"Fionna and Cake": Complex adult-oriented sequel to "Adventure Time," with two out gay couples and lot of back story and backsides

 

Link to the n*de photos

The Cartoon Network series Adventure Time (2010-18) sent 12-16 year old human Finn (Jeremy Shada, left) and his magical dog companion Jake on adventures in the medieval-style world of Ooo (occupied by sentient candy, slime, and fire beings, plus a few animals and humanoids).  Eventually we learn that this is a post-apocalyptic world where things went wrong during the Mushroom Wars 1,000 years ago.  It gets more complex and much more sinister, with back story after back story, with Lovecraftian cosmic beings pulling the strings of the world, only to discover that there are darker gods changing reality on a whim. 

  All you really need to know about is the only same-sex romance in the series, between the Bubblegum Princess  --really an Elemental, one of the four substances that created the universe and all life, but presenting as a 16-year old girl -- and Marceline, a 1000 year old teenage vampire whose mentor Simon Petrikov put on a magical crown and became the insane Ice King -- got all that?  They become girlfriends in the last scene of the last episode -- typical, no open gay characters until series fade-out. 

Fionna and Cake were a gender-swapping Finn and Jake in the Ice King's fan fiction. Then an omnipotent being decided to bring them to life, and after some adventures, remove their magical powers and memories and place them in a pocket universe designed to look like a 21st century city.  But things are a little off-- generic names like "City Park", backgrounds a little smudged, everything tastes like cardboard, there is nothing but elevator music on the radio, nothing on tv but reruns of Cheers and Friends.  Cake is non-sentient, and Fionna is so discouraged that she keeps getting fired from dead-end jobs.

Episode 1.6, "The Winter King," features a meeting between the male counterparts of the Bubblegum Princess and Marceline: Gary Prince (Andrew Rannells, left), a baker who has discovered a way to give food taste; and Marshall Lee (Donald Glover, below), an aspiring musician who has discovered how to use a guitar. They kiss in Episode 1.7.

Rannells backside on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Both voice actors are gay in real life.

One day Fionna and Cake find their way to Ooo, where they meet Finn from the original series, now middle aged, and the Ice King, now reverted to human form as Simon Petrikov.  After many adventures on a variety of worlds, they decide that they like their original pocket-universe, and return in time to save their city from destruction under a godlike being named Scarab.  End of Season 1.

We hear all of this in the opening sequence of Season 2: it is told in story form to Simon (the former Ice King) and girlfriends Marcelline and the Bubblegum Princess by a little girl whose back story on the fan wiki is too complex to mention. So maybe the Fionna-Cake universe is still a fan fiction?  

 I think we're ready for a review of Episode 2.1.

Scene 1: Fionna awakens, relishing her new human life, and sets out with Cake into the still-recovering City.  She helps out at the places where she was fired previously, except for the tour bus ("on your left you'll see more destruction"), where tour guide Queenie (a gender-reversed, child version of the evil King of Ooo) calls her a "deadbeat."

Scene 2: Next the Candy Supply Store, where the shape-shifting, still-sentient Cake transforms into a buxom woman so she can flirt with the owner.  Fionna grabs the last bag of cocoa powder, but the evil Lady Cutter steals it and calls her a loser. They fight.

Scene 3: On the street, Fionna gets a call from Simon Petrikov, back in Ooo, who is living with the Bubblegum Princess and Marceline.  He'll start teaching magical arts at the university tomorrow. Meanwhile, Cake destroys all of the posters advertising DJ Flame, Fionna's ex (the gender-swapped version of the Flame Princess, Finn's ex).

Scene 4: In a forest on Ooo, a lion steals an orange from a tomb, and the Huntress Wizard, the middle-aged Finn's estranged girlfriend, gives chase.  She finds it in a cave with a cow and a duck, squeezing the juice into the mouth of the  nearly-unconscious Finn.  He is dying.   

More after the break

Deli Boys, Episode 2.1: The guys are back, with more wacky drug deals, Andrew Rannells as a squeaky-clean gay DA, and Pakistani d*cks

  

Link to the n*de dudes

The second season of Deli Boys just dropped on Hulu.  I reviewed an episode of the first season, and gave it a B: not enough beefcake, but some gay characters, including Brian George, whom men of a certain age remember as Babu on Seinfeld, as the season's Big Bad.

