hynden Walch) and asks her to cure her of her vampirism, as she no longer wants to be immortal. Bubblegum agrees and extracts the vampiric essence from Marceline's body. As Marceline recovers, the extracted essence gains sentience and escapes. Meanwhile, Finn (voiced by Jeremy Shada) and Jake (voiced by John DiMaggio) are called out to investigate livestock being attacked by a bloodsucking creature. Suspecting Marceline, they confront her, only to discover the extracted essence is behind the attacks. However, as Finn and Jake chase the vampiric essence, a mob of angry villagers capture Marceline and tie her to windmill, hoping that the rising sun will kill her. As the light hits her body, Marceline's life flashes before her eyes: Marceline first recalls a time when her mother (voiced by Rebecca Sugar) comforted her by singing a lullaby entitled "Everything Stays". Marceline then remembers Simon (voiced by Tom Kenny) leaving her before he is fully corrupted by the ice crown. She also remembers when she hunted vampires as a teenager and thereafter befriended a tribe of humans who survived the Mushroom War. Back in the present, the sunlight does not hurt Marceline, indicating that she has been cured.
Meanwhile, Jake encounters Marceline's freed vampiric essence, which has divided into five vampires whom Marceline had previously slain: the Fool (voiced by Ron Funches), the Empress (voiced by Rebecca Romijn), the Hierophant (voiced by Paul Williams), the Moon (voiced by Beau Billingslea), and the Vampire King himself (voiced by Billy Brown). The Vampire King's cohorts are each based on a different tarot card. As of a disagreeance of how to reestablish dominance, Hierophant goes to the forest, Empress goes to the Ice Kingdom to gather new troops, and Moon retreats to a marsh-like area. Witnessing this, Jake warns Finn and Marceline—the latter of whom recalls when she slew the Vampire King but was turned into a vampire in the process. Marceline tracks down and confronts the resurrected Vampire King, killing the Fool and reabsorbing his power of flight. However, before she can battle the Vampire King, he warns her that the Empress is headed for the Ice Kingdom. Fearing for the safety of the Ice King, Marceline gives chase, and with the help of Finn and Bubblegum, slays the Empress, reabsorbing her powers of invisibility. Finn, Jake, Marceline, and Bubblegum then encounter the shape-shifting Hierophant. When notified by Peppermint Butler (voiced by Steve Little) that the Hierophant cannot enter houses without permission, Jake shapeshifts into a house and the group takes shelter inside. The Hierophant manages to injure Marceline, but he is accidentally knocked into Jake and dies due to his entering a house uninvited. Marceline reabsorbs his shapeshifting powers but falls ill due to the Hierophant's wound. Princess Bubblegum takes Marceline to the Candy Kingdom to try to cure her. Meanwhile, Finn and Jake track down the Moon in hopes of using her powers to heal Marceline. Finn and Jake lure the Moon back to Marceline, who manages to reabsorb the vampire's healing power, thereby allowing her to recover from her injury.
Marceline and the group prepare for their final confrontation with the Vampire King. However, when he appears before them, he declares that he no longer wishes to be a vampire. The group reluctantly agrees to remove the King's vampiric essence. Bubblegum places the Vampire King in the same contraption that she used on Marceline, turning him into a relatively harmless lion. The vampiric essence, on the other hand, is placed in a bucket, which accidentally detonates and forms a new monstrosity: the Dark Cloud. This looming essence begins ambling towards the Candy Kingdom, causing Finn, Jake, and Bubblegum to go on the offensive. Marceline, however, loses the will to fight. The Ice King arrives and briefly talks to Marceline, instilling in her a sense of purpose; Marceline then realizes that it is her destiny to stop the Dark Cloud. Marceline flies into the Dark Cloud and, using her soul-sucking abilities, drains it from the inside out. However, she does so at the cost of once more becoming the Vampire Queen. Once the incident is over, Marceline comes to terms with her vampiric nature. The miniseries concludes with Marceline singing a rendition of "Everything Stays"; as she sings, the audience is presented with short sequences showing Ooo returning to normalcy.
