HIGHWAY TO THE DANGER ZONE [427]

Cover of "The Art of Archer" book (2016)

September 2016 was the month my viewing habits changed: I bought a streaming device for my TV, and I began subscribing to Netflix. Initially an easier way to get YouTube onto a bigger screen, streaming made taking up Netflix inevitable, but for me, it was not for their own shows like “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black”, or for their Blockbuster Video-replacing back catalogue of recent films - it was because it was the only place in the UK to see the animated comedy series “Archer”. With the show now ending on its American home of FXX on 17^th December 2023, a date also marking the thirty-fourth anniversary of “The Simpsons”, a show that will outlast us all, I have reason to reconsider continuing my Netflix subscription.

First appearing in 2009, “Archer” is a retro-styled secret agent adventure series crossed with workplace comedy. Sterling Archer, an agent whose intuition is enhanced by womanising and alcohol, is an agent at ISIS, an agency owned and run by his similarly hard-nosed mother Malory. The ensemble originally had rigidly defined roles: Lana Kane, the by-the-book lead agent; Ray Gillette, the gay bomb expert with a transplanted hand; Cyril Figgis, the downtrodden head of accounts; Cheryl (or is Carol this episode?) Tunt, the secretary too rich and neurotic for this reality; Pam Poovey, the boisterous head of HR; and Algernop Krieger, the skilled engineer who built his holographic girlfriend. All have become agents over the show’s fourteen seasons, embroiled in plots and heists that have stretched and fleshed out these characters across different realities and time periods, particularly during three seasons that took place while Sterling was in a coma. It may wear the skin of a James Bond film, but it has the heart of “The A-Team.” 

What attracted me to “Archer” is what animation has afforded it. The retro aesthetic deliberately fudges the time period in which it is set, living in the world of both Sean Connery’s Bond and “Get Smart”, while not being restrained by technology of the time – something exists to help get out of any scrape. That said, there is the satisfaction of recognising the Apple Lisa computers on ISIS agents’ desks, or their building’s establishing shot having a Renault 12 driving past. The humour is very quick and often about language: characters warning each other over “phrasing”, exclamations like “yup”, “boop” and “sploosh”, and even outright saying “I swear to God I had something for this”. But every viewer of “Archer” knows the phrase most often repeated: “You want ants? Because this is how you get ants.” For stories where is victory is often achieved just in time, the pacing and comedic timing of each twenty-minute episode could not be achieved in live-action.

I originally saw “Archer” on Channel 5 in the UK, or one of their extra channels, but after the first four seasons, the show became available on Netflix only, feeling like when “The X-Files” or “Friends” previously disappeared to satellite television about fifteen years earlier. This move to streaming also stopped UK DVDs of the show in their tracks – this is another case of me wanting a copy of a show that is uninhibited by digital rights management. Maintaining access to the show requires maintaining a subscription to a service I rarely watched for anything else. Can The Criterion Collection start releasing TV shows as well please?

A FIGHT FOR LOVE AND GLORY [310]

Warner Bros. 2020 logo redesign by Pentagram

Watching Warner Bros’ latest film “Space Jam: A New Legacy” at the cinema was an interesting experience. With a story based within the company’s computer servers, I needed the cinema-sized screen to catch all the references to the company’s characters from their films and “properties” in the crowd watching the climactic basketball match between LeBron James and the program running the show, “Al-G Rhythm”. 

The film has received negative reviews for the general product placement of, well, Warner Bros. itself: it is strange to see a family film sprayed with characters and locations from far more adult productions, like “Mad Max: Fury Road”, “A Clockwork Orange,” “Game of Thrones,” Pennywise from “It”, and Vanessa Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne des Anges from Ken Russell’s “The Devils” – I sincerely doubt the latter would get as worked up over basketball than what goes on in their own film (really, look it up).

 

As a film fan and student, I believe Warner Bros. is the Hollywood studio, shaping the art form, staying on top of it for a hundred years, and preserving its past, even if through mergers and acquisitions: the new “Space Jam” film features MGM’s “The Wizard of Oz” and Tom & Jerry alongside Hanna-Barbera characters, including The Flintstones, and RKO Radio Pictures’ original King Kong. The breadth and scale of Warner Bros. today is belied by only just mentioning Looney Tunes now, followed by DC Comics, HBO, CNN, and “Friends”. 

 

It is meant to be distasteful to bring business into art, but the history of Warner Bros. is the exception that proves the rule: “The Jazz Singer” is not known as “Warner Bros’ Supreme Triumph” for nothing, not least because the studio proclaimed the film as such upon its release in 1927. Far more than making “talking pictures” viable commercially, through Al Jolson’s effortless use of his established catchphrase “you ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” the notion of what a ALL FILMS made before or since “The Jazz Singer”, and the idea of film itself as a medium, will feature a soundtrack of some kind, whether one is added to a “silent” film, or even when a conscious decision is made to be “silent” for any length of time, for Warner Bros. and Western Electric developed the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system to provide musical accompaniment and sound effects in all cinemas, even those that could not afford its own band or orchestra.

