Matt Armitage
Frisky Dingo
Valerie: Please don’t kill us!
Killface: Please don’t make it so appealing!
Before Archer, there was Frisky Dingo. Whilst Archer has gone on to ten seasons (getting progressively more tired in my opinion), Frisky Dingo was given only two short seasons: 25 ten-minute episodes. However, into that 250 minutes, Adam Reed and Matt Thompson (previously responsible for Sealab 2021) packed so much hilarious weirdness that—while the humour is largely similar—given a desert island scenario that bizarrely and peculiarly specifically consisted of some method of watching only one of these animated shows, I would choose Frisky Dingo to be my companion in isolation and undoubtedly spiralling madness.
Explaining Frisky Dingo using the plot doesn’t really work well, and you are more likely going to end up putting people off the show rather than encouraging them to watch it. Suffice to say it focuses around the antics of Killface, a seven-foot-tall skull-faced alien who has arrived on Earth and has plans to destroy it with the Annihilatrix he has built. Opposing him is the childlike billionaire Xander Crews (a prototype Archer for sure) whose superhero alter-ego Awesome-X and sidekick mercenary group the Xtacles have defeated all the local villains and are looking for a new nemesis to avoid retirement from the superhero business.
The key to Frisky Dingo‘s genius is its rapid-fire delivery and non-stop barrage of jokes, with layers upon layers of in-jokes, callbacks, homages, and downright weirdness. This is not a show you can dip into and hope to understand even a fraction of its humour or complexity. While the backbone of the plot is Killface’s intent to destroy Earth, a lot of the actual humour of the first season comes from the ordinariness of the character’s struggles with life, his teenage son Simon, the rivalry with Xander Crews, and his constant outrage at having to deal with the annoyances of life and the people around him.
There is also Grace Ryan, journalist and erstwhile girlfriend of Crews, who falls into a barrel of radioactive ants which crawl into her brain turning her into Antagone; Arthur Watley, a Crews employee who has lobster claws grafted onto his hands as part of Xander’s efforts to create a new supervillain called The Dread Lobster; and a whole host of other bizarre and hilarious characters. It even has a bottle episode in a hospital emergency room that is 10 minutes of comedy perfection. Also, there’s an underground rabbit-fighting tournament. I rest my case.
Really, there is no way to describe why I find Frisky Dingo so funny, you just have to experience it. The first two episodes are available to watch on Adult Swim UK’s YouTube channel and are embedded below for your viewing pleasure. Give it two episodes and if you’re not in, then by god I don’t even want to know you. Both seasons of the show are available to stream on Hulu in the US and for some inexplicable reason in the UK only the first season is available to stream on Channel 4.
