“Perfect Pussy Time / Come on, grab your friends / We’ll go to Per-fect Pussy lands.”

I recently had the chance to talk to Ray McAndrew of the Syracuse punk band Perfect Pussy about Cartoon Network’s punk cartoon Adventure Time. We barely scratched the surface of the incredible, magical, multi-layered animated series — which just finished its sixth season — but was a lot of fun to try. Let’s go!

KELLY: When did you get into Adventure Time?
RAY: I think during the second season. My brother is an illustrator and knows the creator/has friends working on the show, so that’s how I got into it.
KELLY: Oh, that’s great! Have you ever gotten the chance to talk to them about the show?
RAY: A little bit, this was when my brother was living on the west coast and we visited the Cartoon Network offices to see his friends. Pen Ward showed us an unaired episode starring the Magic Man that was still in production which was pretty cool. Also their break room had a huge sign that said LUNCH TIME in the style of the Adventure Time opening title, i thought that was funny.
KELLY: Hahah, wow. Well. You definitely have a closer relationship to your chosen television show than any musician I’ve talked to about a television show.
RAY: Hahaha, yeah I’m pretty lucky. It’s all because of my brother though.
KELLY: Do you have a favorite Adventure Time episode?
RAY: Its hard to pick…but I think any of the episodes involving the Ice King’s background with Marceline are so touching and sad.
KELLY: Yes — I agree, those are great. Adventure Time succeeds, I think, at feeling really genuine and heartbreaking more often than most shows, cartoon or not, on TV now.
RAY: Definitely. There were some recent episodes where Finn meets his dad, who turns out to be awful, and then loses an arm, and it’s so sad.
KELLY: Oh god, yeah.

RAY: There are a series of episodes for that plot that are great. I love when they do mini plots that span over the course of a few episodes.
KELLY: I love that too.
RAY: It’s such a good way to keep viewers because it doesn’t get deep enough to the point where you have to watch from the beginning of the show to understand everything going on, but it keeps the audience invested in the characters back stories.
KELLY: How do you feel about the Fionna and Cake episodes?
RAY: My brother’s friend actually created that! Natasha Allegri who works for the show did drawings of Fionna and Cake and then posted them on her tumblr. They got so many reblogs and likes that they decided to make it into a few episodes.
KELLY: Oh wow! I had no idea that that was the origin.
RAY: It’s such a cool idea, I don’t know of any other television show that’s done that
KELLY: I don’t either! It makes sense that it would only be Adventure Time.

KELLY: Do you have any character whose story you like to follow particularly?
RAY: Definitely, Lemongrab.
KELLY: Hahah, yes!
RAY: I was going to say Gunter at first but I had to look at a list of characters to make sure i wasn’t forgetting anyone. Lemongrab doesn’t have the best stories ever, but he is just the perfect character
KELLY: Do you have a favorite Lemongrab scene?
RAY: I think this is my favorite Lemongrab moment:

RAY: Or this one.
KELLY: Great choices.
RAY: Also BMO is amazing.
KELLY: Yes. I think the first episode, or one of the first episodes, I saw was when Finn and Jake tricked BMO into letting them enter a game for real inside of him. It was VERY intense, I remember.
RAY: Hahaha oh yeah, I think the monsters in the game came out of BMO as well and then they had to fight them in real life.
KELLY: Right! Hahah, and all the monsters wanted to do was to see the sun and then kill BMO for imprisoning them. INTENSE. Do you have a fave BMO episode or moment?
RAY: I don’t know if I can think of a specific moment off the top of my head, but the best BMO episode is when BMO gets lost and meets the bubble and they eventually fall in love, and then at the end of the episode Jake pops it.
KELLY: Another intense episode.
RAY: That’s actually the first episode where they refer to BMO as a “he,” and I think it was strictly for the sake of the relationship between BMO and the bubble because every other episode they don’t assign a gender to BMO. (The bubble was voiced by a guy.)
KELLY: Man, what a great show.

//

Perfect Pussy’s debut album Say Yes To Love is out now on Captured Tracks.