If you want to binge something without putting a dent in your busy Summer plans, Frisky Dingo, now streaming on Hulu, might be just the ticket for you. The show premiered in the then fledgling Adult Swim late-night programming block on Cartoon Network in 2006 and was Adam Reed and Matt Thompson’s follow-up to Sealab 2021, a send-up using stock footage from the environmentally conscious 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon Sealab 2020.
Unlike Sealab 2021, Frisky Dingo was a completely original creation that viciously poked fun at action hero and supervillain tropes. Also, unlike Sealab 2021, the show was serial in nature with each episode running approximately 11 minutes, effectively creating a viewing experience akin to a feature length movie for each season. In total, 25 episodes were produced across two seasons before Reed and Thompson’s 70/30 Productions company was shuttered in 2009. If you’re a fan of Reed and Thompson’s Archer on FX, Frisky Dingo shows the creators finding their comedic footing and developing their trademark animation style.
1. Killface is.
Opening episode one with a threatening soliloquy from the vaguely British-sounding supervillain, Killface, you’re unsure what you’re getting into with Frisky Dingo, but once Killface finishes quoting “Ozymandias,” taking a pregnant pause, and sipping from a bottled water, it starts to dawn on you that this plot is not on the level. What follows are a series of instantly quotable lines from the pigmentless and red-eyed mountain of a specimen as he grapples with the difficulties of marketing his plan for global destruction. Trigger-happy and menacing, Killface does not suffer fools, or USC Film School grads, and his alienness juxtaposed with his alternating familiarity with the subtleties of American culture and cluelessness about it’s more pedestrian realities is the source of most of the villain’s punchlines. “Shelley was a man, you Philistine!” He’s frequently confounded by the unapologetic banality of humans. Naturally, only the most superficial of adversaries will do.
2. Weapon X
Introduced in the second episode, Awesome-X’s alter ego, Xander Crews, is what would have happened if Bruce Wayne had taken the more irresponsible trust fund route and just fought crime for kicks. His parents were even murdered when he was at a young age, but Crews seems more interested in playing on that fact for sympathy rather than using it as motivation for his crime fighting. He’s petulant, stunted, and cavalier, and his interactions with supporting characters exhibit the detachment of someone with much more money than sense. He is the chief executive in his family’s company, where he avoids work at all costs, and his tryst with a prostitute, to whom he unwittingly reveals his secret identity to avoiding getting caught by his girlfriend (more on her next week), costs his company $5 million in hush money. The ridiculous error in judgment serves as the basis for the conflict that drives the narrative of season one. To recoup the money, Crews converts his factories to produce Awesome-X toys, but he needs an arch nemesis since he has defeated the last of the city’s supervillains. Enter Killface. Actually, enter a failed attempt at genetically engineering a new foe (more on him next week too) and then enter Killface. It’s easy to see how Crews might have been the template for Reed and Thompson’s Sterling Archer as his arrested development is the cornerstone of Crews’s character.
3. Welcome To You Are “Doom”
“Is this some sort of ironic doom?” For a series that depends so heavily on dumb bro and decidedly non-PC humor, Frisky Dingo is incredibly smart. After Killface settles on “the dry hump of marketing strategies” and sends out one million postcards (with a likely response rate of 1%) on his shoestring promotional budget of $250,000 to alert humanity of his plan for global destruction with two egregious grammatical errors, a supporting character says he should have sent a postcard to Strunk and White. Once the postcard is picked up, ridiculed, and dismissed by a morning show that strongly resembles Live! with Regis and Kelly in episode three, Killface’s appearance on the show brings his disdain for the banality of American media to the forefront. You’ll never see Scion vehicles (or jump rope teams) the same way again.
4. Stan the Man
Think of Stan as Rutger Hauer’s William Earle character from Batman Begins. He’s Xander Crews’s business mentor, and a stern but haplessly ineffectual tonic for Crews’s juvenile behavior. On the surface, he appears to be the only one concerned with the legacy of Crews’s company, but once the company’s board is revealed to be a table full of Stan clones in episode two, you know something’s not quite right about this dude either. While he’s the antithesis of Crews, old and stodgy versus young and reckless, he clearly has designs on running the company himself if only Crews would let go of his dreams of producing Awesome-X and Killface action figures. He’s at the end of his rope babysitting Crews, and he’s likely not going to take it any longer.
5. The Xtacles Mark the Spot
The unsung heroes of these first three episodes, and in fact the entire series run, are Awesome X’s crime-fighting support cyborgs. Their repartee provides the most quotable lines in an insanely quotable show. We don’t get much of them in these opening episodes, but their responses to the threat of future unemployment are priceless. “Are we at least eligible for Cobra?” Look for them to play a larger role in the rest of the series, but until then, their interchangeable appearance paired with names like Kevin, Mike, and Fat Mike hint at the brand of humor to come.
Join us next week as the plot of Frisky Dingo season one really starts to take shape in episodes four through six.
