Banana Guard Academy is a Adventure Time comic miniseries from 2014. It was written by the TV show scriptwriter Kent Osborne with Dylan Haggerty, and drawn by Mad Rupert.
In the story, Princess Bubblegum decides to open the Banana Guard up to non-Banana Candy Kingdom citizens, because she's angry that the Bananas are eating all of the turnips that she needs to help her to sleep. Yes, It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context. This outrages the Banana Captain, who decides that all of the non-Banana cadets must be encouraged to drop out by any means necessary. But Peppermint Butler's explorations in the Academy's basement will end up putting much more at risk than the ego of a racist fruit...
Banana Guard Academy has the following tropes:
- Alternate Timeline: Issue 5 takes place in two different time lines, one in which Princess Bubblegum fires the Banana Captain, and one in which she doesn't.
- A Day in the Limelight: For Tree Trunks, Mr. Cupcake, Peppermint Butler, and many far more obscure Candy Kingdom figures.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Various characters adopt a narration role in different issues, always annoying all the other characters.
- Call-Back: As opposed to the vague relationship to TV canon in most of the comics, this miniseries has the deaths of Lemongrab in "Lemonhope" and Root Beer Guy in "Something Big" take place during the story, and uses them as plot points.
- Continuity Nod:
- The Candy Nursery from "Goliad" reappears, and is still just as chaotic.
- Once again, the future version of Finn is the macho one-armed Cable lookalike first seen in his vision in "Mortal Folly".
- Cowboy Cop: Muto Bread really wants to be one.
- Deconstruction: Punch Bowl's backstory is a parody of Kool-Aid adverts that shows how annoying a party-obsessed bowl of punch would actually be.
- Fantastic Racism: The Bananas consider policing to be their fiefdom and refuse to allow their female members to date non-Bananas.
- Genre Shift: The last two issues shift from a Police Academy parody to a huge-stakes SF event that puts the whole of Ooo at risk.
- MookâFace Turn: The Captain's two aides end up siding with the cadets after they overhear that the Captain plans to fire them as well.
- The Neidermeyer: The Banana Guard Captain is incompetent, pompous and malicious.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Peppermint Butler breaks the timeline by being unable to restrain himself from showing emotion while questioning the oracle in the basement, and then accidentally provokes an invasion of evil extra-dimensional robots by talking philosophy while the timeline is unstable.
- Non-Mammal Mammaries: This miniseries depicts female bananas with breasts.
- Reset Button: The whole of the series ends up being erased from the timeline by Peppermint Butler, to prevent Ooo from being conquered by the robots.
- Robot War: Ooo ends up being conquered by evil robots in a Bad Future again, after the previous time it happened in the second arc of the main comic series.
- Sheltered Aristocrat: The Compulord is so pampered that making him sit on a chair with no cushions is a brutal enough torture to completely break him.
- Shout-Out: Princess Bubblegum's incredibly theatrical "YOU'RE FIRED!" is a parody of The Apprentice.
- Spirit Advisor: The spirit of Root Beer Guy is sent back from the afterlife to advise Peppermint Butler on how to heal the timeline.
- Take a Third Option: In the final stabilised time line at the end of issue 5, the Captain resigns instead of being sacked.
- Unishment: Ice King freezes the cadets into ice cubes after they tire of his annoying attempts to be a good host, but they find it relaxing.
- Whole-Plot Reference: To the original Police Academy.
- You Have Failed Me: The robot Compulord is so evil that he loses his temper with his minions and forces them all to kill themselves every ninety-three minutes precisely.
