Some of the Adult Swim’s beloved programming over the years played a role in bringing us the hit adult animated show Archer! While a lot of hardcore fans may not be surprised, I thought it’d be fun to talk about the rad pedigree of the creators of this great show! Let’s get back to the beginning…
I’ve been a huge fan of the weirdness of Cartoon Network since the early nineties when Turner Network Television (which we know as TNT) launched after the success of Turner Broadcasting System (TBS). Turner Broadcasting had acquired Hanna-Barbera Productions which contained an insane amount of animation under its roof that Turner could then use for it’s fledgling animation channel. While in the early years, it was essentially re-runs of all of those cartoons we grew up with, eventually they started allowing an afternoon to evening block of more interesting, adult-appealing programs. Enter Matt Thompson and Adam Reed in 1994. This was when High Noon Toons was conceived and with a pair of quite literal hand-puppets hosting the show, the weirdness of Cartoon Network was just being born.
With a lot of shenanigans on-set, Matt Thompson and Adam Reed were seen as obvious writing gold for the CN who, under ten years old, was still getting its feet off the ground. The duo was then tasked with a low-budget version of, as they put it, a ‘deconstructed‘ talk-show. Using Hanna-Barbera footage that Turner had access to, they set off with the inception and execution of Space Ghost Coast to Coast as showrunners and writers under Mike Lazzo and Khaki Jones. This was the first crucial test of creating new content with recycled, archival animation.
(Adult Swim)
Enter the intensely quirky and immediate fan-beloved Sealab 2021. Based on the original show Sealab 2020 about an underwater laboratory in the future, the show was from the 70’s and was so unpopular, it lasted only three months. Can you even imagine how bad a show has to be to only last three months? Since there was a good handful of shows to pull animation from and re-use the cells with new scripts and a low budget, Reed and Thompson debuted Sealab 2021 and kept Cartoon Network’s new Adult Swim block happily floating along. They were part of the group of creators who were beginning to shape a new direction from the channel’s evening programming and were quickly building a franchise…
(Adult Swim)
Thompson and Reed went on to work together not just on Sealab 2021 but also Frisky Dingo before they would eventually dive into the early inception of Archer. Frisky Dingo was produced by their company 70/30 Productions (a joke where Thompson said he’d do 70 percent of the production of their shows but only 30 percent writing, while Reed would do the absolute reverse). Eventually, Cartoon Network cancelled Frisky Dingo after two seasons and shuttered the spin-off they were working on called The Xtacles. Only two episodes of that show were ever produced and this was the jumping point for Reed and Thompson’s studio in which they worked under Cartoon Network, to close.
(FX Networks)
This wasn’t even remotely the last stop because in 2009, after a vacation in Spain to start dreaming up new concepts, Reed found himself contemplating how an International Super Spy like James Bond would be able to talk to women so easily. The women he found himself struggling to talk to, in his mind, would be absolutely nothing to a man like Archer – who he quickly began to develop. Taking inspiration from movies like James Bond and The Pink Panther as well as the show Arrested Development, it was bound to be a hit. This time, the nature of the show was so adult that it wasn’t the right fit for Adult Swim, with Cartoon Network being a children’s mainstay channel. Archer was pitched, written and housed at FX; meanwhile Floyd County Productions was born and Reed and Thompson took the helm for creating one of the biggest adult animation hits of the last decade.