 

For a company only properly incorporated in 1923, and having only built their studios in Sunset Boulevard in 1918, Warner Bros. had enough cash from the box office of “The Jazz Singer” to buy up a brace of music publishers, suddenly a necessary part of film production, and the Stanley theatre chain, which came with a one-third ownership of a far bigger film producer and distributor: the current Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California was built by First National, whose name continued to be used for some time. These investments helped to pioneer both the musical film genre and the initial use of Technicolor, and to allow a switch to comedy, horror and gangster films when audiences’ tastes changed.

However, the content-rich current state of Warner Bros. is precisely down to the corporate upheavals in Hollywood that took place following the anti-trust lawsuits that separated cinema chains from film producers, the rise of television, and sheer bad luck. Its massive purchase of the Turner Broadcasting System in 1996 reunited Warner Bros. with the pre-1950 films and cartoons it sold in 1956 to support itself at an uncertain time, but this also came with the pre-1986 MGM film library, RKO’s library from “King Jong” to “Citizen Kane”, and all of Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon series too. Ted Turner built up this collection to provide content to his TV networks, from Cartoon Network to TBS and TNT, but he sold on the MGM film company because he overextended himself, despite keeping the rights to their films. Similar divestments by Warner Bros. in previous years included Nickelodeon, MTV and VH1, along with their cable TV network that built these channels, and the computer game company Atari.

 

Watching “Space Jam: A New Legacy” made me think I was watching a film studio writing a love letter to itself, albeit one I’ll happily act as a co-signatory. What I think the scriptwriters could have done, considering the film is mainly set in a virtual reality run by a computer algorithm, is they could have made more of the connection with “The Matrix”, especially with Warner Bros. releasing the fourth film in the series this Christmas.

AND WE’RE SENDING OUR LOVE DOWN THE WELL [33]

Allow yourself to feel incredibly old and terrified for a moment – TWENTY-SEVEN years ago today, the first episode of “The Simpsons” was broadcast on American television. This means there are people who born since the show began, that now have their own children.

In Britain, for those not willing to pay for Sky TV, the BBC began showing “The Simpsons” in November 1996, at just the right time for the teenage me. For years, I dutifully taped every episode I came across, laughing at its subversive humour, marvelling at its feature film-scale storylines, and identifying with its fully rounded characters.

For the record, my favourite episodes of the series came early in its run, like Lisa winning an essay contest and uncovering political corruption in “Mr Lisa Goes to Washington,” the awful musical “Streetcar!” in “A Streetcar Named Marge,” and the disaster movie plot of “Marge versus the Monorail.” There was once a time where no show could do the two things the “The Simpsons” could – anything, and everything.

I also learned about the references “The Simpsons” made to films, books, philiosophy, and American idioms, both in libraries and online, having just got dial-up internet at home. We eventually did get a satellite dish, and the taping, later joined by DVD buying, continued. The show confirmed I should, without exception, always look under the surface of whatever is put in front of me.

And yet, I found myself falling out with “The Simpsons”, feeling I got all I could from it. I had joined it in its ninth season, and left at its seventeenth – it is now on number twenty-eight. I still watch it occasionally, but usually just my favourite episodes. For all the references they gave to other works of creativity, “The Simpsons” also sent me in pursuit of those works – all the homages to “Citizen Kane” cannot be beaten by just watching “Citizen Kane.”

The sitcoms and dramas that are lucky enough to end on their own terms will usually do so once they have finished exploring the world they created. That may be after twelve episodes, in the case of “Fawlty Towers,” or ten years, if you are “Friends.” Recent “Simpsons” storylines, if you look them up, are still good to watch, and exactly the sorts of episodes you expect from the show. However, for me, this is because they are the sorts of plots I had thought they had already done – they are of “The Simpsons,” but they do not add to my idea of what “The Simpsons” is.

“The Simpsons” may only end when it stops making money for 20^th Century Fox, but I hope its makers see the end coming. The only sitcom that comes close in both its longevity and cast of characters, “Last of the Summer Wine,” could also have run forever, until the BBC decided it would not. Thankfully, Roy Clarke, who wrote all 295 episodes, from 1972 to 2010, was aware of the show being ended, allowing him to write the low-key ending that he wanted, but everyone else still complained about. If “The Simpsons” does end, its demise should match the cultural impact it has had on the world – they could try blowing it up.