The Premise: After their father is murdered, Pakistani-American brothers, the hardworking Mir (Asif Ali) and the screw-up Raj (Saagar Shaikh), inherit his deli and DarCo, a company that produces and sells achar (a pickle relish).   Soon they discover that they are actually transporting cocaine to drug dealers in the West Philly market.   Two of Dad's consiglieres, Aunt Lucky and Ahmad (Brian George), show them the ropes of their new business -- until Ahmad, betrays them in a ploy to gain control.  Oh, and he's the one who murdered their Dad.

Scene 1:  DarCo is now the Number #1 cocaine distributor in Philly, grossing $2 million per quarter, but with fame comes notoriety: Every criminal is trying to "jack their sh*t"  So the guys and Aunt Lucky go to Max Sugar's casino to ask for his help in laundering their drug money.

Max (Fred Armisen) resists the idea... whoops, he catches someone cheating with weighted dice, so he goes down to the floor and forces the guy to eat them.  Dude is dangerous!

Back to business: he is extremely attracted to Aunt Lucky, and agrees to discuss the matter further, over dinner tonight.

Left: Not Fred Armisen.

Scene 2: DA Andrew Chadwater (gay actor Andrew Rannells) is running for mayor on a platform of cracking down on "dealers, sickos, and crooks," with the campaign slogan "Say 'heck, no' to drugs."  Sounds like Nancy Regan's "Just Say No" campaign in the 1980s. 

At headquarters, he gets the intel on the latest fad, where you mix cocaine with ices.  His assistant points out that his ex-husband was a cocaine addict, so he has a personal stake in the issue.

"We're not talking about Craig" Chadwater exclaims.  "Did he call?"

"No."

More after the break

Lewis Cornay: Actor/singer meets Doctor Who and a Bear, has Daddy issues, stands on his head. With n*de Mormons and History Boys

  

Link to the n*de dudes

I wasn't happy with the Doctor Who 2023 series, on Disney Plus,  when they made the time-and-space jumping Time Lord gay for a season, then had him fall in love with his new companion, Belinda. Not only queerbaiting, but breaking 60 years of tradition: the Doctor never dates his companions.   

But I liked some of the cute guest stars, such as Lenny Rush as time-travel machine building Morris Gibbons (Episodes 1.7 and 1.8).

Samuel Sherpa-Moore as Tenzing Norgay, one of the men who reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953 (The Season 1 Christmas special).

And Lewis Cornay as Logan Cheever, a cook in a diner in 1952 Miami (Episode 2.2).   He serves the Doctor and Belinda even though it's a "white only" diner in the Jim Crow era, and fills in the back story about people who mysteriously vanished in the chained-up theater across the street. 

When the all-powerful being trapped inside is finally defeated and the moviegoers released, he greets Tommy (Cassius Hackforth).  In my head canon, they're boyfriends.

Lewis has only three other acting credits listed on the IMDB, so I'm guessing he's new to show business:

The short A Bear Remembers (2025): A boy (Lewis) seeks out a wise, elderly bear (Ciaran Hinds, d*ck on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends), who remembers.

John & Jen (2021): Broadcast of a two person play.  Jen (Rachel Tucker) and her little brother  (Lewis) grow up in the 1950s, then drift apart. She becomes a hippie, and he goes to Vietnam, where he is killed.  Years later, she names her son (Lewis) after him. 

Wait -- Lewis and Rachel performed the original play at the Southwark Playhouse, London, in 2021.

The music video Silent Night (2018), sung by Kerry Mucklowe from the BBC's This Country, joined by the cast of Just So.

Just So is a musical based on Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling.  Lewis starred as the Elephant Child, the focus character, at the Barn Theater (Cirencester, west of Oxford), in 2018. 

Doctor Who may be Lewis's first tv role, but I gather that he has had an eventful career in the theater. 

There are several biographies in the promotional materials for his various plays.  He was born around 1995, and started his career with  Mary Poppins (2005), The Sound of Music (2008), and The King and I (2009), in prestigious sounding venues: The Prince Edward Theater, The London Palladium, Prince Albert Hall.   

He received a B.A. in Musical Theater (2017) from the Guildford School of Acting in Guildford, Surrey, about 25 miles from London, and went to work in musical theater.  His first role as a graduate was in Paw Patrol Live: Race to the Rescue (three shows a day, 2017).  Then came:

The Book of Mormon (2020): Lewis plays Elder Cross, one of the Mormon missionaries awaiting an assignment in the opening song, "Two by Two."  Elder Price (Andrew Rannells in the original Broadway production) asks him where he'd like to go, and he says "my favorite place in the world."  It ends up being Japan. 

Rannells' d*ck on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends.