Production
Stakes was announced in February 2015 alongside news of Long Live the Royals, a separate miniseries created by Sean Szeles, at an upfront regarding Cartoon Network's programming for the 2015 to 2016 television season. Writing for Cartoon Brew, Amid Amidi speculated that both were commissioned following the success of Over the Garden Wall, the network's first miniseries created by Patrick McHale (a former writer for Adventure Time). Michael Ouweleen, the chief marketing officer of the network, later said that "miniseries provide the network with more opportunities to try different creative textures and give new properties a chance to get on air." Despite being touted by some outlets as a "spin-off",E.g. Adventure Time showrunner Adam Muto later clarified that Stakes was considered part of the series' seventh season.
At the 2015 New York Comic Con, Muto revealed that the miniseries originated with ideas that were initially developed during the show's second season. He remarked, "There was this idea from season two about Marceline and ... how she got her powers to begin with. We kind of rolled with that and expanded that into eight episodes." In a 2020 interview, former series creative director and storyline writer Patrick McHale clarified what exactly this original idea had been:
I realized [sometime during the production of season two] that we'd never actually had Marceline and Ice King interact with each other in the same episode, and we'd also established that they were both 1000 years old. I thought that was meaningful, and so I started coming up with this whole elaborate backstory [explaining that] Marceline was the daughter of a demon and a human ... [and that roughly one thousand years prior to the start of the show] Marceline and Ice King were working together to save humanity [from vampires]. But Ice King was losing himself [to the ice crown], and it all landed on Marceline to fight off the vampires as the humans were escaping on an ark, set for some unknown shore. ... So in the final struggle, as a mutated horde of monsters and vampires come to kill the last remaining humans ... [Marceline] goes and fights the vampires with her demon powers so that the boat can leave. The humans make it, but Marceline is turned into a vampire. So she's stuck looking [like a teenager] forever, and Ice King is stuck being crazy ... and it's too heartbreaking for [Marceline] to ever even go near him, so she avoids him and lives in a cave ... Anyway, I pitched this whole huge elaborate thing to the writers room and they were like, "That's cool, Pat." But it was too much plot. Nobody was very excited about it.
Olson was not aware that the producers and writers were working on a Marceline-centric miniseries until the series' head writer, Kent Osborne, casually mentioned it to her in a conversation; when she learned of this, she reportedly cried because she was so excited. Due to the Marceline-centric nature of the miniseries, a new opening was created that features Olson singing the theme song over a bass guitar. This intro was storyboarded by Tom Herpich and was animated by Masaaki Yuasa's company Science SARU.
The miniseries' story was developed by head writer Kent Osborne, series creator Pendleton Ward, Jack Pendarvis, and Muto. The eight episodes were storyboarded by Ako Castuera, Jesse Moynihan, Muto, Hanna K. Nyström, Herpich, Steve Wolfhard, Seo Kim, Somvilay Xayaphone, Lyle Partridge, and Luke Pearson. Andres Salaff, Elizabeth Ito, and Muto served as the miniseries' supervising directors, and Sandra Lee served as art director. Notably, the miniseries saw the return of several artists who had previously left the series, like Castuera (a storyboard artist who had left the series after working on the fifth season finale "Billy's Bucket List"), and Rebecca Sugar (a storyboard artist and songwriter, who had left the series after working on the fifth-season episode "Simon & Marcy"). Castuera storyboarded the first, sixth, and seventh parts of Stakes alongside Moynihan, and Sugar wrote a new song for the miniseries entitled "Everything Stays" and voiced Marceline's mother.
In regards to the miniseries' cynosural song "Everything Stays", Nyström revealed that, during the storyboarding of the episode of the same name, she found herself unable to write a lullaby for the scene between Marceline and her mother. She relayed her issue to Muto, who contacted Sugar and asked if she would be willing to pen the song. Sugar agreed and based the song on an incident in which she lost a stuffed animal in a garden. A year later, she found it; the sun had bleached the exposed surfaces, but the underside was still the same. She explained, "[The stuffed animal] wasn't better, or worse, just different. It was the first time I realized that things will change no matter what, even if they're left alone, and stay completely still." Muto was excited to have Sugar return to work on the show, and noted at the 2015 Adventure Time San Diego Comic-Con panel that "because [Stakes] was a Marceline miniseries, it wouldn't really feel complete unless Rebecca Sugar wrote a song for it." At San Diego Comic-Con, Sugar and Olson performed the song live.