Adventure Time Episode “Simon and Marcy” Still Stands Out as Series’ Scariest After 13 Years

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Here’s a frosty hot take: the Ice King is one of the greatest anti-heroes in TV history. He belongs alongside Walter White and Tony Soprano. Adventure Time‘s princess-obsessed villain, also known as Simon Petrikov, is voiced by Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants. He’s funnier than those other guys, and he’s also more tragic and more intimidating than Tony and Walter combined.

Don’t believe me? Watch the greatest and scariest episode of Adventure Time from the show’s 10-year run: “Simon & Marcy.”

You could go into “Simon & Marcy” totally blind and come away a weepy mess. It’s season 5, episode 14, and it’s streaming on Hulu, Disney Plus, and HBO Max. To see what makes the story so good, though, we have to go back to the beginning.

The Ice King before Simon

The Ice King has been in Adventure Time from the start. He appears in the original viral animated short that launched the show, and he returns in the cartoon’s third official episode. For the first few seasons, his routine was simple. He hung out in his mountain lair with his penguin henchmen and kidnapped princesses with his icy powers. Finn and Jake, the series protagonists, kicked his butt. Then season 4 changed everything.

Something had always seemed a little off about the Ice King. In season 4, episode 25, “Remember Me,” we got our first clue why. The Ice King visits Marceline, the vampire queen, and asks for help writing a song to attract princesses. Marceline is frustrated that he doesn’t remember a shared past, one the audience doesn’t know about either. Then she calls him by his real name for the first time: Simon. That alone was a bombshell, but a year later Adventure Time dropped an even bigger one.

Simon & Marcy

Aside from a brief opening scene where the characters play a pickup game of basketball, “Simon & Marcy” is one big flashback. It’s set 996 years before the events of Adventure Time. The Mushroom War has just ended. That nuclear conflict turned the Earth we know into the radioactive fantasy land called Ooo. Two figures trek through an apocalyptic cityscape: a middle-aged man named Simon and a young girl named Marcy.

It’s unclear how they know each other. They appear to be the last two humans on Earth, or at least in this ruined city. The world is full of zombie-like green mutants with neon ooze pouring out of every orifice. Simon has one weapon against these “Oozers,” a magic crown fastened to his belt. When he puts it on, he can control ice and snow, but it also saps his sanity. Singing the Cheers song seems to keep him grounded, but only a little. In just 10 minutes, the episode manages to be scary, funny, and beautiful, sometimes all at once.

In an Entertainment Weekly list of their 14 favorite episodes, the Adventure Time creative team placed “Simon & Marcy” at number 7. They wrote that they pitched it to the network as The Road “except for kids.” Getting it approved took a lot of back-and-forth, but they felt it was worth it to make the Cheers theme even sadder.

That just about nails it. Adventure Time always hopped between genres. One week it was a fantasy adventure. Another might be an epic space opera or an existential stage play. So it’s no huge surprise that when the creators set out to tell a post-apocalyptic drama, they stuck the landing.

What is surprising is how important “Simon & Marcy” became to the larger Adventure Time mythos. It could have been a great one-off story that solved a mystery set up a season earlier. Instead, it grew into more stories about both the Ice King and Marceline. Those stories played out over nearly 300 episodes, plus a streaming spinoff that’s still running today.