She Loves Me (2022): Like You've Got Mail, but in 1961 Budapest, and with penpals instead of email. Lewis plays Arpad, a teenage delivery boy whose B Plot involves a gay-subtext buddy bond with shop owner Maraczek.  I don't know why he is sitting on Maraczek's bed in this shot.

Spongebob: The Musical (2023).  Spongebob.

Whistle Down the Wind (2022): A girl named Swallow thinks that an escaped convict is Jesus.  Lewis plays Amos, a teenage boy who is dangling two girlfriends at the same time.

More after the break.  .

Peter Scolari: Wacky inventor, gay dad, Tom Hanks' bosom buddy, icon of my childhood.

 

Link to the n*ude photos.

It's sad when you discover that one of the icons of your childhood has died.  Sadder when you discover that he died in 2021.  

Peter Scolari was short, blond, muscular, handsome -- perfect.  Born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1955, his tv career began in 1978, with some guest spots and a starring role in the short-lived Goodtime Girls, with such future stars as Annie Potts, Scott Baio, and Adrian Zmed.  It was set during World War II, so the "good time" was just a gushy tagline, like the tv shows Happy Days and..um..Good Times.

In 1980, Peter hit television fame with Bosom Buddies, pitched to the network as a "witty Billy Wilder-style buddy comedy, like Some Like It Hot."  The network only heard Some Like it Hot, and put the buddies, Peter and then-unknown Tom Hanks, in drag. They explain in the intro that it's just so they can live in an all-female residential hotel; they're heterosexual, so "it's all perfectly normal."

In the second season, they minimized the "they're guys in dresses, har har!" jokes to concentrate on the buddy-bonding.  The two became lifelong friends off-camera, too. Tom Hanks states that they were "connected at the molecular level."  Today we would call it a bromance.

 The theme song, Billy Joel's "This is My Life," was an anthem for all of the gay boys of the 1980s who fled homophobic small towns for the freedom of West Hollywood or New York:

I  don't need you to worry for me, cause I'm all right, 

I don't want you to tell me it's time to come home. 

I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life. 

Go ahead with your own life, and leave me alone.

Next came episodes of Steambath, which was Loveboat at the baths, with no gay characters; Finder of Lost Loves, which was Loveboat with private detectives, with no gay characters; and Love Boat.

The next tv show I saw Peter in was Newhart (1984- 90), with Bob Newhart as the proprietor of a rustic New England bed-and-breakfast, later the host of a tv show, Vermont Today. Peter played his producer, Michael Harris, who falls in love with heiress-turned-maid Stephanie.  No beefcake -- in an interview, Peter said that he never takes his shirt off because Michael "doesn't have biceps like this"; no gay characters, and it ends horribly, when the whole series turns out to be the dream of the psychiatrist Bob Newhart in his old show. 

Still, as it bounced around the schedule with Designing Women and Kate and Allie, it provided some glimpses of gay potential, like the three buddy-bonding brothers, Larry, Darryl, and Darryl.

I didn't see much of Peter after Newhart. I was living in West Hollywood, then New York, and not interacting much in the Straight World.  He had some guest spots on Empty Nest and Burke's Law,  voiced Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain, and had a starring role in Dweebs, another short-lived series about computer nerds.  Future queer-friendly comedian Kathy Griffin also appeared.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Series sounds awful, but it won two Emmies, a review calls it "the best-written kids' show on television," and it lasted for 68 episodes. Peter played the guy who shrinks kids, and Thomas Dekker, who would grow up to have a chest, played the kid who gets shrunk. 

The full post, with n*de photos, is on RG Beefcake and Bonding

"Black Monday": Downlow financier, closeted Congressman, and a photocopied dick in the homophobic 1980s

  

  Link to the NSFW review

Black Monday, October 17, 1987, is named after a stock market crash that resulted in a drop of 22.6% in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and $500 billion in losses in the U.S., 1.7 trillion dollars worldwide.  I didn't hear anything about it at the time: in West Hollywood we didn't concern ourselves with such trivial matters as finances.  But apparently in the straight world, it was a big deal.  

I still find the world of finance immensely boring, but I happened to notice that an episode of the 2019-22 Black Monday tv series showed Andrew Rannells having sex with a guy -- the scene I used as an illustration for my Gideon-Keefe fan fiction -- so I checked out Episode 2.4, "Fore."

Scene 1: Bosses Dawn, a middle aged black woman, and Blair (Andrew Rannells) , a swishy white man, show horndogs Wayne and Yassir(Horatio Sanz, Yassir X) a photocopy of an enormous penis. They've received an anonymous sexual harassment complaint.  Blair yells at them: "The women in the office don't want to look at that, and neither do I."  

