Frisky Dingo is currently available on Adult Swim’s official site.
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Frisky Dingo is insane. Frisky Dingo is so insane that it makes co-creators Adam Reed and Matt Thompson’s follow-up, the immeasurably more popular Archer, look like an Elizabethan period-drama. It’s Archer on steroids. Archer on LSD. Archer on steroids mixed with LSD – but within that palpable madness (and before its untimely death), Frisky Dingo laid the groundwork for everything that made Archer thrive.
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Even if you aren’t a fan of Archer, Frisky Dingo is an easy recommendation in our Binge It! series because watching the entirety of the show will take you only slightly longer than The Return of the King’s Extended Edition (about four-and-a-half hours total). As an Adult Swim show from 2006, each episode is only 11 minutes long, and its brief, two-season run means you can finish the whole thing before you know it.
Which is a shame, because man do I love this show. Its first few episodes start out relatively slow, but they’re really seeding the ground for a farcical series of inside jokes and callback gags that are then mixed and remixed into Frisky Dingo’s ridiculous story nonstop – a story ostensibly about a superhero named Awesome-X (the alter ego of which, Xander Crews, is pretty much H. Jon Benjamin’s voice away from being a proto Archer) and a wannabe villain named Killface.
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Frisky Dingo’s structure can be felt in Archer every time someone says “this is how you get ants” or sings “danger zone,” but it’s the way Frisky Dingo unexpectedly weaves those moments into a plot that only stays as straightforward as the description above for about two episodes. By the end of Season 1 (reminder: it will take you just two hours to get there), you’ll find yourself in a constantly shifting fractal of ever-escalating stakes littered with self-referential landmines.
It’s chaos, but it’s chaos that never fails to make me laugh. The characters are all fantastic, and the way it simultaneously plays with and dismantles superhero stereotypes (Frisky Dingo premiered two years before Iron Man) somehow keeps the narrative grounded even as the world burns around it. Frisky Dingo is the most perfectly choreographed train wreck you’ll ever watch.
And while Reed and Thompson’s sense of humor can be traced back to the wonderfully strange Sealab 2021 before this, Frisky Dingo is the oft-forgotten missing link between it and Archer. In fact, Frisky Dingo’s death is part of what gave life to Archer: The show lost its funding in 2008 during development on a third season, forcing its creators to shutter the production company behind it before starting a new one to create Archer in 2009. It’s no coincidence they share such a distinct art style.
But look, I’ll level with you: As with so much of Adult Swim from the ’00s, there is a very real chance that Frisky Dingo is not a “good” show, strictly speaking. It has admittedly aged poorly in spots, but I still dearly love its particular flavor of weird. And when it’s streaming for free and only takes an evening or two to finish, it’s an easy recommendation – especially for Archer fans, who owe it to themselves to watch what was essentially a lawless test bed for all its best ideas.
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Binge It! is IGN’s recommendation series. Movies, TV shows, books, comics, music… if you can binge it, we’re here to talk about it. In each installment of Binge It!, we’ll discuss a piece of content we’re passionate about — and why you should check it out.
Source: IGN.com Binge It! Frisky Dingo Gives an Insane Glimpse at Archer’s Origins