PASADENA, Calif. -- My love of the late, great "Frisky Dingo" is well-documented and I'm similarly fond of FX's upcoming animated comedy "Archer" from the same creator, Adam Reed, but the show's press tour panel was a bit of a disaster as Reed and voice stars H. Jon Benjamin and Aisha Tyler tried way too hard to be funny and too often did a ker-splat.
The panelists seemed more interested in amusing themselves than offering cogent answers to questions about this series described by FX as:
"Archer" is an animated half-hour comedy set at ISIS, an international spy agency, where global crises are merely opportunities for its highly trained employees to confuse, undermine, betray and royally screw each other. The series features the voices of H. Jon Benjamin as suave master spy Sterling Archer, whose less-than-masculine code name is Duchess; Jessica Walter as his domineering mother and boss, Malory; Aisha Tyler as his ex-girlfriend, Agent Lana Kane; Chris Parnell as ISIS comptroller and Lana's new love interest, Cyril Figgis; and Judy Greer as Malory's lovesick secretary, Cheryl.
Despite the panel's attempts at joking around, reporters tried to get some questions about the show answered.
Whereas "Frisky Dingo" mocked super heroes, the raunchy but hilarious "Archer" takes aim at the spy genre. In one scene, Malory accuses Archer of using his expense account to pay for a trip to "Whore Island."
"We always try to take familiar genres and subvert them as much as possible," said Reed, who also created "Sealab 2021" for Adult Swim. "We'd done superheroes and supervillains and action heroes working underwater so espionage seemed like the natural evolution of that idea. It's a familiar genre. People know a lot of the conventions so you can build that backdrop that's familiar -- James Bond, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." -- and skew it very badly."
The show's look, as pictured above, also comes from the same cost-effective animation technique used in "Frisky Dingo." Reed said it begins with dozens of photos of models for the characters. Animators then trace the photos to create the animation.
"It's easy to forget you're watching an animated show and you can concentrate on the dialogue more," Reed said. "I am not a huge fan of animation."
Posted
Aug 07 2009, 12:54 PM
by
Rob Owen