And this is a bad time: Congress is about to pass deregulation, so we'll be getting generational wealth. You'll be able to set up your kids' kids' kids If Amerasavings gets wwind of this,.... Ugh, economics and politics.  Let's get some zombies up in here.

The guys protest that it wasn't them, but they are punished by being placed in the "Rubber Room" for a month, and they have to apologize to every woman in the office.  Then Blair leaves --- he has to go play golf with Congressman Roger  (Tuc Watkins, Andrew's real-life boyfriend) to ensure that he will vote for deregulation.  Dawn can't come, because she's not a white man. Wait -- he calls her "babe."  Are they romantic partners, too?

Scene 2:  The horndogs figure that they've been framed, targeted by "some lying bitch" for being the last old-school "women should enjoy getting their butts grabbed" horndogs in the office. Their plan: find out who issued the bogus complaint, apologize, and then "get revenge." 

Scene 3: Blair goes back to his apartment -- still under construction -- and starts making out with his boyfriend -- Congressman Roger!  

Meanwhile, a lady bursts into the office to yell at the "home-wrecking harlot" who's destroying their marriage.  She wasn't expecting a middle aged black lady: "Blair" sounds more like a young, giggly blond, like the girl from Facts of Life.   

"This is a mixup from the tits up," Dawn assures her.  Blair is a man.  He goes golfing with Congressman Roger to push for his deregulation vote.  A downlow romance!  Neither of the wives know!

"But they golf all the time, in Palm Springs, San Francisco, Fire Island,,," Gay meccas, har-har.

"Standard business trips." A perfect example of heteronormativity: gay men cannot exist, so everything must have a heterosexual explanation.

The Wife, Corky, insists: "Blair and my husband are having sex...with other women, and using each other as alibis."  Come on, no one is that stupid!

Dawn calls Blair to prove that he is playing golf -- just as he is about to.... The wives will be driving out to the country club to meet them on the golf course.  "um...what hole are you in?"  Har-har.

Uh-oh, Blair knows nothing about golf, and it's too late to learn!

Scene 4: The horndogs try to play "good cop/bad cop" while interrogating the women. Except Yassir thinks they're supposed to both be bad cops, because "all cops are bad."

Scene 5: On the way to the country club, Wife Corky complains that Congressman Roger has betrayed her with a "nancy."  Dawn insists that Blair isn't gay, but Wife  Corky meant "a Nancy Reagan," who stole future President Reagan away from his first wife, Jane Wyman. Har-har.

She does happen to be the daughter of a Jerry Falwell-like homophobic televangelist.  He sells a special cologne that can "spray the gay away."

More after the break

Andrew Rannells and Adam Devine: Can a straight guy and a gay guy find true love? With bonus bulge, butt, and dick pics

  

Looking for Adam Devine content, I came across a Reddit post stating that he and Andrew Rannells were bromantic partners.  Plus a 2015 interview in PopSuger proclaiming that they are "Your New Favorite Comedy Duo," 

First question: wasn't Adam already involved with Zac Efron?  How many men can a straight guy be in love with, and still identify as straight?

Second question: Andrew is gay, and has a boyfriend.  Can a straight guy and a gay guy have a bromance?  Regular platonic friendship, sure, but wouldn't an intense, passionate, physical relationship get weird?  Surely the "we might be having gay sex, har har" jokes would be ruined if one of the guys was really having gay sex. 

Third question: In what way were they a comedy duo?  The PopSugar interview was about them starring together in The Intern (2015), featuring Robert DeNiro as an oldster who becomes a "senior intern" at an online women's clothing company.  Andrew plays Cameron, the Vice President, who pitches the senior intern idea, and Adam plays Josh, an employee whom DeNiro helps with his (heterosexual) love life.  They don't interact.

They also appeared together in Why Him (2015), known as The Boyfriend in French.  Andrew plays Blaine Pederman, owner of an online greeting company (like greeting cards without the stamps), one of the guys hanging out with app billionaire and gay sex aficionado Tyson Modell (Adam); but they barely interact.  Tyson spends more time falling in love with Scotty Fleming, son of the focus character.

Extensive research has yielded no evidence that Adam and Andrew had an off-screen frienddship.  I think it was just an advertising stunt that some Reddit-ers took seriously.

Oh, well, at least it gives me an excuse to post some nude pics of the guys on Righteous Gemstones Beefcake and Boyfriends.

See also: My review of Why Him?